Animals running wild.

When our daughter was maybe nine years old - old enough read quite complicated stories but young enough to be scared by the content at times - she read a book involving wolves: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aitken, set during the fictional early 19th-century reign of King James the Third. A large number of wolves have migrated from the bitter cold of Europe and Russia into Britain via a new "channel tunnel", and terrorise the inhabitants of rural areas. It left our daughter somewhat traumatised, terrified that wolves might move into our area. I’m quite surprised she has always had dogs as a grown-up. Her reasoning is that she doesn’t want her children to be scared of dogs as she was as a child. She also maintains her own fear of dogs was the result of our not having one when she was small, but I think it’s the imagined wolf trauma that did it. 

I think of this whenever I read about proposals to reintroduce wolves into the wild in the UK. It always seems a bit crazy to me to bring back potentially dangerous animals. There’s already been an apparently successful project to reintroduce bison. I do not know how fierce bison are. They might well be quite docile. Highland cattle with their big horns look very fierce but the two which are kept in a field near here when they occasionally escape onto the Donkey Line bridle path are not at all aggressive. They are rather inquisitive and on one occasion came to have a good look at my bicycle but they did not seem threatening.

Wolves might be a different matter though. They tend to roam around. I’ve read reports of farmers in Spain complaining about wolves killing their livestock. Farmers around here get cross enough about dogs during the lambing season, in full swing at the moment with the air full of their noise! They have been known to threaten to shoot dogs which chase sheep. What might they do if there were wild wolves on the loose. 

And then there are bears. Bears!! I know they have bears, small brown bears I think, in northern Spain. (They also have very problematical wild boars! We might have some of these in the south of England as well.) Here’s a link to a report about a young man attacked and killed by a bear while running in northern Italy. Somehow we don’t expect to be attacked by wildlife in our civilised European lands. 

I was mildly amused by the reaction of Annamaria Procacci, a former ecologist deputy, who objects to the idea that the bear might need to be put down and says it’s the local council’s responsibility to keep people out of the way of bears. This is especially so when there might be cubs around, which is understandable.

A Canadian friend of ours once told us about having bears in his garden. That’s probably why I associate bear problems with the North American continent - that and the Yogi Bear stories. This story from Tim Adams appeared in yesterday’s paper: 

“It’s five years since the Asheville Citizen-Times ran the memorable headline: “Bear trapped in car busts out window, enters kitchen, eats muffin mix, skedaddles”. Since then, residents of the North Carolina city – population 94,500 – have become ever more used to living with black bears in their midst. There are up to 6,000 bears in the western part of North Carolina and as their natural woodland habitat is encroached upon by housing, some have adopted more urban ways of life.

 

The photographer Corey Arnold took this picture with a fixed camera at the back of a house where the family are used to seeing young bears share their kids’ rope swing. The picture is part of Arnold’s series Cities Gone Wild, shortlisted for a Sony world photography award. The series focuses on the obverse of the usual narrative of animal habitats destroyed by human activity, looking at those species that have adapted well to city living. A recent study of Asheville’s younger bears found that they were twice as heavy and produced their first cubs two years before their rural cousins, a result of the high-calorie diet they had learned to forage from rubbish bins.

Attacks on humans are rare and Asheville citizens are mostly “bearwise”: not putting bird feeders out – bears love nuts – and cleaning up after barbecues and picnics. The notable instances of bears entering cars or kitchens in Asheville can usually be traced to a resident habitually feeding the animals, which makes them more defensive and territorial in a particular area. The headline-making Citizen-Times bear was inadvertently trapped in a van after a woman left its doors unlocked. Once released it wandered into a neighbour’s kitchen and found the muffin mix in a drawer. Some of Asheville’s bears, a conservationist inevitably noted at the time, “are smarter than the average bear”.”

Maybe  North Carolina bears are different from Northern Italy bears. I think I’ll stick to seeing them in zoos. And this may not be time of year to go running in bear territory with the possibility of cubs and protective mother bears. 

Here’s some info about hibernation: 

“If food is not available, bears do not have to eat, urinate or defecate all winter long and can simply sleep through the winter. Some scientists call this winter denning, others call it hibernation. Bears differ from groundhogs, squirrels and other hibernators in that they do not have to wake up to eat and excrete waste. When bears come out in the spring, they are very hungry and most of our bear encounters happen during the spring and summer. Typically, by fall, there is enough natural food available for bears, like nuts and acorns, decreasing their need to roam into towns and neighborhoods in search of food.” 

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!