Britain – no country for top carnivores

I believe Britain is a zoophobic nation. While other European countries rewild to great success, we are shamefully disconnected from our wild past of wolves and bisons. And our timid, visionless conservation movement is complicit

A pack of timber wolves (Canis lupus) wandering in snowy birch forest of northern Norway. Photograph: Michael Leach/Getty Images

 

I returned from the meetings filled with amazement, and the stirrings of a hope which has been all too rare in recent years. First, at the launch of Rewilding Europe's Wildlife Comeback report three weeks ago, I heard about the remarkably rapid spread of large wild animals back into places which lost them long ago.

Then, at the World Wilderness Congress 11 days ago, I heard how people and nations with very few resources, under almost impossible circumstances, were protecting or reintroducing "difficult" wild animals, species which are controversial, and which require the largest habitats.

Amid the hope and wonder, what hit me hardest was this: while in Britain we applaud the courage of people in poorer nations and celebrate their successes, while we send money abroad to conserve large wild animals and, rightly, become upset if people start killing them, we seem determined not to participate. Protecting species towards the top of the food chain, with all the difficulties that can involve, is something other people should do: we would rather stand back and watch.

I have been trying to understand why we are so far behind the rest of the world, why we fetishise deforested and almost empty ecosystems, why the United Kingdom, in the words of the biologist David Hetherington, is "the largest country in Europe and almost the whole world" which no longer possesses any of its big (or even medium-sized) carnivores, and why, above all, our conservation groups seem so unconcerned about the depletion of nature in Britain and so disinclined to address it.

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