Reintroduction of wolves to Scotland would be a threat to livelihoods

COPA-Cogeca, the umbrella organisation for the EU’s farming unions and farmer co-operatives, is one of eight European stakeholders’ organisations participating in an initiative by the European Commission to address problems caused by large carnivores. The idea is to facilitate a dialogue between participants to solve conflicts arising from the presence of wolves, brown bears, Eurasian lynx and wolverines.

I raise this topic because there are moves afoot by some to reintroduce wolves to Scotland’s hills and glens. For instance, the John Muir Trust has said recently that there was “no ecological reason” why wolves could not be reintroduced to Scotland, and that the animal had been “demonised” in the UK.

Wolves were hunted to extinction in Scotland in the 1700s, with some of the last killed in Sutherland and Moray to protect sheep from predation. Modern Scottish sheep farmers don’t want them reintroduced, but elsewhere in Europe farmers on the edge of large forests and wildernesses have to cope with these marauding carnivores.

Copa-Cogeca has stressed the need to find adequate solutions to address the concerns and difficulties some European livestock producers are facing, particularly in view of an increasing number of attacks by large carnivores.

Mr Emmanuel Coste, chairman of the CopaCogeca Sheep Working Party, pointed out: “More and more sheep herders have their animals killed by large carnivores, even those who have established protection measures.

“The number of attacks, especially on sheep, is PERIL: The farming community could be at risk if wolves were to come back after 300 years. increasing rapidly, causing severe losses in production and consequently in income. This discourages young farmers from taking over farms, leading to abandonment of extensive grazing areas which increases the loss of high value biodiversity.

“Current protection measures are very costly and not sufficiently efficient. Wolves searching for easy prey are even attacking during the day as they are no longer afraid of humans, thus getting closer to farms, households and even towns. This is why compensation payments are no longer the only solution.”

I had a brief encounter with wolves in Poland when I was doing my Nuffield Scholarship back in 1991. I was studying the European trade in “milk lamb” - the by-product of milking sheep, and effectively the equivalent of veal calves from dairy cows.

My travels had taken me up into the Tatra Mountains in the South-East of Poland, in the company of four shepherds, a boy and 700 ewes that were milked to produce oscypek, a salty, smoked cheese.

Every spring the shepherds gathered up their flock of lambed ewes from the various villagers and took them high up in the mountains. There they lived in wooden huts for the summer, tending and milking the sheep. To protect their flock from the wolves that lived in the surrounding forest, they kept them in small paddocks made out of wooden hurdles that were moved onto fresh pasture every day. These were guarded by big, fierce Tatra Mountain sheepdogs that were more than capable of repelling wolves. In addition, the shepherds had to be prepared to support their dogs with guns to the extent of hunting down a renegade wolf.

The ewes were milked by hand three times a day till June 25 and then twice a day until September 20, when they were dried off. The shepherds did not squeeze the teats individually when milking the ewes, but firmly squeezed the whole udder between their cupped hands forcing milk out of both the teats at the same time. They had the thickest, strongest forearms I have ever seen.

The unpasteurised milk was made into a salted cheese. After this, it was pressed into wooden, spindle-shaped forms that gave the cheeses decorative shapes. Those forms were then placed in a brine-filled barrel for a couple of days, before being placed up in the roof of the huts, where they were cured for about a fortnight by the smoke from a fire that constantly burnt wood from the forest. At the end of September the shepherds returned to their villages with the flock of sheep and a cart loaded with valuable cheeses.

It is a unique way of life that may now be under threat from wolves, as they have been protected throughout Poland since 1998. That has led to a dramatic increase in numbers.

Scotland is fortunate not to have wolves, and I don’t see any justification for their reintroduction and the threat it would pose to the livelihoods of farmers who already have to contend with farming in some of the most severely disadvantaged areas of Europe.