In 1997, wildlife groups and travel companies formed the Pan Parks Foundation, which hopes to secure a further million hectares of self-willed land in Europe.*4 So far it has protected 240,000 hectares, in Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Lithuania and Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy and Portugal. In 2012, after ten years of negotiations, it created what it calls its first ‘transboundary wilderness’: a single protected area incorporating national parks in Finland and Russia in which no hunting, grazing, logging, mining or any other extractive industry is allowed.†5
The conservation group WWF is helping to protect around a million hectares in the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube catchment, connecting existing national parks and rewilded lands in Serbia and Romania.38 A coalition of wildlife groups called Wild Europe hopes to allow wildlife to move between protected areas all over the continent, by creating ecological corridors and restoring degraded land.39 The Polish government intends to increase the wild land around the Białowieża Forest, the largest expanse of primeval forest in Europe.40 The German government has now pledged to rewild 2 per cent of its land by 2020.41
Almost everywhere, except Britain and Ireland, large charismatic species are returning. Wolves have spread across most of Europe. Between 1927 and 1993, the wolf was extinct in France. Now, helped only by the restraint of people who might otherwise have killed them, there are over 200 wolves there, in at least twenty packs, some of which have spilt into Switzerland.42 The wolves which began to arrive in Germany from Poland in the late 1990s–almost a century after the species became extinct there–have now formed around a dozen packs.43 Since they were almost exterminated in the 1970s, wolf numbers in Spain have quintupled, to around 2,500. They have also grown rapidly in Italy and Poland.44 In 2011, 113 years after the species became extinct there, a camera trap in Belgium produced footage of a wolf dragging away the carcass of a deer.45 Another one–or possibly the same one–was seen in the Netherlands in the same year.46
Bears on the Continent have more than doubled in number over the past forty years. Though they have declined to critically low levels in France, Italy and Spain, they have been allowed to multiply in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia. Now there are some 25,000 in Europe.47 Extinct in Austria since the nineteenth century, they have slowly been reintroduced, though with a fair number of setbacks: they are the most difficult and dangerous of Europe’s large wild animals.
The population of European lynx, reduced to almost nothing a century ago, began to recover a little in the 1950s; since 1970 it has more than tripled, to around 10,000.48 During this period lynx have been reintroduced to the Jura Mountains and the Alps in Switzerland, to the Dinaric Mountains in Slovenia, the Bohemian Forest in the Czech Republic and the Harz Mountains in Germany. They have reintroduced themselves in other places.
The European bison, or wisent, the magnificent animal whose bulls can weigh over a tonne, once roamed the forests and steppes from central Russia to Spain. Soon after the end of the First World War it became extinct in the wild, and only 54 wisent remained alive in captivity.49 Some of their descendants were released into the Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland in 1952. Soon after the collapse of Soviet communism, I spent a fortnight there in late spring, pedalling silently down the sandy paths on a hired bicycle, then stalking as quietly as I could through the trees whenever I came to a promising spot. Scarcely touched by foresters, this is an ecosystem of the kind which must have been familiar to the people of the early Mesolithic. Oak and lime trees with trunks twice as wide as the length of my bicycle rose perhaps 100 feet without branching. Where they had fallen they formed an unscalable barrier, which dammed the spongy ground, creating small pools. The forest floor was a maze of dead wood. Between the toppled trunks it frothed with ramsons, celandines, spring peas and may lilies. I disturbed boar with their piglets, red squirrels, hazel grouse, a huge bird that might have been an eagle owl, a black woodpecker. Hiding in the reeds beside a river that ran through the forest, waiting in vain for the beavers which had felled the birch trees with cartoon precision, I saw a great snipe fly overhead. Along the streams on the edge of the forest at night, every bush appeared to contain a nightingale. Black storks scoured the meadows, among a hubbub of frogs and corncrakes.
I saw the bison only twice. On the first occasion I walked around a curve in the path and met an animal which looked more like a Christian depiction of the Devil than any other creature I have seen. We both stopped. I was close enough to see the mucus in her tear ducts. She had small, hooked black horns which gleamed slightly in the soft light of the forest, heavy brows and eyes so dark that I could not distinguish the irises from the pupils. She wore a neat brown beard and an oddly human fringe between her horns. Her back rose to a crest then tapered away to a narrow rump, from which a black tail, slim as a whip, now twitched. She flared her nostrils and raised her chin. I fancied I could smell her sweet, beery breath. We watched each other for several minutes. I stayed so still that I could feel the blood pounding in my neck. Eventually she tossed her head, danced a couple of steps then turned, trotted back down the path and cantered away through the trees.
On the second occasion, I had hidden among some bushes overlooking a pond I had found deep in the forest, which was surrounded by spoor. I had waited for no more than an hour when I was struck by the impression that the trees were moving. I blinked and looked again: a large herd of wisent had materialized beside the water. It was hard to believe that animals of this size could have arrived so quietly. The cows drank while their fluffy calves stood beside them, their front legs in the water. The great slab-sided bulls burnt ginger in the spotlight of the pond’s clearing. Now I could hear them snuffling the water, occasionally snorting and softly groaning. After perhaps twenty minutes, the forest began to move again as the bulls hauled their bulk from the pond then stood on the bank, looking around as the cows raised their heads from the water, beards dripping, before backing away through the mud, while the calves jostled, afraid that they would lose touch with their mothers. Wisent have now been reintroduced to many parts of eastern Europe, to Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, though in some of these cases they remain within enclosures, awaiting a wider release. The population has risen to around 3,000, but, as they are all descendants of just thirteen animals, the genetic base is dangerously small.
Beavers have been released, at the latest count, on 161 occasions in Europe.50 Reduced by 1900 to tiny populations on the Elbe, the Rhône, in the Telemark district of Norway and the Pripet marshes in Belarus, their numbers have risen 1,000-fold, to some 700,000.51 Golden jackals, after being driven out of much of Europe, are now multiplying in Bulgaria, Hungary and the Balkans, and moving into parts of Italy and Austria from which they might have been absent since the Iron Age. (The date of their disappearance is quite speculative, as the fossil and historical evidence is patchy.)
But this ecological revolution, though occurring in almost every other country in Europe, has left Britain untouched. There are several reasons. Species such as wolves which can extend their range freely on the Continent cannot reach these islands unless someone buys them a ferry ticket. Farmers have been slower to leave the land here than they have elsewhere: it seems that the further people are from the towns, the sooner they give up, perhaps because of the sense that life elsewhere is passing them by. Few parts of Britain are as far from large settlements as some of the farmland in Spain and Portugal, southern France and central and eastern Europe.
But this explains only part of the difference. The contrast between attitudes to nature in these isles and on the Continent is striking. I have often been told that Britain is too small and crowded for rewilding, though the same consideration has not stopped the Netherlands, which has much less land suitable for cultivation. I have also been told that we cannot afford it; though this has not inhibited Romania or Bulgaria or Ukraine.
Perhaps Britain is the most zoophobic nation in Europe. We appear to possess a deep fe
ar of wild animals, even those which can do us no possible harm. This could be because this was one of the first nations to become largely urbanized, or because much of the countryside is controlled by that small but peculiarly powerful class, which often seems to be antagonistic to any wildlife not classified as game. But it is also clear that, partly perhaps because of the popularity of wildlife programmes, enthusiasm for the idea of restoring our native wildlife is growing–everywhere except among the few thousand people who own most of the countryside. It is an unfortunate quirk of fate that those likely to exert the most influence over the question of whether or not our missing species are reintroduced are those who are most resistant to the idea. But in the case I am about to discuss, it is not only the landowners who are likely to voice strong objections.
The deadly ferocity of the wolf is a story to which we are exposed early and often. It swallows grandmothers then borrows their clothes. It dresses as a sheep or a sheep dog to pursue its wicked schemes. It blows down houses. It hybridizes with people to spread havoc through merely human society. Christianity equates wolves with evil and greed, though they played a more positive role in the foundation myths of some cultures, such as the Turkics, Chechens, Inuit and Romans.
To what extent are the horror stories true? Wolves have certainly killed people. A comprehensive review of recorded wolf attacks from 1557 until the present found that unprovoked attacks by non-rabid wolves are ‘very rare’, and that almost all of them took place prior to the twentieth century.52 Researchers found that eight people have been injured by wolf attacks in Europe in the past twenty years, but no one has been killed. There are nearly 20,000 wolves in Europe. During the past fifty years, five people have been killed by rabid wolves on the Continent and four by wolves without rabies, four by each category in Russia (where there are 40,000 wolves) and none in North America (where there are 60,000). Wolves not carrying rabies are most likely to attack when they have lost their fear of humans and live among them, or when they have been cornered or trapped.
There is no rabies in Britain,*6 and any wolves brought here for reintroduction would be screened and quarantined. If wolves retain their fear of humans (which I will discuss in a moment), attacks are likely to be extremely rare, perhaps non-existent. The chance of being killed by a wolf in Europe, even where they are abundant, is much smaller than the chance of being struck by lightning, or of being slain by the wrong kind of bedroom slippers (the cause of a number of fatal plunges down stairs) or by a collapsing deckchair. Even so, their reintroduction is a risk, however small, that will be imposed on other people. So it should happen only with wide public consent.
We expect the people of other countries to conserve far more dangerous animals than wolves: lions, tigers, leopards, elephants, hippos, crocodiles and Cape buffalo, for example. Many people in rich nations give money to the wildlife groups protecting them. Are dangerous (or in this case not very dangerous) wild animals something we choose to impose on other people, but not upon ourselves?
Wolves do present a more realistic threat to livestock, especially sheep. For reasons which are not well understood, they prefer to hunt wild game, though sheep are easier to catch.53 Even so, wherever they live they clash with livestock farmers. The impacts across the whole industry are small (less than 0.1 per cent of the sheep kept in the parts of America where wolves live are killed by them,54 and 0.35 per cent in Italy55), but their effects on an individual farmer can be greater, especially if a local wolf has developed a taste for mutton. Occasionally a wolf will slaughter a large number of sheep in a single attack (wolves will return to their kill for weeks if there is enough meat: mass killing is an attempt to create a larder).
Across France, Greece, Italy, Austria, Spain and Portugal, an average of €2 million a year is paid out in compensation to farmers who have lost animals in wolf attacks, and roughly the same amount is spent on preventing them.56 Though these figures are small, the agencies handing out the compensation money could be overpaying, as dog attacks are often blamed on wolves (in Italy, for example, there are 900,000 feral or free-ranging dogs and just 400 or 500 wolves57) and some claims are probably fraudulent.
There is a possible deterrent which has not been widely discussed in Europe, though it is used in South Africa to protect animals against lions and other predators, and in America to tackle coyotes. The livestock protection collar carries a chemical in two capsules at the animal’s throat, ensuring that a predator ingests it when it kills. In the US, sheep farmers load it with deadly poisons, but an emetic (a compound which causes vomiting) could deter predators from attacking that kind of livestock again. A Swiss biologist has designed another clever device: a collar that monitors a sheep’s heartbeat. If the rate rises and stays high for long enough, the collar sends a text message to the farmer. Sheep become distressed as soon as they see a wolf, so the farmer could have time to reach them before the wolves attack.58 The same collar could also produce noises of the kind a human would make, to frighten the wolves away before the farmer arrived.
Alternatively, a wolf that makes a habit of killing sheep can simply be shot. Though I hate the thought of killing wolves, and could never do so myself, I think we should be able to love wildlife without being unreasonably sentimental.
In fact hunting, strange as this may sound, could be the wolf’s salvation. There are three reasons for this. The first is that, as with wild boar, allowing licensed hunters to shoot wolves is likely to create a powerful lobby for their protection, just as anglers have become the staunchest defenders of fish stocks. The second is that it shows other people that the animals are under control. I feel we control our wildlife too much, but the wolf has a public relations problem, and the idea that it should be allowed to roam and breed without check is likely to be too much for many people to contemplate. Licensed hunting in Sweden has gone some way towards making the wolf politically acceptable there, after it reintroduced itself from Finland in the 1970s, provoking widespread demands that it be exterminated.59 I was told something similar by a forest officer in Slovenia: were it not for the authorized hunting of wolves and bears, they would be wiped out by unauthorized hunters, concerned that no one was managing them. In both countries, however, the number of wolves hunters are allowed to shoot every year is a highly contentious issue: over-hunting is suppressing the population of wolves to the extent that their genetic viability is threatened.
The third and most important reason is that it keeps the wolves afraid. As the review of wolf attacks suggests, the best means of protecting people from wolves is to ensure that wolves go nowhere near them. Nothing is likely to do this more effectively than an occasional shooting. The same tactic could be used to prevent wolves from migrating into areas in which they are not welcome. At other times people have hunted the wolf in order to eliminate it. Now we might hunt the wolf in order to preserve it (but not within protected areas).
The last British wolf is widely believed to have been killed in the Findhorn Valley, close to where Alan lives, in 1743, though the story is treated as apocryphal by the great rural historian Oliver Rackham. The last definite record of a wolf in Britain, he says, was the massive bounty paid for an animal killed in Sutherland in 1621.60 Wolves survived for longer in many parts of the Continent until they were reduced, during the twentieth century, to remnant populations in Spain, Italy, Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Their return to much of Europe, which in many places has been greeted enthusiastically, is perhaps the clearest sign of a radical change in attitudes to nature over the past forty years or so, a change that has been taking place more slowly in Britain but which, even so, is tangible.
Wolves range widely and can live almost anywhere: tundra, deserts, forests, mountains, moorland, farmland, cities. When they are not killed, they quickly re-establish themselves. There is one part of Britain which has all the characteristics required for their reintroduction: the Scottish Highlands. There the population of red deer and roe deer is not only high enough to support them but far too hi
gh. The human population is far lower than in many parts of Europe (such as eastern Germany and the Apennines) in which wolves live today. There are few roads, which means that they are unlikely to be killed by cars. The Highlands could probably support around 250 wolves, which should be enough to keep the population viable.61 England and Wales are less suitable, as they have fewer deer; in Wales deer have been almost obliterated.
While wolves and sheep may not be the perfect social mix, introducing wolves to Scotland’s deer population could, one study suggests, benefit even the big estate owners.62 The overpopulation of deer, while it pleases the stalkers, presents them with a major management problem. Suppressing the population to the extent recommended by the Deer Commission is a labour-intensive and expensive business. People pay to stalk and shoot the stags, but the profits tend to be offset by the losses incurred in shooting the hinds (the females), with the result that most estates either make a loss or just break even. The scientists who have modelled the effects of reintroducing wolves find that it is likely to make them more profitable. While wolves would reduce the number of stags, they would also avert the need for a hind cull. The result would be that the estates would make a profit of £800 a year for every ten square kilometres from deer keeping, rather than £550.63 The remaining stags are also likely to get bigger, as there will be more food for each deer, which could mean that people would pay more to shoot them. The wolves, the model suggests, are likely to reduce the deer in the Highlands to around half their current number.
By killing and deterring deer, wolves allow woodland to regenerate. A study published in the European Journal of Forest Research suggests that hunting by humans is a less effective means of protecting forestry than hunting by wild predators.64 Wolves not only suppress the population but radically alter the behaviour of the deer. They might also reduce the number of cases of Lyme disease, a debilitating and (in its advanced stages) sometimes incurable illness spread to humans by deer ticks.65 While we are well aware of the wolf’s unhelpful contribution to sheep farming, we are perhaps less aware that this will be partly balanced by their killing of foxes, which often carry off lambs. For the same reason, they are likely to be beneficial to grouse moors and pheasant shoots. In North America, most of the compensation paid to farmers for the damage done by wildlife takes the form of payments for crops eaten by deer, not for livestock eaten by wolves and coyotes.66 It is possible, though I have not yet been able to find comparative figures, that wolves there could in fact increase the overall production of food for humans.
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