Next morning I call the professor back. If he is surprised by my reverential tone – I realise I am actually bowing over the telephone – he does not reveal it. But there is a twinkle in his voice that suggests humour. He is in his eighties now but apparently still busy. Better still, he speaks good English. He listens while I pour out my story, which I tell in a confused rush with little sense of order or economy. How can I convince him that I am basing a whole book around his tiny fragment of golden mole? It must surprise him that a layman had even heard of it, let alone turned it into a quest. He chuckles. There is much he could tell me, he says. Many stories. But does he have the Somali golden mole, Calcochloris tytonis, the world’s rarest known mammal? Ah! Well, of course he doesn’t have it personally . . . But why don’t I come to see him in Florence? Then he can tell me. There are so many stories . . .
It is 9 a.m. on 22 June 2012, a date inked into my diary. We agree to meet in the third week of September. The professor will send me his address. I thank him with near-idiotic profuseness and put some champagne on ice. Florence! Venice alone might beat it as my favourite city, but it would be by only the smallest of margins. If I don’t find the mole, then at least there will be Leonardo, Michelangelo, Boticelli and rare Florentine steak. As it happens, blood, meat and mortality have been weighing heavily on my mind. An old friend has recently died and I have just returned from visiting a slaughterhouse. The two strands of thought have tangled themselves with the mole into an unpickable knot.
We are not clever about death. In the developed world we are living longer than at any time in our species’ history. But the very remoteness of death, and the tidy packaging of it by morticians, means that – also unlike any people in history – we keep it out of sight. Many people will die without ever having seen a dead specimen of their own kind, or even having applied the word ‘death’ to another human. We speak rather of ‘passing away’. The sensitivity extends to pets, which may be posthumously anthropomorphised at special crematoria or cemeteries. But many other animals, of equal or greater intelligence, will have no memorial beyond the thickening arteries of those who have cooked and eaten them. At the slaughterhouse I have spent a morning watching lambs die. They are stunned by electrodes placed across their heads, then have their throats cut. A mechanised conveyor delivers them in a nose-to-tail stream to the slaughterman, who kills them at the rate of one every nine seconds. I follow the whole process from the delivery of live lambs at the lairage gate to the dispatch of dressed carcasses from the refrigerator. Placing logic before emotion, I remind myself that squeamishness is not morality. I belong to a meat-eating society whose gods granted it dominion over all other species – gods, indeed, to whom animals were ritually sacrificed. We kill and we eat. It’s been that way for millions of years, though for all but the last small fraction of that time people were far closer to the bloody realities of what they ate. The act of slaughter was visible and common to every community, not hidden away like it is now. In no century earlier than the twentieth would a writer have experienced as much difficulty as I did in persuading a slaughterhouse to let him through the door.
It made me think about the value judgements implicit in the theme of this book. If someone were to find and kill a living example of Calcochloris tytonis, my anger would burn holes in the page. And yet I accept the deaths of lambs without qualm. What, then, is my moral position? Do I have one? Another awkward question: is it worse to kill a rare animal than it is to kill a common one? Moral philosophers – those who talk about animal rights – would say no. A life is a life, and it is not for us to judge the value of one over another. Indeed, on the utilitarian principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, they might argue that numerical supremacy and moral value marched in lockstep – a dangerous principle in the wrong hands. As I said in Chapter Nine, ‘speciesism’ – the notion that individuals should be favoured or disfavoured purely on the basis of their position on the phylogenetic tree – is abhorrent to them. This plainly rules out any idea of animals as property, which means goodbye to pets as well as to meat on the plate. It means also a moral dilemma wherever the interests of people are in opposition to other species’. Pre-linguistic infants, senile and insensible humans are routinely invoked as proof of our inconsistency. If animals have similar or superior abilities to these, then why do they not enjoy the same moral rights?
It is a neat but ultimately unsaleable argument, best left to the debating society. Perhaps I should be capable of a more enlightened outlook, but I am not. As a leather-shod meat-eater kept clean and healthy by products tested on animals, I have no moral high horse to ride upon. But I don’t believe this should commit me to the outer darkness. Moral precepts are not immune to circumstance. Like everything else in a changing world, they answer to market forces. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the supply of wildlife seemed inexhaustible, it might have been no more unreasonable for Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming to roof his bivouack with an elephant’s ear than for me to grill a cutlet. Adventurers then had a concept of novelty, but no appreciation of rarity or endangerment. How could they? For us, who must wrestle with the consequences of all that humankind has done, these are wholly new ingredients in the moral mix. So I repeat the question: is it worse to kill a rare animal than a common one? Answer: yes. It might not please the anti-speciesists, but most people of uncomplicated view would think it worse to extinguish a species than to snuff out an individual. Like it or not, this imposes a progressive scale of values. Bio-ethics is not immune to the laws of supply and demand. I frankly admit that I would have no interest in Professor Simonetta’s owl pellet if its contents were commonplace.
Saving the savable is the very lodestone of wildlife conservation. What to preserve, how and where to preserve it, are questions that are easier to ask than to answer. It is easy to say what is desirable; much harder to know what is possible. The number of variables – population, fertility, habitat, food supply, climate – make conservation an issue of high risk and complex calculation. It is here that phylogenetic trees might be useful. Like climate models they can tell us something about where we are going as well as where we have been. I have at my elbow a grey slab of academic text bearing the names of eleven distinguished authors from scientific institutions in three continents. ‘Phylogenetic trees and the future of mammalian biodiversity’ has lain on my desk for a month or more, and I can put it off no longer. Today is a rare phenomenon, a day of searing heat in the weird British summer of 2012, when northern Europe played chicken with the jet stream. Out I go into the sunshine to park myself under a maple tree with a notebook, a pink highlighter and a jug of iced elderflower cordial. Outdoor reading has its rituals and its distractions. On a morning such as this, even a largely denatured England seems frighteningly alive. It is one of those days that recalibrates the eye and makes you look afresh at the over-familiar view. There are shades of green here that would have confounded Cézanne. The grass is speckled with daisies and clover; a spider’s thread catches the sun and becomes a tiny laser beam; a brown butterfly tumbles past, as if churned by some hidden current in the still air; a fledgling thrush hops guilelessly into view. There are ants, a bumblebee, the inelegant flap of a woodpigeon moving from beech to ash, the rhythmic chomp of a baler in a hayfield. A ladybird settles on my arm. Banal thoughts sometimes are difficult to resist. I stroll down to the dyke outside my garden, a narrow trickle that feeds a stream that joins a river that flows down to the sea, which, by way of gulf, delta and estuary, joins me to every place on earth. Thus do I now see the brown butterfly, the bumblebee, the ant, the pigeon, the tractor driver, me – all of us rafting on the same river of life, eddying and moving on.
I abandon the aquatic metaphor and return to the branching structures of the phylogenetic tree. By noticing where branches end, or where they divide into twigs, scientists can work out which kinds of species in which kinds of environment are more or less likely to thrive or to diversify. Some of their conclusions would have been no surprise to the hunter-slaughterers of the nineteenth century or to the penitent butchers of the early twentieth. The tropics both literally and metaphorically are the hothouse of mammalian diversity, and – pace Ol Pejeta – concentrations are especially high in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, where they peak at more than 250 species per 100-kilometre square. There are peaks also in Amazonia and, say the authors of ‘Phylogenetic trees’, ‘in an arc running from the Himalayas into south-eastern Asia’. This brings economics into the argument. Is it better to concentrate on areas with a relative abundance of life, relatively easy to protect; or to firefight where life is on the brink?
While a mob of unidentifiable black insects buzzes around my head, I read about ‘sister clades’ – groups of closely related species within a genus. They are most common in genera with high populations and large litters, which may explain why 920 species have ‘mouse’ in their name, and only three ‘giraffe’ (the camelopard itself, plus a seahorse and a catfish). Having few close relatives is a strong indicator of risk. Less surprising is the news that wild mammals tend not to thrive in proximity to humans. The author of Genesis might have been a great stylist but he was no great seer. Dominion we have had for millennia, but we’ve yet to acquire the knack of looking forward with our eyes open. No biblical prophet ever came down from the mountain with a premonition of global warming, or even with any idea that there was a globe to be warmed. Still less did they have any idea of the destructive past. Some 10,000 years before the time of Christ, at the tail-end of the Pleistocene, climate change had already caused a mass wipeout. The species that vanished were mostly large – cave-bear, mammoth, mastodon, smilodon (sabre-toothed cat), woolly rhinoceros, giant beaver, giant sloth and many more, all now represented by stump-ends on the tree. The current mass extinction threatens to be similar. On average, say the authors of ‘Phylogenetic trees’, declining mammals are an order of magnitude heavier than non-threatened ones. Thus the wood mice, which helped fill the void after the disappearance of mammoths, remain secure in their many niches while rhinos have struggled to cling on. The special vulnerability of big animals is pretty obvious. The smallest creature I have ever heard of being shot at was a spider, at which my grandfather (who enjoyed his beer) aimed an airgun so unsteadily that he shot himself in the hand. Hunters on the whole prefer something easier to aim at, so it is the big beasts that have attracted the spears and bullets.
A big animal is a more serious loss to its species than a small one. Megafauna have smaller litters of larger (and so more vulnerable) offspring, which take longer than small animals to mature. A female black rhinoceros, for example, will reach sexual maturity at between four and seven years; a male at between seven and ten. Calves are born singly, after a gestation of fifteen to sixteen months, and then take two years to wean. The birth interval is between two and a half and four years. Now compare a wood mouse. Sexual maturity at two months; gestation twenty-one to twenty-six days; up to four litters a year, four to seven babies each time. Bigger animals also tend to be more specialised in their territory, and to need more of it for each individual, which makes them especially vulnerable to habitat loss as well as to hunting. Specialised habitats also tend to be localised, which puts whole populations at risk. This is why rhinos and elephants can go missing from entire countries.
There is actually a measurable threshold – 3 kilograms – at which the size factor kicks in. This is about the weight of a smallish red fox, the smallest animal regularly hunted for sport. But you only have to look at the Red List to see that smallness is not an absolute defence – at best a tin hat rather than a bomb shelter. Innumerable diminutive species driven from their ranges, out-competed by introduced species or robbed of their habitats, are heading for the cliff edge. Because it is rather easier to prove the non-existence of a large animal than a small one, much of the search effort for highly endangered or possibly extinct species is for animals of less than 3 kilograms. But it’s the big stuff – the wild ox and horse, the thylacine – that gets the most attention.
Near the temple of Wat Phnom in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh stands what many visitors might suppose is a larger-than-life statue of a charging bull. With its huge curved horns and corded musculature, it looks far too big for its tiny railed enclosure, like a shark in a shrimp net. Tourists kneel to get the most dramatic, head-on image of this seemingly mythical monster. Braver souls have taken almost absurd risks to track down the real thing. Giant it may be, but mythical it is not. The kouprey, or wild grey ox, Bos sauveli, is the biggest and most virile of Cambodia’s several national animals. Its short acquaintance with humanity contains all the elements of tragedy and near farcical comedy that can descend on science like moths on a wardrobe. There are times when you can’t see the substance for the holes. Does the kouprey still exist? If it does, is it a bona fide species of genuine scientific value, or some kind of wild/domestic cross-breed of no more than passing interest? Passing, certainly, is the mot juste.
The kouprey is, or was, every bit as imposing as the statue implies. It stands over 6 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs up to 2,000 pounds, or 0.89 imperial tons. It was ‘discovered’ – i.e. brought to the attention of western zoologists – only in 1937, and was believed to range through northern Cambodia and parts of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. An American zoologist, Charles Wharton, managed to film some in 1951 but that, pretty much, was that. The last verified sighting was in the 1960s. Wharton did catch five live specimens in 1964 but the mission ended in disaster when three of them escaped and the other two died.
Cambodia for most of the time since has not been a happy hunting ground, or indeed any kind of hunting ground, for zoologists. The most heroically mad expedition was mounted in 1993 by the daredevil American journalist Nate Thayer, whose apparent blindness to danger earned him comparison with Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Marlon Brando’s crazed maverick in Apocalypse Now. According to an account by two of the participants, Robert K. Brown and Robert MacKenzie in Soldier of Fortune magazine, Thayer led a terrifying twenty-five-strong posse including journalists, jungle trackers, former Khmer Rouge guerrillas, a British photographer, a Thai television cameraman and an Italian expert on camels. Not all the journalists might have passed drug tests, but they did have the foresight to complement their notebooks with walkie-talkies, AK-47s and a rocket-launcher. Together, riding on elephants and eating lizards, they set off into one of the most inaccessible parts of one of the most dangerous countries on earth, successfully tempting exhaustion, illness and the curiosity of the Khmer Rouge. They survived, but not a kouprey did they see. And not a kouprey has anyone seen since.
Worse was to follow. In 2006, scientists from Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, citing DNA evidence from two kouprey skulls, argued that Bos sauveli was not a proper species at all but the bastard offspring of domesticated banteng (another species of wild ox) and zebu cattle (otherwise known as Brahmins, progenitors of Ol Pejeta’s Borans). ‘It is surely desirable,’ said their team leader, ‘not to waste time and money trying to locate and preserve a domestic breed gone wild. The limited funds available should be used to protect wild species.’ This stuck like a thistle in the craw of conservationists who had been trying for decades to find the kouprey, and who now found themselves relegated from legitimate scientific investigators to a mere breed society. This is the great dilemma of the Anthropocene. When man and nature dance together, it is not always clear who leads.
Happily in this case the tune would soon change again. By a miracle of synchronicity, a fossilised kouprey skull suddenly turned up. As is the way with fossils, its age was a bit slippery, probably somewhere between the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, giving it a range of between 5,000 and 125,000 years. But it didn’t matter. As the Northwestern team-leader himself conceded: ‘You can’t have a fossil kouprey skull if the kouprey is a recent hybrid.’ Scientists from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris then did some further analysis and concluded that a female kouprey and a male banteng had mated some time during the Pleistocene, and that it was this – not modern hybridisation – that explained the discovery of kouprey DNA in bantengs. The dancers reversed, Bos sauveli got its status back and a branch high up on the phylogenetic tree stopped quaking.
But the consolation was academic. The kouprey recovered its dignity but not its life. Loss of its forest habitat had taken the inevitable toll. So had diseases transmitted from domestic cattle. But the decisive genetic cleanser was hunting – initially for meat and then, as scarcity ramped up the value, for skulls and horns. The IUCN Red List reports horns for sale at Ban Mai, on the Thai–Lao border, for up to 12,000 US dollars a pair. It is hanging fire on declaring the species extinct, but with no confirmed sightings for nearly fifty years the time cannot be far off. ‘Its extinction, if not yet upon us, is certainly sealed,’ it says.
The death of a newly discovered species is practically a self-fulfilling prophesy. My mind goes back to the Natural History Museum and the ‘new’ Madagascan carnivore, Durrell’s vontsira – largely forgotten since its Warholian fifteen minutes of fame in 2010. When a species escapes detection for as long as this one did, the likeliest explanation is that it is vanishingly rare. So it was with the kouprey. So it is with its near neighbour the saola. Earlier I described it as an antelope, which is what it looks like, but Pseudoryx nghetinhensis is actually closer to cattle. One biologist described it as ‘a cow that behaves like a goat’. When it was discovered in 1992 it was the first previously unknown large mammal to have been found anywhere in the world since the kouprey in 1937 (which in its turn was the first since the okapi in 1901). Its fate is testimony to both the strength and the weakness of human interference. Such is the dominance of Homo sapiens over his environment that the power of gods looks feeble by comparison. Mythology cringes in the shadow of the supreme creator and destroyer. There is nothing ironic in the title of Mark Lynas’s challenging but well-argued book, The God Species. He intended it to be taken literally. In the orthodoxy of the anti-GM, anti-nuclear green mainstream, ‘playing god’ is the ultimate act of hubris by which we will render ourselves into dust. Like other independent thinkers, Lynas, once a powerful voice for the green consensus, now argues the opposite. Playing god, in the sense of being intelligent designers, is essential if creation is not to be irreparably harmed. The earth is out of kilter, but by calculated and cooperative acts of benign intervention we can help it to regain its stability. Essentially, however, we’re talking about damage limitation. Human genius might find some technological fix to the life-threatening problems of climate change and ocean acidification, but – aside from the wilder fringes of scientific fantasy – the evolutionary clock cannot be turned back. We have several very effective ways of exterminating species, but no very effective way of bringing them back. Unlike the kouprey, the saola is still clinging on, but its grip is weak. Numbers already may be so low, says the Red List, that no viable populations remain. Following the kouprey through the limelight and out again, the saola is into the last act before the final curtain.
It is a classic victim of sizeism. Throughout its range in the Annamite Mountains, all species heavier than 20 kilograms have been hard hit. Even animals as commonplace as muntjac, Sambar deer and wild pig are rare here, and wild cattle, elephant and tiger are all but extinct. One way or another it is hunting that has done the damage. Much of it has been straightforwardly for meat. The IUCN reckons that eight million Vietnamese people ‘with the propensity to eat wildlife’ live within 100 kilometres of the saola’s forests. But this is not the only, or even the worst, threat to its existence. The supply line for many of the animal ingredients in Chinese traditional medicines begins here, in these very same forests. Although the saola has no direct role in the Asian or Chinese pharmacopeia, it makes very little difference. The snares are indiscriminate. The cost in lives can only be guessed at, but the IUCN has come up with some figures that hint at their enormity. More than a billion people live in China, and more than seventy million in Vietnam, a vast, proximate and hungry market for animal extracts and body parts, with increasing wealth and a growing population only intensifying the demand. (It is a myth that wildlife trafficking is linked to poverty.) The IUCN concludes that every square kilometre of the saola’s range has snares in it, and that hunting in some areas is so intense that it amounts to ‘many thousands of snare-nights per square kilometre per year’. As stocks of deer, civet and pig far exceed those of saola, hunting will continue until well after the saola is gone. The process is accelerated by logging, farming, road-building and hydropower, all of which are taking large bites out of the forest. In the circumstances, we should perhaps be surprised that any saolas survive at all. Not even captive breeding can stop the rot. Twenty or so have been caught alive, but eighteen of them died and the other two had to be released. Meanwhile, scarcity has only increased the saola’s value as a trophy – in Hanoi as long ago as 2000, horns were being quoted at 600 US dollars a pair. When extinction comes, as it must, there will be a few headlines around the world, but the obituaries for a species few people have heard of are likely to be brief. Like the kouprey, the saola will simply slide off the page and be forgotten.
The word ‘depauperate’ is often used to describe ecosystems that have lost important species. If it applies to Vietnam, then it applies just as much to Britain. This is a source of discomfiture. Environmental politics is bedevilled by the absence of good international role models. The charges of hypocrisy flung at rich countries by the poor are easy to make and hard to refute. Latecomers to the feast are not easily charmed by western nations patting their stomachs and telling others it’s their duty to stay thin. As it is with climate change – do as we say, not as we have done – so it is with wildlife. Having wiped out most of our own, we have found a sudden interest in dissuading others from doing the same. The cause is good, but the glass house is a tricky place from which to launch it.
The last person I heard complain of ‘depauperatism’ was a zoologist trying to make a case for the reintroduction of wolves in Scotland. With Ol Pejeta’s lions and livestock in mind, this might not be as crazy as it sounds. Or not quite. In England the government’s official conservation adviser, Natural England, declares its intention ‘to conserve and enhance the natural environment, for its intrinsic value, the well-being and enjoyment of people and the economic prosperity that it brings’. The language is bland but the idea is radical. That bracketing of natural and human interests would have been anathema to Natural England’s predecessor, the Nature Conservancy Council. For them, ‘people’ were pests to be excluded wherever possible from ‘the wild’. The old way was a powerful force in the polarisation of interests – wildlife versus crops – that characterised the post-war agricultural revolution and guaranteed that there would be more losers than winners. Who would have imagined that the finger-in-the-dyke UK Biodiversity Action Plan would need to include the likes of hedgehog, hare, harvest mouse, skylark, cuckoo and toad? It was unimaginable, but it happened – another fine example for others not to follow. For decades after the Second World War, the countryside suffered under a kind of apartheid – one place for wildlife, another place for man. Displaced by their human oppressors, animals were confined to ghettos where they lost touch with each other. Biodiversity became bioconformity, and nature sank to its lowest ebb since the Ice Age. It was a kind of taxonomic multiculturalism in which a home for one population too often meant the displacement of another, and in which wildlife conservation turned into ambulance-chasing. How can we save the red squirrel? The dormouse? The stone curlew? This was nostalgia – a misty-eyed yearning for the good old days of Ratty and Mole, and for the countryside of Clare and Constable – and nostalgia is no substitute for the kind of clear-headed thinking that will actually put fur on bones. This may look parochial – an English writer bemoaning the state of an industrialised landscape in which a corncrake is about as welcome as a rat in a Pot Noodle factory – but it’s not. The problems are the same wherever in the world man and wildlife clash. You can’t conserve what is not conservable. It was French medics in the First World War who formalised the system of triage, by which they sorted patients by order of need. As it was for men in their field of war, so it is for animals in theirs. There are species that can look after themselves, species that can be saved if they receive the right attention, and species that are beyond hope. On this basis it could – some would say should – be goodbye to the giant panda and goodbye to the red squirrel.
England’s long campaign to preserve the red squirrel from the invading grey has been an exercise in futility. The grey – which, unlike the red, is happy to cross open ground – is better adapted to the altered countryside. It is also bigger, fiercer and wholly illiberal in its attitude to rivals, and carries the squirrel pox virus that kills the red. The Prince of Wales, uncrowned king of the dreamers, wanted the red squirrel to be adopted as the nation’s mascot, and declared that it was ‘absolutely crucial to eliminate the greys’. I once had a conversation about this with the BBC wildlife presenter Chris Packham, who simply pointed through the window to the municipal park opposite, where grey squirrels were swarming through the trees. The questions hardly needed asking. How could you expect to wipe out an entire species? Who would pay for it? How could it be imagined that rescuing red squirrels, which need continuous tree canopy, was simply a question of slaughtering greys?
‘The bigger issue,’ said Packham, ‘is that our countryside is in ruins, and our habitats are in catastrophic decline. You can moon and coo all you like over nursery-book favourites like dormouse and red squirrel, but it won’t bring the countryside back. What it actually does is divert thin resources away from where they would do most good.’ It is a stark truth. Every animal needs its natural habitat. If we can’t provide it, then the species is condemned. This is why animals with narrow ecological tolerances, like red squirrel and giant panda, are at higher risk than generalists of more catholic taste. Historically in Britain, ‘habitat’ has meant a network of small and isolated nature reserves, ecologically fragile and in the long term unsustainable. Even in countryside as hostile as this, you have to think in terms of the landscape as a whole, not just isolated survival bunkers. It is all very well for farmers to join stewardship schemes that pay them for hosting wildlife, but the good intentions remain unfulfilled unless they can form an unbroken chain of neighbouring farms that allows movement across the land. This is a basic principle of the Ol Pejeta model, which encourages migration in and out of the conservancy. The scale may be bigger, but the thinking is the same – a linking of biological storehouses that opens nature’s arteries and circulates the blood, releasing the patients from intensive care. It’s not only animals that have to adapt to change. Wildlife managers sometimes need to revise their thinking too.
The reintroduction of locally extinct species into their original or similar habitats is the alpha and omega of rescue conservation. Again Ol Pejeta leads by example with the black rhinoceros. The reintroduction of scimitar-horned oryx, previously extinct in the wild, into the Dghoumes National Park in Tunisia is another huge international triumph, deservedly accompanied by the sound of trumpets, a perfect demonstration of the value of captive breeding. Good zoos now do not take from nature. They give. There have been many other examples – black-footed ferret in the US, Mexico and Canada; beaver in Sweden; Zanzibar red colobus monkey on Pemba Island, Tanzania; mountain gazelle and Arabian sand gazelle in Saudi Arabia; Arabian oryx in Oman; Przewalski’s horse in Mongolia. They vary in their provenance. Ferret, gazelles and horse were all captive-bred. Monkey and beaver were translocated from the wild. They all breathe gently on the guttering flame – pinpricks of light maybe, but in gathering dark a pinprick shines like a beacon. As I write, a trial reintroduction is under way of beavers in Scotland, the only part of Britain that has much space unoccupied by humans. For years, zoological fundamentalists have had their eyes on it as the perfect place to reintroduce the European lynx and wolf. This is a good illustration of the kind of mess we get ourselves into when we destabilise the fauna. Zoologists remind us that humans in Stone Age Britain were outnumbered five to one by bears, which lingered until some time between the eighth and tenth centuries. Lynx were thought to have become extinct at the beginning of the fourth century, but bone analysis now suggests that they survived in Scotland for another thousand years. The last wolf probably died in around 1700, though there are plenty of legends that place the event earlier or later (according to the most persistent of these, it was killed near Inverness in 1743, allegedly with two local children in its stomach). Without top predators the fauna is incomplete, which is why fundamentalists want to bring them back. But what hope is there? Even the beaver trial took ten years of political campaigning to achieve, and received a sniffy response from farmers who dismissed it as a ‘costly luxury’.
If the vegetarian beaver has had to wait so long for admission, then what chance is there for bear, lynx and wolf? For bear we can confidently answer: none. For lynx we can predict a fair chance, and for wolf at least something on the upside of nil. The case in their favour is that wolf and lynx both do what big carnivores are designed for – they eat herbivores. In Scotland this means deer, which, in the absence of predators, have become a pestilence. In England, too, they are a scourge of crops, woodlands, gardens and cars. No accurate figures are kept, but the best estimate is that deer every year cause 34,000 road accidents in Scotland and 8,000 in England, injuring more than 400 people and killing ten. Despite heavy culling, the combined population of the six resident species – red, roe, fallow, sika, muntjac and Chinese water deer – is heading towards two million, and likely to increase by 10 per cent a year.
But what are we to do about it? Lynx would certainly eat a few, but a few is all it would be. Computer modelling suggests Scotland could support a population of up to 450, which would be enough to boost eco-tourism but not enough to stem the tide of deer. If the lynx is to be reintroduced, then it will have to be for its own sake, not as an organic pest controller. There is a moral and ethical point here. Reintroductions of locally extinct species are allowed under European law only if the original cause of their extinction has been removed. In the lynx’s case this means persecution by humans, which is precisely why zoologists say we have a duty to bring it back, the only meaningful apology for past misdeeds. There is a political consideration too. Unless we restore our own landscape and the animals that belong in it, then where is our authority to lecture Laos and Vietnam on theirs?
Wolf-talk has been going on for decades – zoologists arguing in favour, and Highland sheep-farmers, with common sense on their side, questioning the lupophiles’ sanity. For years the political wind blew the wolf’s house down. It was not even believed that it could have a significant impact on the deer. But the ground shifted when evidence from America’s Yellowstone and other national parks suggested that the predictions had been overly pessimistic. It might take a while, maybe sixty years, but wolves and deer would settle into a balanced predator–prey relationship in which deer would be reduced by more than 50 per cent.
Scientists also tested public opinion. Urban people, who mistakenly thought that the principal risk from wolves was to humans, were slightly more in favour than country folk, who correctly understood that the risk was to sheep, but there was an overall majority in favour of the wolf. The peculiar economics of their industry means that even farmers are not as hostile as they used to be. Without subsidies they would make a loss on every animal sent to market. In the past, when subsidies depended on the number of animals they kept, a lost sheep would mean a direct hit on the farmer’s pocket. But subsidies now are paid simply for grazing the land, regardless of flock size, so a dead sheep is a shame rather than a catastrophe. If you factor in compensation for losses to wolves and profit from eco-tourism, then the issue takes on a different shape. Nevertheless, opinion remains polarised. Some scientists see the wolf as an obligation; others as a step too far. Whichever way the pendulum swings, there is no possibility of its swinging very fast. South of the border, where much of the country gets no closer to a wilderness than the grass on a roundabout, the outlook is different. You would more easily reintroduce the pillory than big carnivores to Middle England. If deer are to be kept down, and if wildlife agencies are to make good their pledge to reverse the degradation of broadleaf woodlands, then they will have to rely on fence and bullet. Another man-made problem, another human tweak.
On a world scale, the Highland wolf hardly registers as an issue. It’s not a rhinoceros, or a snow leopard or a red panda. It’s not threatened by global extinction – for the IUCN it is a species of least concern – and not many people would include it on their list of furry favourites. In fairytale, fable and folklore, only the rat wears a blacker hat than the wolf does. But it’s a useful example because it shows how complex is the reckoning that must be done before an absent species can be put back where humans think it belongs. And it’s a useful provoker of thought. As a top predator capable of maintaining equilibrium between the hunter and the hunted, its ecological function is easy to understand. But there are many other species on the IUCN Red List – threatened, endangered or critically endangered – so obscure, so small or so weird that there is no public awareness or concern for their fate. There will be more about these later. For now, they bind me to my purpose. Apart from myself, Gary Bronner and the man who discovered it, who in the world gives a zalambdodontic molar for the Somali golden mole? Who in the world knows anywhere near enough about the species, the habitats, the ecosystems they think should be saved? Think of the pine marten, another animal persecuted to near-extinction in Britain. It is now seen so rarely that, according to the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, many people think it is a bird.
I have seen la martre in France but never in Britain. A few days ago I did have an encounter with its commoner cousin, the stoat. I looked out of the window and there it was, the ultimate exemplar of sleekness and glossiness, up on its points and curving its trunk with all the grace of a dancer in the limelight. There was no prey for it to chase, and nothing to threaten it, but still the dance went on. A behaviourist might have discerned some purpose in what it was doing, but I could see nothing beyond the sheer joy of uninhibited movement, a joy atavistically shared by an observer made suddenly aware of the pleasures of summer. I stood for a while after it had gone, waiting for it to return but knowing that it wouldn’t.