Rewilding really a man-made problem

EVENTS in faraway Vancouver are hardy likely, you might think, to have any bearing whatsoever on life in the UK countryside. But in one respect I certainly think they do.

A furious debate is currently ranging over the management of wildlife in Stanley Park, a 400-hectare public open space on a peninsula bounded by English Bay and Burrard Inlet.

It’s home to an array of wildlife, and notably to a population of wild coyotes. And the animals have been making a bit of a nuisance of themselves lately. Or perhaps it should be that the Vancouver residents have been making a nuisance of themselves to the coyotes.

Either way, there have now been 45 cases of coyotes attacking people – including children – since December and the city authorities have therefore closed the park at night and are preparing to shoot 35 of them.

A signal for the inevitable anti-cull petition to start and lots of collective weeping and shroud-waving of the kind we saw during Geronimo’s final days.

Yet this is a man-made problem. Do-gooders, bunny-huggers and the rest have taken – against firm official advice – to feeding the coyotes, while others have tempted them out of cover with food specifically in order to photograph them.

The coyotes have therefore worked out that humans equal food and have been getting uppity when they have been denied it.

Why is all this relevant? Because I can see exactly the same situation developing here if the rewilders get their way and alien and potentially dangerous wildlife is released back onto the hills once government policies have made actively farming them completely uneconomic.

Because where there is exotic wildlife people will want to go and see it and photograph it. And will be prepared to go to any lengths to obtain a selfie with a lynx or a wolf, neither of which is likely to be entirely happy that its territory is being invaded. This is just one likely negative outcome of rewilding, but one which, as usual, will hardly rate any consideration by the more extreme factions in the environmental lobby. The ones who still believe that rewilding on a crowded island, where we shall shortly need every last square inch of farmable high ground land as swathes of lower-lying zones are lost to the sea, remains a safe, desirable and sensible prospect.

Who blithely suggest that predatory species will observe the rules about not taking livestock, when you only have to look as far as the mountainous regions of Spain, Italy and France to understand what inroads hungry wolves can make into sheep flocks.

In fact, you don’t even have to look that far to see problems. Scottish government conservation agencies have admitted that the sea eagles reintroduced into the west coast of Scotland are now preying on lambs – the National Farmers’ Union for Scotland recorded one farm alone lost 181 healthy lambs to the birds between 2012 and 2018.

Yet the issue is still being officially played down – presumably to facilitate further reintroductions. I spoke to a Scottish farmer’s wife who had angrily complained about a spate of eagle attacks on her flock only to be accused of ‘exaggeration’ – not a view, she retorted, that would be shared by the newborn lamb she had just witnessed being carried off in an eagle’s talons barely before it had managed to stand.

Where there is exotic wildlife people will want to go and see it and photograph it