You’d be forgiven for thinking it was an imaginative, if not bloodthirsty, way to get rid of farmers protesting against the new inheritance tax rules.
In June, the Lynx UK Trust, an organisation that campaigns for the reintroduction of wild Lynx to areas of rural Britain, formally applied to reintroduce the cats to the Kielder Forest in Northumberland. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) promptly refused, on the grounds that lynx are classified as dangerous wild animals. But then the head of the government’s wildlife regulator stepped in.
Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, said he personally was “enthusiastic” about reintroducing wild lynx to Britain – and would be “absolutely delighted” if it could be achieved during his two-year term. In rural east Yorkshire, where I work, this was met with a degree of eye-rolling. People in agriculture have been aware of the proposals for a while, but until now, no one has taken them seriously. That has shifted a notch to: “They couldn’t… could they?”
I do not work in agriculture, but my dad’s family were tenant farmers, smallholders and contractors. My brother works on an arable farm on the Yorkshire Wolds, and I meet a lot of people in the industry.
Politically, I always find myself caught in the middle ground. I think farmers moan too much and are too resistant to change, and I think too much farm and conservation policy is made by experts who give a good impression of not really knowing what they’re doing. In this case, you have to say the reintroduction of the lynx to the wild in Britain would cause many problems for farmers – although it’s not all about farms and the cats themselves.
The most obvious issue – so obvious that it is acknowledged by lynx advocates – is the risk to livestock. There is no question that on large, upland farms, lambs would be killed. The Lynx to Scotland campaign group proposes financial compensation schemes to cover this, but you wonder about the limitations – surely once the predators know where the easy meals are, they will return repeatedly? And how do you prove a missing lamb was taken?
This would not only affect sheep. In Europe, the lynx’s preferred prey is deer, and there are about 30,000 farmed deer on 400 farms in the UK. You’d worry for outdoor-reared pigs as well.
I know a man from a farm in Poland, where wolf numbers have grown in recent years, who tells stories about his family at home bringing in stock from the fields at night to protect them, so it’s feasible that on some deer, pig and sheep farms we would see some form of evening roundup, or shelters being built.
There is then the question of game on country estates. Few people, or indeed animals, will shed tears over barons and bankers being deprived of the chance to bag pheasant, but the awkward fact is that hunting tends to go hand in hand with a strong degree of nature conservation. Of course, landowners aren’t going to give that up because a lynx snarfs a snipe here and there, but what they will do is get their gamekeepers to shoot them.
The less obvious risk concerns not commercially bred animals, but domestic pets. A lynx’s hunting range can be up to about 170 square miles, and they can travel up to around 12 miles a night. That would surely allow for them to enter rural housing developments, estates and villages in search of food, in the way foxes and deer do fairly routinely now. Given cats’ noisy predilection for fighting, it seems a very real possibility that, in winter, they would end up attacking domestic pets.
At this point, especially if it happens in a quiet news period, it would all become a very different kind of problem. Where that could affect farmers is in local pressure to fence in land abutting housing. Given the increasing public complaints about the noise, smell and mud that are inextricably linked with agriculture, it would hardly be a surprise, should the circumstances arise.
Admittedly, this is highly speculative and slightly paranoid, but it is worth pointing out that some rewilding schemes do have unintended consequences. Nature is full of unforeseen knock-on effects: this year, my neighbour got a rather murderous house cat, and the hay and barley fields next door are visibly less eaten off by rabbits, because the cat has either eaten them or scared them off.
Similarly, it appears to me, and several local birdwatchers I know, that the reintroduction of birds of prey, combined with the policy of cutting hedges less frequently, has visibly reduced the number of small birds. This is because, unable to get deep into the hedge any more, they nest on the outer edges where the nests make easy targets for sparrowhawks.
It’s for reasons like this that I find the idea of rewilding dubious in its insistence that nature somehow finds its own healthy balance; such balance is usually a lot healthier for the predator than for the prey. I can see that it can work in vast spaces – to be fair, the reintroduction of lynx in areas of Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland seems to have worked without too much carnage. However, in most of the UK, the space is far from vast, and benefits from some sort of management.
Finally, if the UK government’s wildlife body approves the reintroduction of the lynx, it may have another, more vague effect on farmers because of its symbolism. There has been no coherent agricultural policy from the current or the previous government, and there is a sense in the industry that these days MPs would rather just get the food from overseas, and pack in with food production altogether to save the greenhouse gas emissions. That may or may not be true – but releasing a livestock predator back into the wild would be interpreted by many as a certain signal of intent.
Richard Benson is author of ‘The Farm: The Story of One Family and the English Countryside’ (Penguin, £15.99)
