Norway too. Due to a strong distortion field surrounding the rather dubious impact of large predators on the viability of livestock farming, there's a political consensus between the 3 largest parties(labour, conservatives and the agrarian party(officially the "centre party")) that the minimum viable population numbers agreed on in the Bern Convention are actually maximum limits. The resulting policy is that any population beyond that is culled every year. This is unironically referred to as "getting down to population targets".
This is of course not ideal for the ecosystem. Game populations are out of control, which has lots of harmful effects on forests, etc. And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.
> And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.
It's a complicated topic of conservation, because the reproductive strategy, genetic makeup, and history all influence the species' minimum viable population, and thus its reaction and trajectory following new genetic bottlenecks. Some species can somewhat recover from very extremely little e.g. the black robin went as low as five individuals, including only one fertile female, today there are 300; or the mauritius kestrel which was down to 5~6 known birds of which a single fertile female, for mammals the northern elephant seal went down to ~30.
One of the massive risks for species surviving a genetic bottleneck is that the low genetic diversity will let diseases spread like wildfire, especially for the more social species.
Yeah it's amazing. The Swedish narrative includes the logical somersasult that the population must be slashed in half to reduce the risk of inbreeding. Like I don't even.
It's kind of shortsighted though. If we kill all the other predators, we're left with rampant overpopulation of all their prey animals, even the ones that harm our own interests and are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with (like boars).
This is of course not ideal for the ecosystem. Game populations are out of control, which has lots of harmful effects on forests, etc. And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.