Simon Barnes: bring back the cat

Simon Barnes: bring back the cat
Simon Barnes
If it’s difficult to convey the excitement of seeing some marvellous animal out there in the wild, it is even harder to explain the thrill of not seeing one.
Nevertheless, I’ll have a bash. I was in southern Spain, in the Coto Doñana national park, a rich and splendid spot, and the undoubted star is the world’s most endangered big cat, the Iberian lynx.
The sensation of looking out over the wild landscape and knowing that here in Europe, in a place where a cerveza was only a few miles away, there are eagles, vultures and wild boar, and that among them is a large and charismatic carnivore, and, what’s more, one with tufty ears ... well, it was something to savour.
Then, early one morning, we found fresh tracks, sharp and clear in the sand, as yet unblurred by the wind: a lynx had passed here within the hour. I was within 60 minutes of seeing a lynx. The entire trip was justified.

So let’s have them back in Britain.

There is a growing lobby in favour of this deeply thrilling possibility. Now it’s a commonplace among conservationists, particularly after a cerveza or few, to talk wildly and gleefully of massive reintroductions of huge and dangerous predators. Bears and wolves tend to be high on the list when it’s time for last orders.
But it’s when this sort of talk starts to acquire practical shape that the real craziness comes in. It is an irrefragable fact of life: nobody is ever rational about predators. The bigger the predator, the madder people get.
I can’t claim that the late-night chats about the desirability of bears rampaging around Scotland are entirely sane — still less the thought of introducing them to, say, East Anglia or Streatham Common. But the kneejerk response from everybody else is likely to be just as irrational — and in the other direction.
They’ll eat sheep, they’ll eat hikers, they’ll eat babies, they’ll destroy the ecology, they’ll eat all the grouse and/or pheasants, and, besides, they’re big and fierce and scary. Which is precisely why we like them. Our relationship with big predators is based on contradiction.
But there used to be lynx in this country — the Eurasian species hung on into medieval times. It wasn’t so much direct persecution that got rid of them as the loss of forests: lynxes are sneaky ambush predators and need trees to hide behind.Wolves lasted centuries longer because they hunt in packs across open country: they actively prefer pursuit to ambush.
Since the beginning of the last century, many big areas of the country have been reforested. In many of these places you can find roe deer and red deer: roes and the calves of reds are the natural prey of lynx. David Hetherington calculated, in British Wildlife magazine, that the Scottish Highlands could hold a population of 400 lynx, with another 50 in the southern uplands.
Lynx reintroduction is not mere fantasy. It has been done across Europe — Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia. It is a valid option, and lynxes won’t even eat many sheep because we don’t keep sheep in forests in this country.
All reintroductions are controversial, and the fiercer the animal is, the more controversial it becomes. But the enormous white-tailed sea eagle was reintroduced in the face of fervent opposition and has become a local and national asset, a great bringer of visitors and, therefore, money, and a bird of great joy for all who see or even know about it.
Meanwhile, the M40 has become a place of beauty with the reintroduced red kites, which love to cruise above it.
Reintroductions are difficult and complex logistically, but they can be done. It’s the people side that is the difficult matter. So let’s try to be calm about lynxes. They are not big like lions and tigers; they can get above 4ft in length, and get close to 2ft 6in at the shoulder. Compact, powerful, effective, but not a threat to people.
They are hard to see, being nocturnal, solitary and secretive. They are more or less silent as well, so if we did reintroduce lynxes, they would pretty well vanish. All most of us would ever see is the occasional pawprint. But think about the joys of not seeing a lynx. Imagine being where lynxes are. Imagine walking in lynx country, spending time in the land of the lynx. This is a powerful thought. It touches our deep nostalgia for a wilder way of life; it niggles us in those hidden places where we feel sudden surges of impatience with city life.
Lynxes haven’t made it deep in our folklore. Little Red Riding Hood had no fear of lynxes, and Goldilocks didn’t visit the Three Lynxes. The lynx has always had its being in invisibility. Besides, people got rid of lynxes much earlier.
But the fact remains that it would be easier to have lynxes back than any other large carnivore. There is a real sense in which these exoticisms would fit in. And imagine walking in the Highlands and coming across the pawprint of an enormous cat, and then knowing — and better than knowing, understanding — that out there, in our over-tame and over-controlled land, there were great cats skulking, breeding and ambushing; the cat that walks by himself, out in the wild wet woods waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. The Times: 26th September 2009