PERHAPS the most annoying characteristic of environmentalists is their unshakeable belief in their own rectitude. Anyone who opposes them is not only wrong, but wicked. Reason is lost on them.
A fine example of this is the ‘Missing Lynx Project’ to introduce the Eurasian lynx to Northumberland, North Cumberland and the Scottish Borders. This is a rehash of the previous attempt by Paul O’Donoghue in 2018, through an outfit called The Lynx Trust, to be given a licence to loose these big cats into Kielder Forest in Northumberland. To his credit, Michael Gove, who was secretary of state at DEFRA at the time, declined to license their release.
Well, they’re at it again! In a slightly different guise, but with the same aim and spurious justification. It’s apparently necessary to introduce these ‘missing’ wild cats to ‘help nature recover’. Nowhere is it explained how ‘nature’ will ‘recover’ by letting a big wild cat roam free across large acreages. Recover from what? And how will we know it has recovered?
Eurasian lynx, widely distributed across Northern, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia, are strong secretive predators that, including the stubby tail, grow to about four feet long. They hunt like domestic cats, stalking and ambushing their prey, usually at dawn and dusk and during the night – seldom during the day. Their only predator, apart from man (and sometimes European brown bears) is the grey wolf and, in places, the wolverine. But lynx tend to have the upper hand because they can climb trees. The female has an average of two kittens a year and once the male has impregnated her he remains solitary for the rest of the year.
They prefer to eat deer and hares, but when they are hungry they will eat anything they can catch that will provide them with the 2½ to 4½ lb of meat they need every day. They are known to have eaten beavers, foxes, dogs, domestic poultry, wild birds, sheep and goats. They travel long distances – up to 12 miles a night – patrolling up to 150/60 square miles of their hunting territory.
Apart from the four animals illegally released (and quickly recaptured) in the Cairngorms last month, lynx were eradicated from Britain about 1,300 years ago. Most other European countries with settled agricultural populations have either exterminated their lynx over the centuries or severely controlled them. In Norway between 1846 and 1980 the state paid a bounty on each one killed. They are now controlled in Scandinavia by issuing annual hunting licences.
Yet the Missing Lynx Project proposes to let them roam free, strictly protected by law. No farmer will be allowed to shoot these cats to protect his livestock. They will become top mammal in the British countryside. This will be devastating for British pastoral farming because uniquely in Europe our climate allows us to keep sheep on pasture all year round. In other lands it’s either too cold in winter or attacks by predators make it too risky. They have to be housed at night and protected during the day. But here, apart from foxes, badgers and crows at lambing time, our hill and upland sheep flocks graze unsupervised with minimal shepherding. And farmers can lawfully shoot foxes and crows. Over millennia every square foot of usable land in Britain has been wrested from the wilderness, occupied, farmed and made productive. There is no wilderness in Britain. This is not the case on mainland Europe with a much lower population density and different farming methods on different land with a different climate.
The lynx supporters come up with fanciful justifications in support of their campaign that have no basis in reality. ‘Missing’ mammals, ‘nature recovery’, controlling deer, they hardly ever prey on livestock, and if they do the government could pay compensation. None of these bears the least scrutiny.
So what’s it all about? I don’t want to give the lynx people any ideas, and I suspect they know this already, but they could tap into the ‘research’ by academics at Leeds University on the idea of re-introducing wolves reported in the Guardian this week which gives the game away. They claim releasing wolves into the Highlands could help ‘combat climate change’. Researchers have ‘estimated’ that a pack of 167 wolves in the Cairngorms would cull the red deer that are eating saplings and preventing regeneration of woodland. They estimate (that word again) that each wolf would ‘lead to an annual carbon uptake capability’ of 6,080 tonnes of CO₂ – and here’s the genius part – making each wolf worth £154,000, ‘using accepted valuations of carbon’. This is brilliant monetisation of nature based on nonsense.
Surely the lynx could be valued in the same way. They eat roe deer, roe deer eat trees and if roe deer were prevented from eating trees more trees would grow, sequestering more carbon and that carbon will have a notional value of whatever a tonne of carbon is worth on the make-believe carbon credit market.
Forget sentimental nonsense about nice pussycats in the country. This is a matter of life and death. The climate emergency is upon us. All of nature has to be valued in carbon credits and therefore encouraging lynx will result in an income for the landowner on the carbon market. No need to manage the land or produce food. Just let the whole thing go to wilderness and sell the lynx and the trees to an airline or big corporation. And make sure you don’t actually do anything on your land – otherwise you won’t get the money. The less you do the richer you’ll become.
Introducing lynx into a peopled landscape will be disastrous for rural social harmony, for pastoral farming, for food production and ultimately for country life. It will be yet another nail in the country’s coffin and any government that allows it will be signalling its contempt for country people. The Starmer regime could well offer the ‘Missing Lynx’ their best hope.
