No happy ending if wolves return to the hills
CAn there be a more stark illustration of how much of a lack of understanding there is about rural affairs than former Scottish Socialist Party member Carolyn Leckie advocating the return of wolves to the hills?
It seems to her eye that the great open spaces could do with the return of a species that has not roamed here for 300 years.
Many people think the countryside is a wilderness mankind has spoiled with his interference and that, left to her own devices, Mother nature would make a far better job of things.
Really? no doubt Miss Leckie is utterly against deer culls.
nature’s answer to burgeoning deer populations is to thin the herd via starvation - is that really a superior solution?
The only contact many Scots have with the countryside is a glance out the window as they take a tootle in the car of a Sunday afternoon.
It’s easy for them to think that great open spaces and majestic hills are just scenery best left to the animals.
Because there are no smoke-belching chimneys, they cannot grasp that this ‘wilderness’ is carefully managed agricultural land.
The lonely moorland that Miss Leckie would like to see echoing to the howl of the wolf sustains more rural jobs than most would believe.
And given her red credentials, Miss Leckie perhaps assumes she’s doing a Robin Hood – robbing the rich – and that anyone who dons a waterproof jacket and wellies when they go to work is an aristocratic toff.
not so. The lambs and sheep her wolves would predate represent the livelihoods of ordinary farmers. There are more belted Galloway cattle in Scotland’s fields than there are belted earls. The Left always likes to control and legislate. We see that clearly with the SnP stacking useless rural laws to the rafters from its urban strongholds in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Wolves in the hills? We already have a voracious pack howling at the moon in Holyrood.
DONALD BLACK, Fort William, Inverness-shire.