Howls of protest over wolves in Scotland plan

WOLVES, bears and lynx will be reintroduced to Scotland “over my dead body”, the SNP’S Rural Economy Minister promised yesterday as he came under intense pressure over the damage beavers have caused to farms.

Fergus Ewing told the NFU Scotland (NFUS) AGM that the reintroduction of any species that makes farming more difficult “won’t happen in Scotland as long as I’m around”.

In an apparent swipe at the controversial reintroduction of beavers, he said the problem they had caused “shows precisely why it’s absolutely essential that we do not proceed on any more misguided experiments of this nature”.

The minister’s intervention came after Paul Lister, who became a multi-millionaire after inheriting his father’s MFI furniture fortune, outlined plans for a 50,000acre reserve for two packs of wolves in Sutherland. He has previously suggested that bears could be brought in to transform tourism.

But farmers warned Mr Ewing that beavers were a much more imminent threat to their livelihoods, arguing it was unfair they had to bear the costs and warning that a future licensing regime to keep down numbers would “cost serious amounts of taxpayers’ cash”.

Andrew Mccornick, the NFUS president, used his keynote speech to warn that the unauthorised release of beavers in Tayside was a “far bigger” problem than Brexit for farmers. An estimated 200 wild beavers have been

‘There will be no lynx in Scotland, there will be no wolves and bears’

living in the area for several years, after they escaped or were illegally released, in addition to an officially sanctioned trial reintroduction at Knapdale in Argyll.

Mr Ewing told the conference: “This will happen over my dead body. I cannot and I will not support anything which creates further gratuitous challenges or difficulty for our farming sector.

“There are quite enough predators to be getting along with, some of which you are permitted to control. So, there will be no lynx in Scotland, there will be no wolves and bears.”