Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
63 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 64
Elsewhere in Europe, these mesopredators,
especially wolves, have spread back into
much of their former range
W
hat’s missing from this picture?
I mean the picture of rural
Britain many of us hold in our
heads, whether it be a thatched
and mullioned idyll, or the bare
hills fetishised by naive nature writers? Well,
quite a lot. Trees in the uplands; soft boundaries
between habitats (ecotones) that are crucial for
thriving food webs; dead wood, of which
there’s a dearth in this country; scrub (a vital
but derided habitat); undrained wetlands; and
wild, healthy rivers. But there’s something
else, something whose absence is less visible
but just as important. Wolves.
Not just wolves, but any large or middling
terrestrial predators. We talk here of wolves
and lynx as “top” predators. But our native top
predators, until modern humans fi nished them
o , were lions, hyenas, bears and scimitar cats.
Wolves and lynx would better be described as
mesopredators. The wolf that didn’t howl helps
solve the mystery of how this country, for all its
love of nature, remains one of the most
ecologically barren places on Earth.
A few years ago, and centuries after the last
defi nite record in Britain (an animal killed in
Sutherland in 1621), we started talking about
wolves again. We also fl irted with the idea of
reintroducing lynx. Then we forgot again. While
rewilding has spread further and faster in the
past 10 years than I could have dreamed, it
follows a certain pattern, described by
ecologists as “non-trophic”. Trophic rewilding
means bringing back important missing
species, to restore ecological processes and
create self-regulating systems. Instead, most
of our rewilded places, while now much richer
in nature, remain closely managed by people.
People assume the role of wild predators,
limiting the number of herbivores and moving
them around. That’s fi ne as far as it goes. But
we’re not very good at it.
Until the early 20th century, deer were absent
from much of Britain. The roe deer was extinct
in England, the red deer confi ned to isolated
pockets, and non-native fallow deer to deer
parks and grand estates. A century later,
Britain has six species of deer, four of them
exotic: red, roe, fallow, Reeves’ muntjac,
Chinese water deer and Japanese sika. Up to a
point, the expansion of the deer population
was a great success. Beyond that point, it’s a
tremendous failure. Deer have done so well
Howl if you hink reinroducing
op predors would id
biodiversiy
Without wolves or
lynx, our ecosysems
remin brren,
depleed nd overrun
by prolifering deer
By George Monbio
(except in Wales) that they now present a major
problem.
There are no reliable estimates of deer
numbers in Britain, but there’s no doubt they’ve
grown massively and continue to rise. There are
several reasons: more a ordable food (until
recently), which meant less poaching; new
woodlands and plantations; warmer winters;
and autumn sowing, which ensures there are
crop plants for deer to eat all year round. But
above all, their numbers grow because there
are no e ective means of controlling them. The
result is success of the kind you wouldn’t
expect in nature: one study estimates the
survival rate of muntjac born in the UK at
60-70% and of roe deer at an astonishing 83%.
The result is ecological disaster. In many
parts of the country, deer make the
establishment of new woodlands or even
maintenance of existing ones nigh on
impossible. They browse out young trees and
ENVIRONMENT
63 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 64
are no other safe means of delivering the
chemicals to a deer population.
All that remains is shooting. In some
European countries, it works. The state decides
how many deer should be shot, and landowners,
working together, must implement the plan.
But the British disease is the elevation of
private interests above the common interest.
Governments ensure no one can constrain the
behaviour of major landowners, however grave
its impacts. The House of Lords, where owners
of overstocked deer estates are 10,000 times
as populous as in the nations they’re deemed
to represent, historically ensured that the
interests of society can never override the
interests of the lairds.
Governments have repeatedly sought to
stimulate a market in venison to encourage
Where wolves return, the
outcome is less Little Red
Riding Hood than Robin
Hood: a redistribution of
ecological wealth to the
benefi t of the whole system
regrowth from cut stumps. The woods that
aren’t overgrazed by livestock are overgrazed
by deer. The e ect is the same: as mature trees
die, they’re not replaced. In the Scottish
Highlands, trees return only when deer
numbers are below around fi ve per square km.
But in some places, there are 15 or 20.
Heavy grazing in woods reduces the numbers
of small mammals, of nightingales and other
warblers, willow tits, dunnocks and many other
species.
Every so often, a “major initiative” is
launched to control deer numbers. Working
groups, strategies and action plans are
announced, then promptly abandoned. A few
years later, someone else in government will
discover the problem and launch a “major
initiative” of their own.
There are three ways of controlling deer, and
none of them work in the UK. The fi rst is
exclusion. Hard fencing is extremely expensive
and no barrier to muntjac. Electric fences need
constant maintenance and, for reasons that
remain mysterious, roe deer scarcely mind
them. Contraception is useless: you need to
approach within 40 metres to fi re a dart. There
more culling, but the only sure result has been
to stimulate deer farming, especially in New
Zealand, from which we now import 3,000
tonnes of this meat a year. It’s crazy in a country
overrun with wild deer. Some of it is sold in
Scotland as “Highland Game”.
After years of this nonsense, it’s obvious that
humans in Britain are an unreliable control
agent. They announce plans but don’t follow
them through. They propose incentives, but
either fail to deliver them or generate the wrong
results. They fret about the problem, but
constantly fail to solve it.
Wolves and lynx, by contrast, get on with the
job. Wolves may hunt by committee, but they
begin with a consensus position that hunting
should happen. They require no incentives or
action plans, strategy documents or working
groups. Lynx, as solitary hunters, don’t even
need to discuss the issue.
Elsewhere in Europe, these mesopredators,
especially wolves, have spread back into much
of their former range. Where wolves return, the
outcome is less Little Red Riding Hood than
Robin Hood: a redistribution of ecological
wealth to the benefi t of the whole system. Here,
we stubbornly insist that their return is
“unrealistic”. The “realistic” option, apparently,
is to keep doing the same thing while expecting
di erent results: ever more working groups,
until the last tree falls and no saplings are left
with which to replace it.
Bring back the wolf and the lynx and all the
other native species that people in this country
are prepared to accept. Our living systems –
and our lives – will be the richer for them.
This article fi rst appeared in the Guardian.
www.monbiot.com
Rts with ntlers
Would be better off inside wolf
