Finding harmony with wolves

For centuries, human hatred of wolves has been obsessional. Only when we learn to co-exist peacefully with these remarkable, vital animals will we rediscover our own place in nature.

The recovery of wolves across Europe is one of the greatest conservation success stories ever told. No reintroduction was needed. Wolves have simply been recolonising swathes of their former continental range since legal protection was established in the 1970s. At its nadir, the wolf was down to a few handfuls clinging on in Europe’s wildest reaches , so committed had earlier generations of Europeans been to their eradication. On the islands of Britain, Ireland, Sicily and Sardinia and in a number of continental European countries wolves were exterminated completely.

In his brilliant recent book Hunt for the Shadow Wolf, Derek Gow explores the hatred people harboured for wolves. Considered the incarnation of the devil, wolves were loathed, hunted, trapped alive, dragged back and ritually burned alive, eviscerated, torn apart by dogs or cruelly tortured in some other unspeakable way in front of crowds of baying men, women and children. Across Europe, a whole-of-society effort was mustered to do away with them, and in all but a few places it worked.

Anyone who has paid a visit to the beautiful but utterly denuded Highlands of Scotland has seen what happens to a landscape that has been stripped of wolves. In the absence of predation, deer numbers have skyrocketed, stripping the hills and glens of young trees, scrub and flowers. Hordes of red deer, a woodland species, huddle underweight and exposed on bare hillsides that are devoid of any kind of cover. The Highlands has become one of the most degraded ecosystems in all of Europe, largely on account of having lost not just wolves but all four of its keystone species.

The native Highland cattle, whose grazing, browsing, trampling and dung kept in motion a vast, twinkling, semi-open woodland mosaic known as the Caledonian Forest, was expunged along with the native people during the brutal Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Powerful landowner drove out the people and their cattle and cut the trees in order to fill the landscape with sheep. When the price of wool collapsed in the face of cheap imports from across the British Empire, native deer took the place of the sheep as the land was converted to vast hunting estates.

Driven to extinction at the same time as the wolf was the wild boar, nature’s gardener, whose constant rootling in the soil is of vital importance for an array of germinating plants, from ephemeral wildflowers such as poppies and scarlet pimpernel, to the mighty aspen and black poplar, trees which have now virtually vanished from Britain. And some time earlier, the beaver, the keystonest of all keystones, whose intricate dams built along the creeks and streams create sunlit ribbon wetlands which abound with life in a vibrancy that we are unused to seeing in Britain today.

A 4 minute video entitled How Wolves Change Rivers has now been watched nearly fifty millions times. The video documents how the reintroduction of north American wolves to Yellowstone National Park unleashed a trophic cascade of ecosystem recovery. Not only did wolves bring the numbers of wild herbivores under control, they changed their very behaviour, instituting an environment of fear, whereby deer and other grazers came and went quickly to and from the riverbanks, rather than milling about. Berry-laden scrub and trees returned, creating ideal conditions for everything from grizzly bears to beavers to salmon, which began to return in great numbers. Wolves protect the mountain’s green mantle from too many hungry mouths. Take them out and quickly the whole ecosystem begins to teeter.

Now though, across Europe, the keystones are back in growing numbers, and with them, predictable calls for ‘culling’, which is a euphemism for ‘eradication’, made by a small, vocal and often vicious minority. The killing of wolves has already been stepped up in Sweden, Norway and more recently in Switzerland, which appears on course to allow 70% of its wolves to be wiped out in spite of a national referendum vote in 2020 to keep wolf protections in place. Pressure in Switzerland is now also growing for greater leeway to kill lynx, beavers and even eagles. The same influential minority in Austria, Germany, France and Spain are watching with beady eyes, as the EU Commission President, Ursula Von Der Leyen, whose unfortunate pony was eaten by a wolf, has made it clear that the EU most certainly has wolves in its sights.

The reasons given are invariably shaky, including the danger posed by wolves to pets, livestock, game and even to people. Wolves pose little or no threat to humans, with records of wolf attacks on people in Europe virtually non-existent across centuries. Wolves are timid carnivores which avoid humans at all costs. Among the risks to which the European public is exposed, wolves simply do not feature. Meanwhile, dozens of Europeans are killed each year by dogs; and in Britain alone more than 100 people were killed by cows in the last two decades.

If perceived risk to humans is the deciding factor in whether wildlife is permitted to exist or not, then humanity ought to set about eliminating large wild animals from across the world; the leopards, lions and the tigers which are found in countries more densely populated and far poorer than ours; the jaguars of Latin and Mesoamerica; the cougars that live virtually in the centre of Los Angeles (and throughout the American West); and let's not forget the buffaloes and the large antelopes and the hippos and crocodiles and anything else which is capable of injuring or killing a human. Outside of Europe, wild animals larger and more troublesome than wolves are found in many countries, and if we followed to its logical conclusion the argument that wolves are ‘too dangerous’ to tolerate there’d be nothing left anywhere.

Certainly wolves are a nuisance for livestock farmers. But the scale of the impact is substantially overstated. France has many wolves, and lost a total of just 0.02% of its sheep population to wolves in 2022. A tiny number, you’d have thought, but sufficient to elicit histrionics on the part of French livestock farmers, along with demands for lethal retribution (on top of the generous compensation sheep farmers already receive). What they don't tell us is that almost ten percent of sheep in France, millions of them, die every year from all other natural causes (exposure, parasites, falling from cliffs, foxes and so on). Meanwhile, wolf coexistence measures such as dedicated sheep dogs, electric fencing and even donkeys are being rolled out successfully from Belgium to Italy to Spain. Last year sheep losses to wolves were halved in Belgium compared to the previous year thanks to such measures, in spite of a growing wolf population. Co-existence between livestock farmers and wolves is not as hard as we are led by the extremists to believe.

So while wolves, like most other wildlife, will always be considered a nuisance by some, a nuisance factor is just not good enough a reason for deciding to eradicate a native wild species from our midst. If it were, why stop at wolves? The tunnelling of moles in fields creates a menace for cattle and horses; badgers allegedly spread bovine tuberculosis; foxes kill chickens and gamebirds; otters target ornamental fish and aquaculture; eagles are said to take lambs; beavers fell trees; in fact you can hardly name a single species larger than a blue tit which isn’t a nuisance to someone or other. Do we rid ourselves of them all? There are some who would say yes.

Or should we try to find ways in which to coexist with wildlife, perhaps with a little humility as to our own lack of understanding in the way we intervene in the natural order of things? Might we find within ourselves a grudging respect for the wolf, our mortal rival across the aeons; empathy, even, for this intelligent, mysterious, social creature which plays such a vital role in maintaining the health of our shared natural environment and whose very presence injects a much-needed frisson into our lives?

Here in Britain, devoid of wolves, hunters have shown themselves simply unable to stay on top of exploding deer numbers. As well as increasing traffic collisions with deer, Lyme disease from deer ticks and the hollowing out of our remaining woodlands, crop damage by deer now poses a very real threat to our very food security (in a way that a few sheep on the hillside eaten by wolves could never be. It's worth noting that thirty million hopelessly subsidised, environmentally-ruinous sheep account for less than one percent of the food produced in Britain.) 

We are told that all farmers hate wolves. But it's simply not true. European farmers who grow crops, fruit, vegetables or raise pigs welcome the return of wolves for obvious reasons. Is it time, then, to bring wolves back to Britain? And not just to the Highlands, but to East Anglia, where much of our food is grown? Is the idea really so mad? There are now more wolves in the Netherlands, a country more densely populated and more intensively farmed than Britain, than there are in Norway. Wolves don’t need wilderness to thrive. Any British tourist who has travelled to Europe in recent years has been, most likely unknowingly, in a landscape populated by wolves. Wolves are even now to be found hiding out in the outskirts of major cities such as Rome, Amsterdam, Paris and Madrid.

How would wolf numbers in Britain be controlled, we’re asked. The science is clear: wolves and other apex carnivores do not need controlling. Once their numbers are recovered they find equilibrium. A number of North American studies expose the fallacy that humans need to manage (or, revoltingly, to "harvest") wolves.

Poll after poll shows that a substantial and growing majority of people across Europe wish to see continued strict protection for wolves, lynx and other large wildlife. Here in Britain, people want our lost wildlife back. This is as much true of rural people as it is of the rest. In a major recent poll of rural people across 10 European countries, more than two thirds felt strongly that wolves, lynx and other large wildlife species should be protected properly, and the benefits they bring to the natural environment taken into account. The numbers remained high even among farmers. Vanishingly few reported feeling that anti-wildlife ‘special interest groups’ speak for them. The times they are a changin’.

Since the Enlightenment, we humans have managed to remove ourselves from the miracle of nature, which shines all around us. Everything that has gone wrong stems from this. Only when we rediscover harmony with wolves and with all wildlife, no matter how irksome it may sometimes be, will we reimagine our own place in nature, which is surely the greatest task of our time. Learning to live with wolves is totemic.