Rewilding: The slow return of European predators

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Across Europe a rewilding revolution is taking place. Hairy hulking beasts — not seen in some cases for centuries — are slowly returning.

Saving the cat

I have reached that point where the chill has got into my bones and I know it will be hours before I can hope to feel warm again.

The thought that at the end of all this I will return to my accommodation — an establishment that can only be described as a poor man's Fawlty Towers — does not lift my mood.

The pounding rain of the previous day has stopped, replaced by an incessant drizzle.

They call this summer in the Scottish Highlands.

I have broken off my family holiday to come back home to Scotland and film an episode of Foreign Correspondent.

A glamorous-sounding prospect, but the reality is this cold and remote village hall on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the western Highlands, where I am now watching domestic and feral cats being neutered.

The neutering is part of an initiative being carried out under the banner of rewilding, and an attempt to save the Scottish wildcat from extinction in the wild.

What makes a cat wild?

These are the key differences between Scottish wildcats and feral tabbies:



Thicker, bushier tail

Fur around the mouth is light brown, not white

Dark stripes, not spots, on the flanks

Source: scottishwildcats.co.uk These are thebetween Scottish wildcats and feral tabbies:

The wildcat is an elusive creature which is clinging on, but only just, in these rugged landscapes.

There are thought to be only a few dozen of the animals left.

Hybridisation is killing the cat. So some organisations, like the one we are filming with, Wildcat Haven, have decided the most effective way to reverse the cat's decline is to introduce mass neutering programs to make sure that domestic and feral cats do not breed with them.

Today's first patient Chico, the pet of a family new to the area, proves reluctant.

Chico escapes when vet Nick Morphet opens his cage to try and inject him with anaesthetic.

The veterinary nurse has to chase him down, cornering him eventually in the small kitchen.

"Worse things happen at sea," says Nick Morphet — an unflappable vet who travels on his own time up from Newcastle to carry out this work.

Chico's sense of foreboding may be justified — he is about to have his balls removed.

That this literally is what neutering a cat means only slowly sinks in as the operation proceeds.

Is this a good moment to mention to producer Suzie Smith that I am not really a cat person?

A remote community

Neutering all the cats on a peninsula is an ambitious project.

Ardnamurchan has been chosen as the site to try and establish a wild cat reserve because of its remoteness. At one point only a small ferry links the mainland with the peninsula.

Still, tracking down all the cats here is no easy matter.

It involves knocking on every single door and trying to persuade locals to allow their cats to be neutered.

The task is made more complicated by the fact that some locals feed feral cats.

"We like cats about the place and they keep the mice down," long-time resident Donald O'Connor says.

Donald and his wife have been sustaining a population of several dozen feral cats, which Wildcat Haven has been systematically trapping and neutering, with Donald's consent.

Many of the animals are found to be diseased, but Donald says that is no reason to abandon them.

"They are still living," he says.

"I hope some bugger keeps feeding me when I am dying."

The elusive highlander

Dr Paul O'Donoghue, chief scientific advisor to Wildcat Haven, and his assistant Ewan Brennan are trawling through hours and hours of footage from camera traps set around the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

The cameras catch all manner of local wildlife — deer, pine marten and badger.

This time they also have some significant wildcat footage.

'"Absolutely unbelievable, man," Dr O'Donoghue says excitedly.

"It's like a proper tiger.

"No doubt about it, that is the real deal, man, that is the real deal, 100 per cent!"

I can see that the cats on the screen seem a little larger than a regular tabby, their tails a little bushier and perhaps there is something more of a swagger in their gait, but to the untrained eye, the Scottish wildcat is not that different from a regular kitty.

"The Scottish wildcat certainly isn't a big tabby," says Dr O'Donoghue, who as well being a scientist is also a farmer, an Oxford University graduate, and an uncompromising wildlife warrior.

"Its markings are like a miniature tiger, its tail, its fur, it's completely different."

Wildcats can ...

Run at nearly 50kph

Weigh nearly 10kg

Use their thick coats to keep warm in the snow

Source: scottishwildcats.co.uk



In addition, he says, wild cats behave differently.

While feral cats will breed all year, the Scottish wildcat will only breed once a year because of the harsh conditions, he explains.

"Is it hard though," I wonder, "to get support to save a cat few people alive today have ever seen and which pretty much looks like a big domestic cat?"

Local landowner Laird Ewen Maclean of Ardgour, who is allowing his land to be used for the project, thinks not.

"I think that is a very poor reflection on humanity if we can't save an animal because we can't see it," he says.

That shuts me up.

'We killed every single last one'



From Ardnamurchan we head south-east, into Northumberland in the north of England — a place, if possible, even colder and wetter than Ardnamurchan, and with even less mobile phone reception.

We spend hours one day just trying to regroup the crew after we split up.

At one point I am in the village shop asking if an Australian woman, aka producer Suzie Smith, has been in recently, when a man walks up and asks: "Are you Barbara?"

Suzie has told the man, who lives across the road from the shop, where she is going and he has been keeping his eye out for strange cars in the street in case we turn up.

Kielder is that kind of place.

It is here that Paul O'Donoghue is planning a project just as challenging as saving the Scottish wildcat.

His group — Lynx UK Trust — has identified the vast Kielder forest as an ideal location for its planned introduction of 10 lynx and is currently holding community and legal consultations on the proposal.

It has been centuries since the Eurasian lynx was last seen here, hunted to extinction around 1,300 years ago.

"We killed every single last one," Dr O'Donoghue says.

"We should be utterly disgusted with ourselves for doing that … and we have a moral duty to right that, to me, disgusting wrong."

The planned reintroduction of lynx faces stiff opposition from local farmers, who fear the cat will prey on their sheep flocks.

Dr O'Donoghue says data from Europe show lynx take on average only 0.4 sheep a year — a loss he says the Trust will compensate farmers for.

He says the benefits of having lynx back will far outweigh the potential loss of sheep, because they will help control deer numbers.

"They're the forest manager's best friend," Dr O'Donoghue says.

"We cull loads of deer in the UK, and lynx can help us to control deer populations in a natural more humane way.

Sheep farmer Greg Dalton is not buying it.

"I would question those figures," he says.

Greg Dalton's family have been sheep farming on upland moors in northern England for four generations, and he has no time for what he sees as the "delusional" notions of "Mr Paul O'Donoghue".

"People come out of university and have a PhD or degree — they think they know it all," he says.

"Theoretically they probably do, but on a practical level they are so far removed from really what is happening on the ground."

Community buy-in on this project could be a lot harder to come by, not helped by the recent escape from a zoo in Dartmoor in England of Flaviu the lynx.

Flaviu savaged four lambs before he was captured three weeks later.

Dr O'Donoghue argues that was because Flaviu was not a wild lynx, had not been taught hunting behaviour, and was not in his natural habitat.

He insists the lynx he wants to introduce will be a totally different beast.

"They'll be killing deer as soon as they're dropped on the ground," he says.

"He has a lot of convincing to do," Greg Dalton says.

Letting nature do its job

While rewilding is still a relatively new movement in the UK, it is much more established on continental Europe.

Thousands of wild animals now roam over around one-third of Europe.

Some have returned to their habitats as a result of conservation efforts and restrictions on hunting, some have been returned under targeted rewilding programs.

Rewilding has seen the reintroduction of bison to eastern and northern Europe, Iberian lynx to Spain and wolves to Germany.

Rewilding is linked to conservation, but goes a step beyond it.

The thinking is not just that the measures protect the animals, but that the animals protect and regenerate ecosystems.

"It's allowing nature to do more of its own job, instead of people managing and controlling nature," Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe, which has 10 rewilding projects running across Europe, says.

The most well-known example so far of a rewilding project is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the US.

Supporters of the project say the wolves are driving down deer numbers by preying on them, but just as importantly, forcing the deer to change their behaviour and avoid certain danger areas, allowing ecosystems there to flourish again.

"In this way the wolves are promoting greater diversity in Yellowstone," Professor Jens-Christian Svenning says.

The elephant in the room

Now the Professor of Ecology at Aarhus University is looking into the science of the wildest rewilding project yet — the idea of reintroducing elephants to Denmark.

To do so you would have to turn the clock back to the Ice Age, 12,000 years ago.

Professor Svenning does not think that is nearly as crazy as it first sounds.

"It can seem quite far-fetched to think of elephants and other large animals roaming again in Europe," he admits.

But he says "the lack of elephants is a new thing".

"For more than 18 million years we've had elephants around continuously, whatever the climate," Professor Svenning says.

"Then, with the expansion of modern humans across Europe, elephants were lost.

"They really do belong here."

The elephants that once roamed Europe are now extinct, but the Danes think Asian elephants might survive.

Ole Bach, the curator at Randers Zoo in central Denmark, concedes the animals could struggle with the climate.

"I guess that these elephants will need some help during the winter," he says.

"Farm beasts also need help during the winter, so I think also that's acceptable if we use machines to maintain nature."

Ole Bach has already helped bring elk back to a massive boggy moorland in the north of Denmark, and a herd of bison to meadowland next to the city of Randers.

He would like to see elephants reintroduced to the country within the next decade.

They would not exactly roam free, but would be fenced inside massive areas of land, some of it abandoned farmland.

"When we said that we wanted to bring back elephants to Denmark, people thought it was some kind of provocation or maybe even a joke," he says.

Now he thinks people are coming around to the idea, in part because of the threat posed to the animals by loss of habitat and poaching.

"You know, to preserve these animals, these big species, it is not just an issue for a small Asian country or for South Africa," he says.

"I think it's a global responsibility."

Radical plans for desperate times

Rewilding can mean different things to different people.

While some supporters of the movement think there should be no bounds to its possibilities, others are highly sceptical of the idea of bringing back mammals from the Ice Age.

"I wouldn't advocate bringing elephants back to Europe," Dr O'Donoghue says.

"To be quite frank, I think that's a ridiculous idea and it's hugely damaging for this kind of conservation rewilding movement, because it instantly gets someone's back up."

Frans Schepers says the idea is not in the scope of his organisation either.

"It's much more like a sort of scientific experiment," he says.

Where the rewilders do agree is that radical action is urgently needed to save species and habitats.

Time is not on their side.

"Biodiversity is what makes Earth so special and so precious," Professor Svenning says.

"We dream about discovering planets elsewhere, and we always dream about discovering planets that have high biodiversity, and we are sitting on one but we are losing it.

"I think we need to fight for that."

"They think I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. You have to dream," says Paul O'Donoghue.

"Because if you don't — what's the point?"

Sorry, this video has expired Video: Wildcats on the way back in rewilding Europe (ABC News)

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Topics: human-interest, animals, environment, environmental-impact, scotland, denmark, england

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