Achi news desk-
“He was very clear,” said Macnab, “that he would never support such a reintroduction. We expect the Scottish government to keep that promise. There have been several attempts to get a consensus but nobody has really got a local or political consensus to start considering release. It just hasn’t happened.”
Although there are currently no plans to reintroduce wolves in Scotland, rewilding charity Scotland: The Big Picture is campaigning for a mandate to reintroduce the lynx on trial.
Macnab, who farms at Kildun, near Dingwall, describes any kind proposals to introduce predators “such as lynx, wolves and bear” as “unacceptable” to the NFUS membership of farmers and crofters
“The Scottish NFU remains absolutely clear,” he said, “that any proposals to reintroduce predators such as lynx, wolves or bears are completely unacceptable to Scottish farmers and crofters, and calls on the Scottish Government to a clear statement rejecting offers permanently.
“There has been a lot of noise,” he said, “about wanting predators to be reintroduced. It has caused a lot of stress for our members – and remember that our members are already dealing with the white-tailed eagle, which preys heavily on sheep despite efforts to reverse it. Our aim is to gather evidence now on that and show that they are a real problem and that it is putting farmers out of business. Introducing another predator into the system would be the last straw for many people.”
Norway has a similar system of sheep husbandry to Scotland and five years ago, Macnab said, the NFUS sent a delegation to the country to look at the impact of large predators.
“The year we were out there,” he observes, “the Norwegian authorities paid compensation for 20,000 sheep lost to predators (at current UK values a sheep will average around £100 to £135). Of the sheep killed in Norway, wolverine accounted for around 34 per cent of the losses with lynx, bear and wolf accounting for 21 per cent, 15 per cent and nine per cent of the sheep killed by predation, respectively. ”
Macnab says: “The Norwegians told us that reintroducing predators to our country would be a complete disaster.”
He notes that the European Parliament’s report entitled ‘Resurgence of wolves and other large predators and its impact on farmers and their livelihood in rural areas of Europe’, states that farmers lose 16 sheep for every lynx.
The report, however, also notes that Norway is unique in Europe in having such high levels of predation.
He states: “The very high losses we see in Norway (and partly France and Switzerland) are the result of husbandry systems where sheep graze freely in forest and mountain habitats without fences, shepherds or dogs. to protect them. The fact that neighboring Sweden and Finland have losses per head of sheep that are between one hundredth and one thousandth of what is found in Norway shows the dramatic effect of removing livestock from natural habitats and keeping them on fields or other fenced pastures close to farms.”
Pro-wolf campaigners, such as Derek Gow, say the style of sheep farming in Scotland may have to change if the species is reintroduced.
Macnab notes that the high voltage fences used to stop wolves in some countries would “affect the right of responsible access under the Scottish Open Air Access Code, tourism, the environment, biodiversity”.
What happens in the European Union is also carefully watched by NFUS. Over the last half decade, the wolf has been ‘strictly protected’ – and its numbers across the block have risen by 1,800% from almost expiring in the 1960s, to 20,300.
But last year the European Commission presented a proposal that would allow them to change the EU’s protection status from ‘strictly protected’ to ‘protected’. It was said that this would allow more flexibility for management to address the ‘challenges caused by the increasing numbers of the wolf’.
The move came in the wake of the killing of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s pony in September 2022. It was found, through DNA tests, that her killer, a mature male wolf, had been linked to the deaths of around 70 sheep, horses. , cattle and goats.
Last year, Therese Coffey, the UK Secretary of State for the Environment at the time, assured English farmers that the UK Government would not support the reintroduction of predators.
“The farmers and crofters of Scotland,” said Macnab, “deserve similar assurances. Despite the speculation in the media, we remind our members that there is nothing yet equivalent to an application for release in Scotland. Should that ever happen, the process for securing permission for a trial release of any predator is long and complex and any application will be subject to considerable analysis and controversy.
“In our opinion, despite numerous efforts, there has never been a local or political consensus for such relief. Farmers and crofters in Scotland can be confident that the Union, as a member of the Reintroduction Forum National Species of Scotland, taking all that is necessary. steps to ensure that their interests are protected should a formal application ever be made.”
