It comes without warning. A black shape shearing out of the sky, a clap of wings like a sail breaking. The foal has no time to startle. Talons hit, the ground shakes, and in the next breath it is gone, dragged upward into the light.
Rewilding is the countryside’s answer to cosplay
This summer on South Uist, a Scottish island in the Outer Hebrides, crofter Donald John Cameron says he lost five Shetland pony foals from his hillside farm, each one vanishing between May and July. He believes they were carried off by white-tailed eagles, reintroduced to Scotland in the 1970s after the species had been hunted to extinction. The foals, he told STV News, were more than livestock: part of his agritourism business and family pets, named by his four-year-old daughter. Scotland’s nature agency, NatureScot, insists there is no direct evidence linking the birds to the disappearances, but has confirmed it is analysing prey remains from nests on the islands.
Eagles in the Highlands may be one thing. But for some, the ambition stretches far further. Every few years, some high-minded committee of zoological fantasists decides that Britain cannot truly be itself until we’ve re-imported something with fangs.
Some enthusiasts aren’t waiting for permission. In the Cairngorms this year, authorities scrambled to trap feral pigs illegally released near Uath Lochans – only weeks after four lynx were dumped in the same area. The National Pig Association warned that Britain’s last swine fever and foot-and-mouth outbreaks began with similarly reckless lapses, while NFU Scotland condemned the releases as irresponsible acts with catastrophic implications for livestock, disease control and rural businesses.
Rewilding, in other words, is no longer just a thought experiment. It is a vision that delights urban environmentalists and alarms crofters, smallholders and farmers in equal measure. Wolves, eradicated from Scotland 300 years ago, are now being pitched as climate policy: researchers from the University of Leeds claim packs could help regenerate woodland and capture a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The price, of course, would be counted not in carbon but in calves, sheep and ponies.
The scientific case usually rests on what ecologists call a “trophic cascade” – the idea that restoring a top predator changes prey behaviour and numbers, allowing vegetation and wildlife to recover. First developed in marine biology, where the loss or recovery of sea otters produced visible effects in kelp forests, it has since been transplanted onto land.
In Yellowstone National Park, the return of wolves in 1995 was hailed as the great terrestrial proof. Early studies suggested wolves reduced elk numbers, which allowed aspen and willow to regenerate, leading to more beavers, more songbirds, healthier rivers. It became a conservation parable, repeated in documentaries, articles and TED talks.
But a 20-year study by researchers at Colorado State University has shown the picture is far more complex. Stream morphology, beaver activity and hunting pressure all shaped Yellowstone’s landscape alongside wolves. The researchers concluded that earlier claims of a neat cascade were “excessive simplifications of a more complex truth”. The case most often cited as proof that wolves can heal ecosystems turns out to be messier, and far less certain, than the headlines promised.
The case for rewilding, then, is never just science. It is also aesthetics – and very old aesthetics. Since the Romantics, Europeans have cast wilderness as sublime and separate from human life, an Eden in which people appear only as noble savages or corrupting intruders. That picture was never true. When settlers entered Yosemite or Yellowstone, they did not find untouched nature. They found landscapes managed for centuries by native peoples: migratory hunting grounds, controlled burns, seasonal agriculture. To make them “wilderness” required expulsion. The myth of wilderness became the justification for removing those who had shaped it.
This is the cultural freight rewilding still carries. Wilderness is not a reality but a prop, a backdrop for exploring the sublime. The BBC’s natural history films reinforce the trope, presenting scrubbed-clean vistas in which pylons, fences and settlements are kept carefully out of shot. Landscapes are judged not by those who live and work in them, but by how well they conform to a pre-lapsarian fantasy.
But this so-called wilderness does not exist in Britain, and has not for thousands of years. Our landscapes are cultural artefacts: oak woods and hay meadows, chalk downs and moorland, all shaped by grazing, coppicing, burning and farming. Archaeologists have found that many of the boundaries we still use today were first laid out in the Roman period or earlier. The lines of fields and roads run on the same axes, carried forward for centuries, evidence of deliberate planning that long predates medieval parishes or manors.
What emerges is not a picture of intrusion but of continuity. The patchwork of roads, hedges and commons that defines this island is not a scar but an inheritance. To pretend wolves or lynx can “restore” a natural order is not just fanciful – it is a category error. There is no Eden to go back to.
For centuries the belief that man had a God-given right to use the world as he saw fit wrought untold harm. It justified extraction, enclosure and exhaustion. What has replaced it is no less deranged: a negative anthropocentrism in which everything wrong in the world is laid at the door of human beings, with the capitalist West seen as uniquely guilty. This is the instinct that animates the progressive left in politics. Just as they sneer at the flag-wavers in Essex, unable to comprehend why such attachments matter, so rewilders sneer at the countryside itself, eager to strip out one vision of England and replace it with another more to their taste.
For rewilders, the countryside can never be accepted as it is: a lived-in, worked-in, deeply historical landscape. It must be scrubbed into a tabula rasa for the rewilding dream, a blank page onto which wolves, eagles and beavers can be sketched. Farmers, crofters, commoners – all reduced to smudges to be erased.
Rewilding is the countryside’s answer to cosplay: a fantasy for metropolitan pilgrims who want the Chilterns to look like Yellowstone. Farmers, meanwhile, are treated as a nuisance – as if keeping sheep were a form of fly-tipping. Try explaining “trophic cascades” to a child staring at an empty paddock. Rural England doesn’t need apex predators. It already has the conservation lobby.
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