Ticino veterinary office looks away, animals die

For years, the Ticino veterinary office has tolerated unprotected farm animals in wolf areas. Ten attacks, 50 dead animals, zero consequences. A systematic failure.

Addendum of 3 August 2026: Since first publication, the documented series of cases has more than doubled. Ten incidents with fifty dead animals have become twenty-one cases with at least 78 killed farm and enclosure animals (October 2025 to July 2026). IG Wild beim Wild has filed a criminal complaint with the Ministero Pubblico in Bellinzona in all cases. Newly added are, among others, Lumino (five kids killed, one injured, one missing), the Alpe di San Martino in Acquarossa (nine goats), and a repeat case in Villa Luganese at a practically identical location. Particularly revealing: in Vogorno, Serravalle and Brione sopra Minusio, DNA analysis showed that no predator was involved at all. The animals died from other causes and were nonetheless deemed «not adequately protected». In parallel, from July 2026 the authority changed its wording from «non protetti adeguatamente» to «protezione in esame», which IG Wild beim Wild classifies as linguistic cosmetics in the context of the pending appeal proceedings (Incarto 60.2026.211). More on this in our current article Halfway through the alpine summer: wolf kills halved.

It is a pattern that can no longer be explained as coincidence.

On 16/17 October 2025, eleven fallow deer are killed in a single night in Bironico. The cantonal office for hobby hunting and fishing confirms: the enclosure fence was not sufficiently wolf-proof. And yet the cantonal veterinary office had issued a keeping permit.

On 10 December 2025, two sheep are found dead in Origlio. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected. DNA analysis confirms the involvement of a predator.

On 13 January 2026, a sheep is found dead in Intragna. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected. Here too, genetic analysis confirms the involvement of a predator.

On 20 January 2026, a sheep is found dead in Lema. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected. Once again, DNA analysis confirms the involvement of a predator.

On 1 February 2026, four sheep die in Sonvico. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected.

On the night of 5/6 February 2026, a wolf kills ten sheep in Paudo. Animal keeper Piero Maretti admits that the fence “repeatedly had holes” and that the stable was too small for all the animals, which is why the sheep spent the night outdoors. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected.

On 6 February 2026, ten more sheep are found dead in Bellinzona, and two animals have gone missing since. On 19 February 2026, three lambs die in Gambarogno. In both cases the same official response: animals insufficiently protected.

On 9 March 2026, an animal is once again found dead in Sonvico, this time a goat. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected. This makes Sonvico the second time affected within just five weeks. Evidently, neither the animal keeper nor the veterinary office took any measures after the first incident.

On 13 March 2026, six sheep and a goat are found dead in Villa Luganese. Official finding: animals insufficiently protected.

Ten incidents in five months. At least 50 animals killed. Always the same diagnosis. Never any consequence.

An authority that knows its duties and fails to fulfil them

In the field of livestock keeping, the cantonal veterinary office bears not only an advisory duty but a genuine duty of supervision and control. This is not an abstract demand but applicable law.

The Animal Welfare Act (TSchG) and the Animal Welfare Ordinance (TSchV) oblige cantons to actively monitor compliance with animal welfare regulations and to intervene in the event of violations. This duty of oversight is not an option to be exercised when one happens to have the time; it is binding.

In the Bironico case, it goes even further: there, the cantonal veterinary office issued a keeping permit for fallow deer, even though the enclosure did not meet the legally prescribed requirements. There is no other way to explain how wolves were able to get in. The Office for Hunting and Fishing has confirmed the inadequate fencing. The permit must therefore have been granted regardless, otherwise the keeping would not have been legal at all. This is not merely a missed inspection. This is the unlawful granting of a permit. The IG Wild beim Wild has therefore also filed a criminal complaint against the veterinary office itself for abuse of office.

«Not sufficiently protected» – and then?

What happens after this official finding? Apparently: nothing.

There are no publicly documented cases known to the IG Wild beim Wild in which, following a wolf kill, the Ticino veterinary office carried out a follow-up inspection, set a deadline, imposed a condition or initiated proceedings on the basis of this finding. Instead, the next attack is awaited and it is once again recorded that the animals were «not sufficiently protected».

This cycle has a name: official toleration. And it has a direct consequence: animal keepers who do not take their protective duties seriously need not fear any sanctions. The signal emanating from the veterinary office is implicit: nothing will happen to you.

Not in the Alps, but right on the doorstep

A detail that is consistently overlooked in the public debate: these animals were not on a remote alp, far from any human eye. Bironico lies in the valley at 468 m above sea level, just a few kilometres from Lugano. Origlio borders practically on Bironico and lies at 430 m above sea level in the middle of the Vedeggio valley. Villa Luganese is located at around 530 m above sea level in the immediate vicinity, likewise in the Luganese. Intragna is located at 339 m above sea level in the Centovalli. Paudo, Sonvico, Bellinzona, Gambarogno: all valley locations or areas close to settlements, all places where the animal keepers live or reside in the immediate vicinity of their animals.

A particularly troubling case is Lema at around 995 m above sea level above the Malcantone. There, on 20 January 2026 – in the middle of winter – a dead sheep was found. Lema is a typical summer grazing area where sheep are not normally kept during the winter. It seems likely that the animal was simply forgotten in the autumn and left to fend for itself ever since. If that is the case, this is not merely a missing fence, but an animal that had to survive for months without any care whatsoever in a known wolf area. That is neglect in the truest sense of the word.

This makes the failures even harder to comprehend. Anyone who keeps a chicken coop in their garden builds an enclosure that keeps the fox out – not because the law requires it, but because it is a matter of course. Anyone who leaves chickens unprotected is rightly regarded as negligent. That the same logic apparently does not apply to sheep, goats and fallow deer kept by hobby animal keepers is hard to explain, except by the fact that until now no consequences whatsoever were to be feared.

The fox is not a protected animal, and yet every chicken keeper protects their animals from it. The wolf is protected, and yet one is apparently allowed, with impunity, to leave sheep and goats overnight in enclosures with holes in the fence, or to forget them entirely on the alpine pasture over the whole winter. This is a logic that can be reconciled neither with animal welfare nor with common sense.

The law is clear – the practice is not

The requirements are unambiguously regulated in Switzerland:

The Animal Welfare Ordinance (TSchV) requires animal keepers to take all reasonable measures to prevent unnecessary pain, suffering or harm. Anyone who knows they are operating in a wolf area – and this has been known in the canton of Ticino for years – must protect their operation accordingly. Wolf-proof electric fences, guardian dogs, keeping animals indoors at night: these measures are reasonable, they can be financially subsidised, and they work.

For keeping red deer in enclosures, Art. 9 of the Wild Animals Ordinance (WildtierV) explicitly prescribes: fences at least two metres high, constructed so that predators cannot gain access. Anyone who issues a permit for such keeping without checking these requirements is acting unlawfully.

Under the Animal Welfare Act, it is not only the active mistreatment of animals that is punishable. A dereliction of duty by omission is also punishable — the deliberate failure to act in the face of a foreseeable and avoidable danger. This applies to animal keepers. And it applies to authorities.

Who protects, who must protect?

In public discourse, every wolf kill reflexively prompts calls for shootings. The wolf is to pay the price for human failure. This is not only ecologically short-sighted, it is a reversal of responsibility.

The wolf behaves in a manner typical of its species. It is an opportunist that takes prey wherever it is easily accessible. Anyone who leaves sheep overnight in a pasture with holes in the fence, who keeps fallow deer behind a fence that does not meet the legal requirements, who forgoes protective measures despite known wolf presence, is serving up their animals to the wolf on a silver platter.

And an authority that tolerates this shares in the responsibility.

Worse still: this paper protection produces the very problem it claims to be combating. Wolves that learn livestock is readily available specialise in it. Then the kill statistics rise. Then shootings are demanded. And the actual failure — inadequate monitoring and a lack of enforcement of herd protection obligations — remains invisible.

Thirty years of the wolf — not a single injured person

There is one fact that is almost never mentioned in the heated wolf debate: the wolf has been present in Switzerland again for over thirty years. Since the first reintroduction in the early 1990s, despite growing packs and increasing wolf presence in all parts of the country, there has not been a single documented attack on a human being.

No injured hiker. No child attacked. No assault on a farmer.

Anyone following the public debate might believe the opposite. The wolf is portrayed as an unpredictable threat, calls for shootings are made with urgency, as though public safety were at stake. Yet the only real danger the wolf poses is to livestock, and even this danger would, in the documented Ticino cases, have been largely avoidable through protective measures in compliance with the law.

By way of comparison: in Switzerland, around 9,500 to 10,000 people are bitten so severely by dogs each year that a visit to the doctor becomes necessary. This is shown both by a SUVA study (evaluation period 2003–2007) and by a large-scale Swiss study from the years 2000/2001. Children are bitten twice as often as adults. Particularly explosive: it is demonstrably often farm dogs that aggressively go after hikers and cyclists – meaning precisely those farming operations that portray the wolf as an existential threat keep dogs on their premises that injure thousands of people every year. Nobody writes about this. There are no calls for kills, no emergency ordinances, no parliamentary motions.

The wolf is not the problem. The problem is sheep farmers who leave their animals in the valley, right next to the house, in enclosures with holes in the fences, and authorities who have tolerated this for years without complaint. Making the wolf the scapegoat is convenient. It distracts from the real question: why are protection obligations not enforced? And why must animals die for it?

What a wolf kill really costs

IG Wild beim Wild has calculated that a single wolf kill in Switzerland costs around 30,000 francs, and this estimate is still conservative. Current figures from the canton of Valais (2025) document costs of around 35,000 francs per wolf killed; in South Tyrol it was even 50,000 euros. In the canton of Ticino, according to calculations based on game warden hours, around 33,000 francs were spent per wolf during the 2025–26 regulation period – for just six animals killed. By way of comparison: for the same amount, seven to ten livestock guardian dogs could be financed for an entire year – a measure that demonstrably works, because it tackles the problem where it arises: in protecting the herd. As long as the state invests millions in kills that neither drive wolves out of the area nor sustainably alter pack dynamics, this policy remains what it is: expensive, ineffective and carried out on the backs of taxpayers.

In the final analysis, the wolf even protects sheep and goats. Whereas in the past around 10,000 sheep per year were driven to their deaths in the Alps by negligent sheep farmers (diseases, accidents, falls, etc.), today, with the wolf concept and shepherding, it is only around 5,000.

What IG Wild beim Wild demands

IG Wild beim Wild has filed a criminal complaint with the Ministero Pubblico in Bellinzona in all ten documented cases: against the responsible animal keepers for cruelty to animals through negligence, against the cantonal veterinary office for the systematic failure to fulfil its monitoring and supervisory duties, and in the Bironico case additionally for unlawful granting of permits and abuse of office.

Furthermore, IG Wild beim Wild demands:

Consistent follow-up checks. After every kill with the finding «animals not sufficiently protected», the veterinary office must issue binding requirements and verify their implementation. Anyone who fails to meet the requirements must not be allowed to keep animals.

Clear liability rules. Subsidies and direct payments to animal keepers must be tied to proof of effective herd protection measures. Those who do not protect receive no money.

Transparency regarding enforcement practice. The canton of Ticino must disclose how many checks have been carried out since 2020, how many violations have been documented and how many proceedings have actually been initiated. This is a question of democratic accountability. The template texts for the canton of Ticino on wildbeimwild.com show how such demands can be implemented through parliamentary means.

Official consequences. If it turns out that the veterinary office has systematically looked away, those responsible there must also be held to account.

Animal welfare does not end at the stable door

It is time to have this debate honestly. Protecting farm animals from wolf attacks is not a question of whether, but of how. The means are known, tested and affordable. What is lacking is the political will to enforce them.

As long as authorities record kill events without acting, animal keepers will continue to neglect their protection obligations. And as long as this remains without consequences, more animals will suffer and die. Needlessly, avoidably, unlawfully. Ten cases in five months prove this strikingly. The Sonvico case, where a second kill occurred at the same location within just five weeks, is a prime example: the official finding «animals not sufficiently protected» remains without consequence.

Paper protection is not animal welfare. And an authority that does not fulfil its monitoring duties is not a protective authority.

More on this in the dossier: Hunting and animal welfare

Further reading: Criminal complaint: Wolf kills sheep in Ticino · Eleven fallow deer killed – and once again nobody looks closely · Dossier: Wolf Switzerland · All template texts for cantonal motions · All dossiers