YOU
don’t have to look far to see the woolly influence of sheep on our
cultural lives. They turn up as symbols of peace and a vaguely
remembered pastoral way of life in our poetry, our art and our Christmas
pageants. Wolves also rank high among our cultural icons, usually in
connection with the words “big” and “bad.” And yet there is now a debate
underway about substituting the wolf for the sheep on the (also iconic)
green hills of Britain.
The
British author and environmental polemicist George Monbiot has largely
instigated the anti-sheep campaign, which builds on a broader
“rewilding” movement to bring native species back to Europe. Until he
recently relocated, Mr. Monbiot used to look up at the bare hills above
his house in Machynlleth, Wales, and seethe at what Lord Tennyson
lovingly called “the livelong bleat / Of the thick-fleeced sheep.”
Because of overgrazing by sheep, he says, the deforested uplands,
including a national park, looked “like the aftermath of a nuclear
winter.”
“I
have an unhealthy obsession with sheep,” Mr. Monbiot admits, in his
book “Feral.” “I hate them.” In a chapter titled “Sheepwrecked,” he
calls sheep a “white plague” and “a slow-burning ecological disaster,
which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than
either climate change or industrial pollution.”
The
thought of all those sheep — more than 30 million nationwide — makes
Mr. Monbiot a little crazy. But to be fair, sheep seem to lead us all
beyond the realm of logic. The nibbled landscape that he denounces as “a
bowling green with contours” is beloved by the British public. Visitors
(including this writer, otherwise a wildlife advocate) tend to feel the
same when they hike the hills and imagine they are still looking out on
William Blake’s “green and pleasant land.” Even British
conservationists, who routinely scold other countries for letting
livestock graze in their national parks, somehow fail to notice that
Britain’s national parks are overrun with sheep.
Mr.
Monbiot detects “a kind of cultural cringe” that keeps people from
criticizing sheep farming. (In part, he blames children’s books for
clouding vulnerable minds with idyllic ideas about farming.) Sheep have
“become a symbol of nationhood, an emblem almost as sacred as Agnus Dei,
the Lamb of God,” he writes. Much of the nation tunes in ritually on
Sunday nights to BBC television’s “Countryfile,” a show about rural
issues, which he characterizes as an escapist modern counterpart to
pastoral poetry. “If it were any keener on sheep,” he says, “it would be
illegal.”
The
many friends of British sheep have not yet called for burning Mr.
Monbiot at the stake. But they have protested. “Without our uplands, we
wouldn’t have a UK sheep industry,” Phil Bicknell, an economist for the
National Farmers Union pointed out. “Farmgate sales of lamb are worth
over £1bn” — or $1.7 billion — “to U.K. agriculture.” The only wolves he
wanted to hear about were his own Wolverhampton Wanderers Football
Club. A critic for The Guardian, where Mr. Monbiot contributes a column,
linked the argument against sheep, rather unfairly, to anti-immigrant
nativists, adding “sheep have been here a damn sight longer than
Saxons.”
More
soberly, the Oxford geographer John Boardman says the uplands, in the
Lake District and elsewhere, have already begun to recover as government
policies encourage alternatives to sheep grazing. “I can see George’s
point and I can see the value of some reforestation,” says Mr. Boardman.
“But what he is proposing isn’t minimal or sensitive change. It’s a
wholesale change, and pretty impractical in terms of public policy.”
Mr.
Monbiot acknowledges the antiquity of sheep-keeping in Britain. But the
subjugation of the uplands by sheep, he says, only really got going
around the 17th century, as the landlords enclosed the countryside,
evicted poor farmers, and cleared away the forests from the hillsides
and moorlands, particularly in Scotland. Britain is, he writes,
inexplicably choosing “to preserve a 17th-century cataclysm.” The sheep
wouldn’t be in the uplands at all, he adds, without annual taxpayer
subsidies, which average £53,000 per farm in Wales.
He
proposes an end to this artificial foundation for the “agricultural
hegemony,” to be replaced by a more lucrative economy of walking and
wildlife-based activities. He also argues for bringing wolves back to
Britain, for reasons both scientific (“to reintroduce the complexity and
trophic diversity in which our ecosystems are lacking”) and romantic
(wolves are “inhabitants of the more passionate world against which we
have locked our doors”). But he acknowledges that it would be foolish to
force rewilding on the public. “If it happens, it should be done with
the consent and active engagement of the people who live on and benefit
from the land.”
Elsewhere
in Europe, the sheep are in full bleating retreat, and the wolves are
resurgent. Shepherds and small farmers are abandoning marginal land at
an annual rate of roughly a million hectares, or nearly 4,000 square
miles, according to Wouter Helmer, co-founder of the group Rewilding
Europe. That’s half a Massachusetts every year left open for the
recovery of native species.
Wolves
returned to Germany around 1998, and they have been spotted recently in
the border areas of Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. In France,
the sheep in a farming region just over two hours from Paris suffered at
least 22 reported wolf attacks last year. But environmentalists there
say farmers would do better protesting against dogs, which they say kill
100,000 sheep annually. Wolves are now a protected species across
Europe, where their population quadrupled after the 1970s. Today an
estimated 11,500 wolves roam there.
Lynx,
golden jackals, European bison, moose, Alpine ibex and even wolverines
have also rebounded, according to a recent study commissioned by
Rewilding Europe. Mr. Helmer says his group aims to develop ecotourism
on an African safari model, with former shepherds finding new employment
as guides. That may sound naïve. But he sees rewilding as a realistic
way to prosper as the European landscape develops along binary lines,
with urbanized areas and intensive agriculture on one side and wildlife
habitat with ecotourism on the other.
In
northern Scotland, Paul Lister is working on an ecotourism scheme to
bring back wolves and bears on his Alladale Wilderness Reserve, where he
has already planted more than 800,000 native trees. He still needs
government permission to keep predators on a proposed 50,000-acre fenced
landscape. That’s a long way from introducing them to the wild, on the
model of Yellowstone National Park. Even so, precedent suggests that it
will be a battle.
Though
beavers are neither big nor bad, a recent trial program to reintroduce
them to the British countryside caused furious public protest. (One
writer denounced “the emotion-based obsession with furry mammals of the
whiskery type.”) And late last year, when five wolves escaped from the
Colchester Zoo, authorities quickly shot two of them dead. A police
helicopter was deployed to hunt and kill another, and a fourth was
recaptured. Prudently, the fifth wolf slunk back into its cage,
defeated.
Rewilding?
At least for now, Britain once again stands alone (well, alone with its
30 million sheep) against the rising European tide.
Richard Conniff is the author of “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.”
