AfD on the environment and animal welfare

The AfD wants Germany to set a maximum number of wolves, as France and Sweden have done. It justifies this with attacks on grazing animals that it says threaten farmers' livelihoods.

The AfD wants only a fixed number of wolves in Germany. Wolves kill sheep and other animals in the fields. The AfD says many animal farmers lose their income because of this.

The platform points to France, with a limit of 500 wolves, and Sweden, with 350. It says hundreds of livestock farmers in Lower Saxony are at risk and that the first large sheep farms have already closed. According to the AfD, compensation payments fall far short of covering the damage.

The AfD wants to rebuild smaller, regional slaughterhouses so that animals travel shorter distances. Slaughter without stunning should not be allowed, even for religious reasons. Permits for modern barns should be easier to get.

The AfD wants more small slaughterhouses close to farms. Then animals do not have to travel so far. Animals should always be stunned before slaughter. This should also apply to religious slaughter. Farmers should be able to build new barns more easily.

The platform rejects long transports as well as large industrial slaughterhouses that require animals to be brought in over great distances. Animal protection should apply from birth to slaughter, and the AfD says it can only be achieved with modern barns. Permits for conversions and new buildings should be streamlined. New barns should be allowed to operate for their full service life without retrofitting, even if the rules change. Actions by organizations and associations against livestock farmers, which the AfD calls criminal, should be investigated by prosecutors at once.

The AfD wants to keep protecting existing natural areas and landscapes but not designate new protected areas or enlarge national parks. It sees these as a creeping expropriation of owners.

The AfD wants to keep protecting nature in Lower Saxony. But there should be no new protected areas. National parks should not get bigger either. The AfD says owners would otherwise slowly lose control of their land.

The rejection covers further areas under European nature protection law as well as larger national parks. The AfD also rejects marine protected zones if they threaten mid-sized fishing businesses; environmental rules should not be read more strictly in Germany than elsewhere in Europe. In forestry, forest owners and foresters alone should decide which tree species to plant, and the party rejects one-sided support for planting beech. It does not want hunting law tightened further.