Fears of ‘rogue rewilding’ in Scottish Highlands after further lynx sightings
Fears of ‘rogue rewilding’ in Scottish Highlands after further lynx sightings
Environmentalists condemn unauthorised releases as ‘reckless’ and ‘highly irresponsible’
For a brief moment this week, lynx have been roaming the Scottish Highlands once again. But this was not the way conservationists had hoped to end their 1,000-year absence.
On Wednesday, Police Scotland received reports of two lynx in a forest in the Cairngorms national park, sparking a frantic search. That episode ended in less than a day. Both animals were quickly captured by experts from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and taken to quarantine facilities at Highland wildlife park.
Yet their delight at a successful operation was short-lived. Early on Friday morning, the RZSS’s network of wildlife cameras caught two more lynx in the same stretch of forest, near Kingussie. The baited traps were redeployed and its specialists went hunting again, before the additional lynx were safely captured at about 6.30pm.
It's the only way beavers were reintroduced.
If you don't want people doing this, don't require millions of pages of paperwork and 50 year consultations to do it legally.
It's weird how ecologies are delicate and require study and very small changes. But yeah if coping with those changes and consulting with experts is too much, then your plan of "do whatever ya like as it's too annoying to work with others" sounds like a great alternative.
They're native to this environment though. Unless you mean the ecology of farms, farms, and more farms. Made and run for the purpose of profit and nothing else. Then yeah, fuck that ecology, release the lynx. Particularly given the genocidal history of the area and its owners.
As far as I can tell the only real opponents to this are the NFU, who are basically just a mafia of rich landowners cosplaying as a farmers union in order to suppress wages for real farm workers and protect the inequality of land distribution.
If you asked a real farmer whether he would be up for getting compensated - even at market value - if one of his sheep was eaten by a lynx he would say "yes, it would save me the bother of rounding up the sheep and taking it to market therefore making it more profitable. Plus I already lose sheep to people's pet dogs. What is the difference?"
Anyway, sheep farming is the least economically viable form of agriculture in the known universe. As an industry it is basically just an expensive national hobby.