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Let us imagine

a village that enemy troops had just overrun during war: destroyed homes; fleeing people being chased by tanks; the dead and badly hurt lying around; food stores plundered, a whole world breaking apart. Surely we feel pity for these people.

But what about our compassion in another case, one which is described by a leading ecologist in the following way: “Every Summer, the small world of field hares (European hares) breaks apart, as monster combine harvesters draw closer and in a few hours or days harvest the fields where the hares had settled in. Now, they are homeless, so to speak, and wander around trying to find a fitting habitat in the neighborhood. But the same happens there.” Under such conditions, the woods offer an important possibility of retreat for the animals. And they also seek refuge in the thick underbrush from the hunting drives. The field hares are animals of the steppes and savannas, which move about in great open spaces where they can enjoy their speed, taking meter high jumps while running and making lightning quick changes in direction to shake off their pursuers. They give birth to their young in the open fields. There, the newborns also have to immediately become cautious – equipped for this, right after birth, they can see and run.

The hare families nourish themselves from grasses and herbs, alternating between the food available in the meadows and in the woods, where they feel less threatened under its protection, as opposed to the open fields. There, the same drama repeats itself over and over again. “In many places the hare count disappears already during the high Summer, even before hunting starts, because the hares cannot cope with the sudden loss of their habitat. They develop typical signs of stress, increasingly coming together in places where pathogens are found and where they are …  wiped out by epidemics in a very short time. As favorable as the fields were in the beginning, when wonderfully tasty and richly nourishing seed grew and where the grain offered a cover at the same time, so unfavorable did they become with the harvest, which turned large agricultural areas into something closely resembling the natural disaster of a steppes fire.”

It is similar for the deer. They, too, prefer to live on the fresh growths of grasses and herbs or the buds of bushes and young trees in the open fields. The fawns are born in the open meadows and are threatened by similar dangers as the hares. Above all, it is the hunting that drives the deer back into the woods and makes them so shy, that they have become used to leaving these only during the late evening hours. We should think about this when we complain about the damage done to the shoots of young trees by browsing wild animals. Beyond this, experts point out that the frequent flight of animals costs a great deal of additional energy, triggering an additional demand for food.

However, the woods are not only a place of refuge, but the natural habitat of two thirds of all animal species. As the largest free living wild animals of Ger- many, the red deer roam the forests – above all in the Alps, in the Black Forest, in the Harz mountains and in the Spessart region. These majestic animals need great spaces: Forty kilometers dis- tance can lie between their Summer habitat where the mothers give birth to their young and their Winter place where the mother takes her young.  The deer live from grass, bark and the shoots of spruce trees. If they leave the forests, it is so they can do some grazing on meadows and fields that are of high quality. In the high mountains they climb beyond the treeline to taste the grass and the dwarf shrubs. Animals that enjoy such wide open spaces especially suffer under the confining conditions of our day, as an expert and lover of these animals realized years ago: “The red deer is a tragic animal figure. Its nature forces it to great migrations in search of food. But the forests are broken up into pieces; the marshlands whose soft woods were a help to survive the sterile winter woods are populated and the marsh woods are cut down. Everywhere, they come up against man-made boundaries like fences, roadways and ski-runs. Hungry, they tear at the bark of the trees around them ...”

For the wild pigs, also called wild boars, things aren’t any better than for the red deer. Wild pigs were also depen- dent on the great forests, above all, the mixed forests of oak and beech, whose seeds are the best fattening food for the wild pigs. This is why they alternate between forest and the fields, to make use of the food offered there. They favor ripe grain fields and potato fields, which is why they are not always particularly appreciated by some farmers – even though those farmers hit by the pre-harvesting of the wild pigs receive compensation for it. Their normal food in the forests are beechnuts and acorns, grubs, worms and roots as well as animal carcasses. This last is what makes the wild pigs, next to the foxes, the “health officers” of the forests. As forestry assistants, they are constantly active, digging up and thoroughly loosening the forest soil with their strong snouts. They turn up the humus that was covered with a thick layer of leaves, under which the germinating seeds of oak and beech would suffocate without fresh air. In this way, the strong boars and sows prevent a matted groundcover and promote new tree growth.

Because of hunting, these animals have also become very shy toward human beings. Wherever they know that no danger is threatening them, they become very trusting. On a farm of the Gabriele Foundation they have again taken up communication with human beings. They regularly come to visit – at first, they used to come only by night, but now, even during the day they will show up while the work is being done.

With their narrow faces and their innocent, trusting eyes, they followed the work of bringing in the harvest this Summer.

Probably the shyest of all forest dwellers, the fox, would also be so trusting and playful if it only had the opportunity. Neither its beauty, or its proverbial cleverness or its speed keep it from being shot, strangulated by traps or gassed in its own den each year, 300,000 of its species. The primitive killing excesses of the hunters reach their high point with the fox, which they hate as a predator and as their competition, as much as they love it, as an object of their murderous passion. It is no wonder that one can hardly ever see a fox.

If it gets wind of a human being, it is getting wind of its own death. Who wouldn’t be cautious under such conditions; and who wouldn’t think of every now and then thoroughly enjoying the “forbidden fruit” in the barns of the dangerous human predator? That “Reynard the Fox,” as Goethe calls it in his great epic poem on animals, can behave in a totally different way is shown, for example, in London and Bristol, where foxes run around in the daylight like housecats, letting themselves be fed in the gardens or through the back doors, and sleeping in the sun on the terraces.

Such behavior patterns give lie to traditional textbooks of behavioral research. This is above all true in relation to the supposedly great danger of rabies, which hunting groups use to try to justify their furious pursuit of foxes. Meanwhile, there are even vaccines available that inoculate foxes against rabies, and the risk that a person can become ill from rabies is so small that it can no longer be measured. Many point out that the merciless hunt of these animals may even be a contributing cause to the emergence of rabies to begin with. In a national park like Berchtesgaden that is free of fox hunting, rabies does not exist. And in a district of the Bavarian Forest, during the time that fox hunting was suspended for a while in the 50’s, it disappeared very suddenly.

Incidentally, foxes feed themselves much less by stealing poultry than is generally presumed. In its immediate surroundings, it hunts mice and hares; but also worms or even carcasses are just fine for it. Foxes love fruit of all kinds, as long as they’re sweet enough – as we know from the Aesop’s Fable “The Fox and the Grapes.” The ripe berries of the forests during high and late Summer give foxes the energy for their kilometers long roaming range, which now begins for them. Their mobility and adaptability in every situation has made it possible for them to survive all campaigns of extermination directed against them until now.

Foxes lead a regular family life and cherish communication with their own kind and, as already said, even with humans, if these are peaceful. It is high time to end the fight against these animals. Experts assure us that their population in the woods and forests would also cease to fluctuate as it did in urban areas where foxes are relatively secure from hunting pursuit.

In earlier times, wolves and bears, lynx and wild cats, aurochs and bison lived in the forests of Central Europe. But now, just about all have disappeared. The last aurochs died in Poland during the Thirty Years War, under the bullets of French soldiers. And a litho- graph proudly dis- played, reports about the extermination of bears in a German hunting museum: “The last bear in Bavaria was killed in October of 1835, lying dead on a wagon while behind it the murderer was carried on the shoulders of his hunting companions, accompanying him on his triumphal procession home.” When in 2006, Bruno, a young bear from Italy, wandered into Bavaria, he was killed by a special forces unit.

The last of the indigenous wolves were killed toward the end of the last century by official wolf hunters. Lynx and wild cats have also been exterminated – and are presently being reintroduced with great effort. Moose are presently found only in the forests of Northern Europe; and bison can only occasionally be encountered on the moors of Bialowiez, on the border between White Russia and Poland.

Much more could still be said about the countless animal species that are at home in the forest – martens and squir- rels, rabbits and dormice, wood mice and many others.

And what would a forest be like without the chirping and twittering of the birds, the finch and titmouse, the sounds of the jays and woodpeckers, without the call of the cuckoo and of the screech owl and other owls or the song of the night- ingale? And let’s not forget those animals living in the ground and soil, the beetles and worms and the microorganisms that process the humus.

But the forests are not only a home and refuge for animals of all kinds. They are also the home for rare plant species that no longer flourish on the fields because modern agriculture has taken their habitat from them. Nowadays, meadow flowers tend to grow more on the edge of forest pathways or in a forest clearing, and not in the middle of a green meadow. Sage and poppies, bell-flowers and ox-eye daisies may be found more often today than earlier, since they are planted along the edges of the fields; but they flourish best in a forest milieu where the soil has not been over-fertilized and exhausted as it has been on commercialized fields.

Our very brief journey has shown that the forest shelters the life of all nature kingdoms in all their manifold forms and offers a basis for the existence of neighboring habitats on the fields and farmlands that are interwoven with them.

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