Predators or plant-eaters? Conservationists are divided as to whether wolves or wild cattle will best restore our natural ecosystems. James Fair enters the fray
James Fair is a journalist with a passion for the environment. He specialises in investigating controversial issues, such as badger culling and persecution of birds of prey.
Since it first reached public consciousness in Britain in the mid-2000s, the meaning of the word ‘rewilding’ has been on a bit of a rollercoaster. At first, it was linked to the idea of bringing back predators such as wolves, because, as we began to understand, ecosystems were impoverished where they were absent.
This view was fuelled by the well-publicised but unfulfilled plans of Paul Lister, the owner of Alladale Estate in the Scottish Highlands, to release wolves into a large fenced area of his land. It was reinforced by books, such as Feral by George Monbiot, which argued the case for the importance of predators in our landscapes. Woodlands cannot recover, the argument went, unless we regain native species, such as wolves and lynx, to reduce numbers of deer, whose grazing inhibits tree regrowth.
But, slowly, a different interpretation of rewilding has started to appear. It’s one that says large herbivores are as equally important to rewilding as carnivores because of the way they disturb grasslands and woodlands, creating microhabitats in which a greater diversity of species can flourish.
WHAT DOES REWILDING MEAN?
But what do we mean by rewilding? Well, clearly it requires the recovery of species and habitats, and usually this is achieved by kickstarting top-down natural processes, or ‘trophic cascades’. This is the idea that the action of, say, a predator influences the behaviour of its prey and smaller predators, and so on down the food chain. True rewilding requires minimal human intervention. Many experts and practitioners also emphasise that rewilding can only occur over large areas – hundreds, if not thousands, of hectares. And as Monbiot says in Feral, the goal of rewilding is not creating a particular ecosystem or habitat, it’s the restoration of natural processes.
There are two further things: first, the word rewilding is, at times, misused and applied to conservation projects that don’t merit the term. Secondly, there is a small, but perhaps growing, divide between those rewilders who believe it can only truly happen if we restore top predators to Britain, and those who may like this to happen, but believe the
