I saw this headline in the Guardian this morning:
Wolves are thriving again across western Europe. Is it time to bring them back to the UK?
My reaction was a big NO THANK YOU!
As a small child our daughter was terrified at the idea of wolves roaming around free after she read a children’s novel called “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” by Joan Aiken. It’s set in an alternative history of England, during which a large number of wolves had migrated from the bitter cold of Europe and Russia into Britain via a new "channel tunnel", and terrorised the inhabitants of rural areas. Indeed, when the Channel Tunnel became a reality some people feared the arrival of all sorts of animals via said tunnel! The book was a great success, permitting the author to give up her day job and write full-time. I think they even made a film of it. But our daughter was quite traumatised. And wolves are migratory and, if reintroduced to the UK (the last recorded were at the end of the 18th century), even if only in Scotland, before we knew it they would be all over the place.
The idea is all connected to rewilding. Former sheep farmer Derek Gow is on a mission to rewild Britain. He’s done a lot of work in that area, among other projects reintroducing beavers and wildcats to various parts of the country. He’s on all sorts of committees and study groups. He’s gone off sheep, regards them as rather stupid and, having switched sides from team sheep, he now wants to reintroduce its mortal enemy.
Wolves are still around in other parts of Europe. French shepherds are in uproar over that country’s resurgent wolf population because 12,000 livestock animals – mostly sheep – are predated each year. Derek Gow points out that 15,000 sheep were killed by out-of-control dogs in Britain in 2016. That’s a different problem though. He hopes high-tech solutions such as a sheep collar that emits a wolf pheromone which has been shown to keep sheep safe in Switzerland might lead to coexistence between farmers and wolves.
One argument for reintroducing wolves is that they would be a natural predator of deer, of which it seems we now have 2 million, a wild population growing by 10% each year and living at a far higher density than in any other European country. So that explains why we are now seeing deer in our valley, where we never saw them 40 years ago when we lived deep in the valley. So many deer are decimating rare plants and preventing the natural regeneration of trees. However, I still don’t like the idea that I might run into a wolf! Beautiful animals though they are, I’d rather not have them as neighbours.
At what might be the other end of the wild animals problem scale, In Paris they are having problems with wild rabbits. Three hundred or more rabbits have been digging thousands of tunnels underneath the manicured lawn of the Esplanade des Invalides, ruining the 16-hectare (40-acre) site overseen by the French military. They gnaw on electrical cables and garden hoses, they have dug burrows all over the grassy area and leave lots of rabbit poo for the military to clean up.
We once had a rabbit which had the run of the basement kitchen, so I know about the fun of cleaning up rabbit poo. Cupboards at floor level had to be securely fastened; our salad was for us, not for the rabbit to nibble at whenever he fancied. At Christmas time he nibbled through the cable for the Christmas tree lights. My Spanish sister had one which gnawed his way through the cables of their music system, after which he was banished to the balcony of their flat. On both of those occasions we marvelled at the fact that the rabbits in question were not electrocuted.
That’s enough about animals for one day.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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