Wolves at your door?

They’re the ultimate supervillains in our fairy tales, unrivalled predators in the wild. And wolves are coming back. With numbers on the increase in Europe, Guy Kelly asks, is there a case for reintroduction in Britain, or should we be afraid of the big b

Their numbers are up in mainland Europe, but will wolves ever return to these shores – and would we want them to? By Guy Kelly

Considering it is a creature that hasn’t existed in the wild in Britain since the 18th century, the wolf seems to have a peculiar hold over our lives.

Leave aside just about all fairy tales for a moment, and instead consider a typical day. Were you to wake just before dawn, you would be occupying what is sometimes called the hour of the wolf. If it’s January and a full moon is present, too, that is the Wolf Moon. You wolf down your breakfast, while the morning papers speak of yet another lone wolf attack. Time for work: you consider throwing a sickie again but that would be crying wolf, and you need to keep the wolf from the door. In the office, your boss seems unusually affable: a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps she wants you to cover for her in a presentation. Great, you’ve been thrown to the wolves. You go out for some fresh air, and some lascivious scaffolders wolf whistle at you. How rude, you might say to yourself. Were they raised by wolves?

It’s quite some impression to have left, and those are just the idioms. Without being physically present, the wolf has pervaded every corner of our culture more effectively than any animal in history. Go looking for them, and you’ll find wolfprints everywhere: all over our stories, our lessons and our language. Everywhere, that is, apart from our landscape. But could that change?

A blindingly bright Sunday morning in January. At Wildwood Escot, an animal park near the east Devon town of Ottery St Mary, 53-year-old George Hyde is deep in the woods, prowling. I slip through a gap in the fence to join him close to the perimeter of a vast, leafy enclosure the size of 32 tennis courts. There is an immediate sense we are being watched. And we are.

On the other side of a 10ft wire fence, spread out in a menacing formation like the beginning of West Side Story, six European grey wolves – named Elvis, Sting, Moby, KD, PJ and Lemmy – eye us warily. They are tawny, rangy and handsome. It’s a brief inspection. After a second or two, they carry on with their sabbath as usual: playing, fighting, staring, lolling. Being wolves, basically.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ Hyde says, pausing to reach into a bag of dog treats and flinging one in the vague direction of Sting. Later, staff will feed the wolves dried pigs’ ears for elevenses. ‘Two years old now. They’re just starting to squabble and sort out pack hierarchy – it’s getting very interesting in here. Fascinating to watch.’ As if on cue, Lemmy goes for Moby’s throat. There’s a bit of growling, some teeth are bared, but it’s over as soon as it starts. Brotherly banter.

Wizened and gently shivering beneath his fleece coat, Hyde is the general manager of Wildwood Escot, having transferred from running the nearby Dartmoor Zoo almost three years ago. After its original, larger park in Kent, this 220acre patch of ancient woodland in Devon is the second site for Wildwood, a campaigning charity that specialises in educating people about the huge variety of recently extinct animals that once roamed all over Britain.

Here, visitors can see (though they aren’t all forthcoming on a winter’s morning) lynx, wild boar, red squirrels, wildcat otters, beavers, and dozens of other creatures that once called this country home, before something – normally us, through hunting or deforestation – saw them off. All the creatures are kept in large, rugged pens fit for their needs, and they seem happy enough. Wildwood Kent even has brown bears, which Hyde would very much like to match it on.

‘We do need a bit more space for them, though,’ he says, appearing to look around for that land as he’s speaking. ‘Bears need room.’

The wolves – siblings from the same litter – arrived 11 months ago, having been hand-reared at Stockholm University and gifted to Wildwood as cubs. It is those music-loving Swedish conservationists the pack has to blame for its rock star names. At first they seem ludicrous, like meeting a dog named Kevin, but they suit the wolves’ characters: Elvis is good-looking but thick; Moby is small and slightly meek; PJ does her own thing; Lemmy is unpredictable; and Sting? Sting is into tantric sex and lute music, of course.

Grey wolves (canis lupus) are one of three generally recognised species of the animal – the other two being the red wolf (canis rufus), a critically endangered native to the eastern United States, and the incredibly rare Ethiopian wolf (canis simensis). Species such as the snow-white Arctic wolf are merely subspecies of the grey that have arisen by taking on physical adaptations to their particular environment. And they could be anywhere: besides dense rainforest, wolves have been found almost everywhere in the world, making them – after us, of course – the most versatile large predator on the planet.

Until only a few hundred years ago, in fact, there were healthy numbers all over Europe, where they served as the unrivalled top predator (partly why they so dominated folk tales) for centuries. They are now creeping back from the eastern wilderness. Wolves were spotted in France and Germany in the ’90s, and have since moved into the Netherlands and Italy. Spain and Portugal have thousands of wolves, and Scandinavian nations a few hundred each. Belgium was the last country in continental Europe to be untouched by the wolf revival – until last month, when a few sheep were slain by a pioneering lone female which German researchers called Naya. She was the first wolf on

Belgian soil for more than 100 years. There are now so many that politicians are being urged to lift EU laws preventing culls in central Europe. Under pressure from farmers, Finland, France, Germany and Norway have slaughtered wolves in this decade, or at least will do this year.

‘It’s sad, in a way. In myths and legends, they’ve become a repository for all mankind’s evils, whether it’s attacks by strangers or a general lurking threat, or the idea of the she-wolf… so people are uncomfortable,’ Hyde says.

Most greys are found in densely wooded areas, meaning they take on a flecked coat of yellows, browns, greys and black. They’re also massive, like Alsatians with an upgrade in absolutely every department. As with all members of the wider canine family, they’re ‘digitigrade’: they walk so that their heels don’t touch the ground, but they use that feature far more effectively than say, a pug. Darting steathily around their enclosure at Wildwood, they barely make a sound, not even that infamous howl. In fact, nobody is completely sure why wolves howl at all – it could be to let other packs know they’re there, or to attract mates, or to organise a hunt, or possibly just for the hell of it. It is rare to hear howling at Wildwood. Once though, a keeper tells us, a human baby was crying in the grounds of the park. Recognising something in the animalistic wail, the wolves responded with their own cry.

Like those other two folkloric perennials, hares and owls, wolves are active in the crepuscular and night-time hours. As such, it is their eyes that are most striking. Blue at birth but turning citrine at adulthood (all the better to see you with), they give off a profound intelligence. Aside from being extraordinary physical specimens – they can jump 7ft, have a sense of smell 100 times better than ours, can hear you from almost 10 miles away and bite twice as powerfully as a police dog – wolves are smart as heck. Researchers once did an experiment with two wolves pitted against two dogs. A treat was placed on a bench, which they could pull towards them, but only by tugging on two different ropes at the same time. Dogs, who are idiots, failed almost every time. Wolves got it almost instantly.

‘Wolves are very, very neophobic, meaning they fear even the slightest change in their environment,’ Hyde says. ‘They are comparable to autistic children, in that sense. Even if we preen a bush here, they’ll regroup, assess the situation and react accordingly. It’s part of the reason why they’re so successful at hunting, and why they’d make terrible guard dogs. If they saw a disturbance, they’d be clever enough to run away until they knew what was happening. Dogs would confront it, which is a poor survival mechanism.’

In a wolf pack, establishing hierarchy is an essential component of becoming an effective hunting unit. Being brothers and sisters, Wildwood’s are all the same age, but a pack in the wild is generally a six- to eight-strong nuclear family: a mating pair that stay together for life, accompanied by their children and perhaps one or two unrelated interlopers. Known as a ‘route’ when on the move, packs are formidable at communicating to orchestrate a kill or protect one another. Conversely, they’re pretty useless at hunting large prey when outcast and alone. It is one of the many myths: a lone wolf is probably less dangerous than a wolf in a pack, not that you should bank on that.

The biggest wolf in a pack is not necessarily the alpha male. The biggest – in this case Elvis – normally operates as a kind of heavy: investigating disturbances, making the first attack, protecting others. The alpha, on the other hand, is often the second biggest, and certainly the shrewdest. Along with the alpha female, he prefers to use his influence remotely, directing matters and taking important decisions for the good of the whole team. In the last month or two, Sting and KD have emerged in those roles. Hyde has no plans to split up the group or add many others, preferring to keep them contained. But he does concede, plainly, that there may be a time when a non-related female has to be included, so the boys can ‘scratch the inevitable itch’ of mating.

You aren’t allowed live feeds at British animal parks and zoos, so the wolves here are given hunks of meat from the local butcher, prehunted. Once a fortnight they also get an entire Dartmoor pony carcass, which lets them practice tearing a large hooved animal to pieces, as is their natural wont. Sometimes, Hyde says, a sensationally stupid pheasant or rabbit will find a gap in the fence and sashay into the enclosure believing they’ve found an untouched swathe of woodland, only to get the shock of their life. ‘Even though they’ve never hunted for real, the wolves click into gear. The pheasant doesn’t last long, I can tell you,’ he laughs.

The pack will spend the rest of their days – around 15 years, all being well – at Wildwood. But they are not simply a zoo attraction. Researchers will work with the park’s staff to analyse their behaviour, especially compared with domestic dogs, and hope to teach as many members of the public as possible about the profoundly positive influence an apex predator like the wolf can have on the rest of their ecosystem, in a domino effect known as ‘trophic cascade’.

A frequent example wolf fans cite is that of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, where 31 grey wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s in an effort to control an exploding elk population. A video of what happened next has now been viewed almost 40 million times on Youtube, and probably appears on your social media feed every month or so.

Elk, like the deer in Scotland, are destructive to the fauna around them, and breed like rats if nobody is around to shoot or eat them. Without wolves, they ate all the willow, aspen and cottonwood shrubs, depriving beavers and songbirds of their habitats, and causing riverbank collapse. Once the wolves were back in town, though, elk numbers shrank, carrion birds had carcasses to pick at, trees grew back, beavers could build dams, and eventually even the courses of rivers changed.

Some dispute that it was quite as clean-cut as that, but the general idea is sound: introducing a top carnivore helps balance an ecosystem. Wildwood hopes that people will start to realise that, because it has the same ambition for wolves as it does for all its creatures.

Whisper it, but if they can make the public like and understand wolves, they reason, then maybe one day we could, you know, if the conditions are right… reintroduce them here too?

You can practically hear the shrill ‘think of the children’ alarm bells ringing up and down the country, particularly from those north of the border, the most likely spot for any experiment. The very suggestion of reintroducing wolves in Britain tends to trigger a thousand furious denunciations as soon it’s made. Just three weeks ago, Fergus Ewing, the SNP’S rural economy minister, pleased farmers when he declared that wolves

They can hear you from almost 10 miles away and bite twice as powerfully as a police dog

would return ‘over my dead body’ – which sounded vaguely like he was challenging them.

Ewing was responding to criticism of Scotland’s reintroduction of beavers over the last decade (they can destroy riverbanks and contribute to flooding, though there are upsides too), but also to proposals from men like Paul Lister, a millionaire conservationist who wants to introduce two wolf packs to his 23,000-acre wilderness reserve, Alladale, just north of Inverness. Inspired by Yellowstone and game reserves in South Africa, he has been criticised for wishing to create a ‘Jurassic Park’ in the Highlands. For the record, he says, he’d fence it off, but by law, you cannot put wolves and deer in the same enclosed space.

‘There are some people who are totally wolf-obsessed, and I assure you I’m not one of them,’ Lister, 58, says. ‘I’m not into wolves per se, but without its natural predators an area is a glorisame fied garden, and that’s what Scotland has become. We aren’t shooting enough deer to change anything. We badly need a trophic cascade.’

Not so badly, some would argue, that we risk wolves killing sheep as well as deer, or straying into built-up areas. The last wolf killed in Britain is said to have been in Morayshire in 1743, after it attacked a woman and two children. Wolves have come within municipal areas of large cities in Europe, however, but they are far more scared of humans than we are of them. There was an unusual spate of wolf attacks on toddlers in India in the 1990s, but otherwise they are notably unthreatening. In the US, just two deaths have been attributed to wolves this century. In the time period, 1,141 Americans have been killed by lawnmowers. All in all, aside from rats – whose reputation never recovered from accidentally wiping out around half the world’s population – wolves could claim to have been the victims of the most sustained smear campaign in animal history. Honestly, whoever does PR for bears and dogs, which are statistically far more deadly but have hero status with children everywhere, deserves a raise.

That reputation can mean it is difficult to examine the fears people have about wolf reintroduction, but not everybody is informed by myth. Teresa Palmer, the founder of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust in Berkshire, who used to bottle-feed wolves in her flat in London in the ’70s, is cautious about the idea of their comeback.

‘There’s lots of reasons why a reintroduction would never work here. People always talk about Yellowstone, but Yellowstone is over two million acres – the size of Wales – and surrounded by land. Scotland, on the other hand, is surrounded on three sides by water, so where will the wolves run to? They’ll go south, where the flat land is, and there are people, food and warmth. Before you know it, you’d have a wolf in Birmingham. And they’re great opportunists, you know… They’ll eat anything and wander 400 miles if they’re hungry, or need a mate. It really would be a disaster.’

Last month, one of Palmer’s grey wolves, Torak, escaped after somebody ‘who probably didn’t agree with animals in captivity’ crowbarred open a gate. A helicopter went up, Thames Valley Police got to use their wolf emoji on Twit- ter, and everybody feared it was heading for main roads. Mercifully, it was captured after six hours, safe and well but a little traumatised by the M4 in rush hour. While Torak fared better than the lynx that escaped in Wales in November (RIP), the public panic didn’t augur well.

Still, before too many people jump down his throat, Hyde would ask you hear him out. ‘It is very easy to put forward a hugely oversimplified view of rewilding so that you have just two warring factions. On the one hand, people who are extremely pro think that wolves used to live here, so they should be allowed to live here again. Now, rightly, the other side then points out that introducing wolves or lynx ignores the fact that the landscape and farming methods have changed since they were wild here, and that the population is so much larger, and that people’s livestock would be at risk. That just goes back and forth. What we really need is a dialogue.’

Hyde clears his throat, and throws a few more dog treats at Moby, who is now camped in front of us. ‘There must be some nuance in this debate. Think of our ecosystem as a continuum, with one end a total environmental monoculture, and at the other end a totally rich, ideally biodiverse space with room for all these creatures. At the moment, we’re creeping towards that monoculture no one wants, so I think we could benefit from exploring the other direction in order to balance it a bit more. Proposing something huge like reintroducing wolves or bears or lynx is an ultimate goal that we may find out is a bad idea or we may not, but think of the good things we could get from that conversation if we work towards it.’

It seems reasonable enough. In other words, contrary to its reputation in some circles, Wildwood does not advocate an airdrop of wolves into farmland across Britain tomorrow morning. Nor does it intend to help wolves ‘take their country back’ with no regard for rational thinking or human cost, like some sort of hairy, lupine Ukipper. Instead, it’s proposing an extreme-sounding experiment that may or may not come off, but could yield some encouraging environmental breakthroughs along the way.

‘I think of it like the moon landing,’ Hyde says. ‘It’s often been said that it was hugely expensive and pointless, but by doing it we made all sorts of amazing scientific discoveries. This could be the same for our environment, if we aim high. But until we start to think like that, with nuance, we just have an argument based on assumptions and fears about an animal that people don’t understand.’

Perhaps the wolves like it that way, not being fully understood. Always elusive. Either way, Hyde is right. It isn’t easy for sense to be heard when passions run this high, so the debate will rage on. At Wildwood, we bid the pack farewell. As we scoot past the final fencepost, Hyde turns to gesture at PJ, who is yawning at us playfully. ‘Just look at her,’ he says. ‘How could you not like a creature as beautiful as that?’

Knock, knock. The wolf is at the door.

‘Without natural predators Scotland has become a glorified garden’