Existing methods of protecting livestock from wolf attacks are not always effective and can be problematic in terms of livestock husbandry practices, and need to be improved and adapted, while new methods need to be developed as well. Accurate knowledge of wolf depredation is crucial for improving and developing new methods. The aim of this MSc thesis was therefore to identify the most common prey injuries caused by wolves when hunting different livestock species, and whether wolves return to areas of successful predation on livestock. Injuries were surveyed for small ruminants (sheep and goats), cattle, horses and donkeys. We extracted all descriptions of evidence of injuries of 2.927 damage records from years 2010 to 2020 and interviewed damage officials from the Slovenia Forest Service who assess damage events to clarify some of the descriptions. The most common injury among the identifiable injury descriptions was bite to the neck (90.9 % of 1.363 injury descriptions) in all livestock species considered (small ruminants 92.7 % of 1.161 injury descriptions, cattle 79.8 % of 119 injury descriptions, horses and donkeys 81.9 % of 83 injury descriptions). We were able to analyse the return of individual wolf to areas of successful predation for 45 out of 108 wolves identified at damage events. The analysis was carried out by determining all possible distances and the number of days between all damage events in which a particular wolf was identified. We found that wolves return to areas of successful predation, with the distance between damage events increasing by 11.98 ± 0.82 m with each additional day (p < 0.0001). Thus, the closer the damage events are in time, the shorter the distance between them. However, the return to successful depredation locations was strongly individual-driven, as the random effect of the wolf on the distance between locations of the damage events was significant (p = 0.0006). The effect of the wolf explained as much as 50% of the variability in the random part of the model.
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