Welcome back to the Europeans, the podcast that every week tries to tame the wild beasts that is European politics and make it vaguely understandable.

This is Katie speaking to you from a very wet Paris, and I'm talking to my charming co-host over there in Amsterdam.

How you doing, Dominic?

Hey, that's a very nice introduction. Are you feeling in a good mood today? Well, last week you did

a interview themed intro in that you made it food-based because we had a food-based interview.

And this week we have a wild beast themed interview. See what I did. More on that later. Yes, I do. Did you have a nice Europe day last week?

I have to confess, this year I didn't do anything specifically Europe-related on Europe Day.

I feel like a very bad European. What did you do? Well, producer Katz and I went for a reception

at the offices of the European Cultural Foundation,

where their director, Andre, called for Europe Day to become a national holiday across the EU.

Yes.

Now, he said this before, and at first I thought it was a bit gimmicky, but I'm really coming around to the idea.

Wouldn't it be nice if one of our bank holidays was connected to celebrating peace in Europe and unity instead of just another Christian festival day?

And it would be nice if you had to make a sort of European banquet to eat or like eat food from neighbouring countries or something like that.

Yes, I love it. And I

should actually mention that it's already a national holiday in Kosovo and Luxembourg. So, well

done Kosovo and Luxembourg. Let's make it happen across the continent. Let's do it. So back on the

subject of wild beasts. Yes, this week we're going to be discussing one of the big dilemmas of our time in Europe,

how to live alongside the wolves. The protection of these apex predators has become a very

thorny political issue in recent years. We're going to be speaking to an expert today, someone

who has studied how wolves

and humans can coexist and some other problems there. That person is Hannah Petterson. She'll be

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