WIf this sound wasn’t so prolonged, you could also mistake it for a cock’s crow. But the high-pitched whine in the Romanian Danube Delta village of Maliuc on this spring morning, still in the dark, between five and six o’clock, lasts significantly longer than the rooster’s morning greeting. It sounds like howling Jackals coming through the closed windows in the pounding rain.

“The jackals are getting cheekier, they are no longer shy, they look at you and challenge you,” says farmer Vasile Staicu. If it were up to him, everyone here would be given a rifle to use to kill any jackal they saw on the spot.

Regular hunting is only permitted in organized groups, with a three-day permit. “25 calves the jackals killed me this year alone, last year it was 40,” complains Staicu, breeder of a sizeable herd of 500 cattle. “Ten Chicken they ate me, now I only have seven hens and one rooster,” he continues.

In Romania, as in other parts of Europe, golden jackals are spreading. The expert network estimated 117,000 copies across Europe Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe their number in 2019 – there are no more recent data. They are also present in Germany – comparatively rarely. And some have even been sighted in colder Scandinavia.

In Romania there are currently said to be almost 29,000. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the jackal migration to Romania started from two directions: they came via Bulgaria and from the Caucasus due to climate change, says Mihai Marinov, a biologist at the Danube Delta Research Institute in Tulceathe largest city in the region.

For about ten years, they are said to have repeatedly caused damage to farms, especially in the Danube Delta. The media are full of stories about it – probably influenced by the bad reputation of the jackals from mythology: In ancient Egypt they were “companions to the dead”, in the Bible they are associated with wasteland, poverty and ruin.

In his smartphone, farmer Staicu has gruesome photos of young cattle that are said to have been badly mauled by jackals: bites in the stomach and mouth, tongues bitten out, but also some that remained alive cows, whose udders are said to have been eaten away by the jackals. Farmer Ionel Radion reports something similar: Two of his calves this year and ten in the previous year were torn. “The jackals have entered the stable. I no longer let my hundred chickens roam free, I keep them like in prison, behind brick walls, with a metal mesh fence.”

Traditionally run in the Danube Delta Bovine, sheep and farm poultry roam freely on the pastures – and this unguarded, day and night. The ecologist Ovidiu Banea sees this type of animal husbandry, which is common in many parts of Romania, as the main reason for the rapid reproduction of the jackals. “The cows calve in the pasture and leave the placenta there. These eat the jackals and are then also interested in that Calf“, he says.

Jackals also eat carrion and plants

Jackal researcher Jennifer Hatlauf also sees a problem in this Institute for wildlife biology and game management at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. On the other hand, farm animals graze outside in Central Europe too. “We have already seen tears from young sheep and sheep in Austria, Germany and Denmark, among others goats noted. However, this is not to be seen as the main diet of golden jackals. This one is a generalist that usually eats what is easy to catch,” says Hatlauf.

The jackal, which also eats carrion and plants, tends to prey on smaller mammals such as mice and rats. A cow is usually a size too big for him, but he dares to take on a newborn calf. The jackal weighs up to ten kilos. It is larger than a fox, smaller than a wolf and mostly hunts at night with the family.

The ecologist Banea camps several times a year with a group of biologists for a few days in the Danube Delta to get information about the number of jackals. He uses a megaphone to simulate howling jackals in the wild. It is observed whether and how many jackals respond. The coyote researchers in the USA are proceeding in a similar way.

According to the biologist Marinov, the chaotic handling of animal waste by the Romanian farmers is an attraction for the jackals. “They just throw their dead cats, chickens and piglets on the outskirts of the village instead of burning them properly,” he complains. “This is how the very intelligent jackals learn bad habits, they make the outskirts of villages their territories. After eating the garbage, they also find open barn doors”.

Nevertheless, Marinov does not entirely trust the farmers’ statements about the damage: “They demonize the jackals. We did a questionnaire among them. When we asked questions afterwards, we sometimes found that the attacks could have come from red foxes or from the many feral dogs that cause us problems here. Sometimes the damage reports were pure inventions.”

Marinov also considers the horror story circulating in Romania’s media about jackals, which are said to have rummaged in the graves for food in the Danube Delta village of Caraorman, to be unproven.

Plastic and paper in the stomach

We still know far too little about the behavior of the golden jackals in the delta, wrote Marinov in 2022 as co-author of an article in the journal “Acta Zoologica Bulgarica”. There is only one doctoral thesis from 2004, for which the stomach contents of 68 animals were examined. Among other things, it turned out that they are looking for food in the garbage. Plastic and paper were found in some stomachs.

But now the investigations are to be renewed and intensified. “We now want to have 150 jackal stomachs – we have signed a contract with the hunting club for this purpose,” says Marinov.

However, Marinov considers hunting as a means against jackals to be completely unsuitable, even counterproductive: “If their numbers are artificially reduced, they simply have more young.” This was also shown by studies from Bulgaria, adds his colleague Hatlauf. The official figures from Romania also support this: from 2017 to the beginning of this year, according to the Ministry of the Environment, the number of golden jackals rose from an estimated 12,500 to around 28,900 – although several thousand were killed every year.

There was a downward dip in 2019 with a population of only around 10,500 animals. Just a year later, the number of estimated specimens shot up again to around 17,500.

Female jackals can have two, but also six to seven puppies in a litter, depending on the nutritional situation. Therefore, in Marinov’s opinion, the only way to curb the spread of jackals is to limit their diet – through more controlled livestock farming and, above all, proper disposal of animal remains.

Viorel Rosca, director of the Macin Mountains National Park, which borders the Danube Delta, thinks differently. He believes the peasants are completely innocent, given that their style of herding had been practiced in the region for centuries without attracting jackals. Rosca believes the cause of the jackal overpopulation is the disappearance of wolves, which were hunted to near extinction in the Delta during Communism. That’s why he now wants to settle wolves there so that they drive away the jackals. Scientists agree that jackals and wolves compete for almost the same prey.

Jackals avoid wolves because they instinctively feel threatened by them. But the experts also agree that a wolf would hardly eat a jackal. At most he would kill him as a competitor. The researcher Marinov doubts that the settlement of wolves makes sense. Cattle and sheep would be even more in danger from the wolves, he says. Farmer Staicu thinks similarly: “It would mean that we drive out the devil and get his mother in return.”

“Aha! Ten minutes of everyday knowledge” is WELT’s knowledge podcast. Every Tuesday and Thursday we answer everyday questions from the field of science. Subscribe to the podcast at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, deezer, Amazon Music or directly via RSS feed.