There are lots of wolves in fairy tales. The Three Little Pigs, Peter and the Wolf, Red Riding Hood and so on. In these stories, our ancestors, who were a lot closer to wolves than we are, perpetuated a rather negative wolf stereotype. Modern wolf fairy stories are very different. They are written by people far removed from wolves, and invariably the wolf is the hero.
A new fairy story has just been published by researchers based at Leeds University. In this the hero is not the woodcutter who saved the admittedly rather dim Little Red Riding Hood from the big, bad wolf. In the Leeds fairy tale it is the wolf that saves us all from global warming. You may have seen it. The story got lots of coverage in the press and social media. Even the Times announced that wolves could save 5% of the CO2 expected to be saved by the UK's forests by 2050.
Just to be clear. The fairy tale is being referred to as research. In fact it is modelling. That is different. It is the difference between keeping a pig and making a sausage. The pig takes a lot of hard and often challenging work. To make the sausage you put some stuff in a machine and see what comes out the other end.
What came out of the modellers machine was that if you let wolves out in 12,000 sq km of the Scottish Highlands you would get a completely different landscape, and that landscape would sequester 100 million tonnes of CO2. They went further and gave a cash value to this, and calculated that each wolf would be worth £154,000 annually. Luckily that is as far as they went. They didn't model the benefits for the NHS or Secondary Education, or the wolves might have become unaffordable.
The simple expedient of combining climate change, carbon cash and wolves in the same sentence created a great opportunity for PR. The news that letting out a few wolves will solve all our problems went round the world in seconds. It has taken hold, people believe it, after all it was in The Times. Unfortunately for the people who live and work in the real countryside, and who care about our existing landscapes and wildlife, the whole thing is nonsense.
What is claimed is that if you fenced off four huge and complex parts of the Highlands, and released wolves into them, they would eat the red deer, and once the deer population density dropped below the magic 4/sq km, trees would spring up. At some point in the next hundred years the trees would form largely closed canopy forests over the 12,000 sq km. The trees would sequester carbon at one million tonnes per annum and at the end of 100 years 100 million tonnes of carbon would be sequestered.
To make the story even better media fodder they divided the amount of carbon they guessed might be sequestered, by the number of wolves they guessed might do the trick, and multiplied the answer by the value of a carbon credit, to give a notional annual value to a wolf - £154,000. This, according to them, might hopefully encourage landowners to support wolf reintroduction.
The whole thing is pointless nonsense for several reasons, but the simplest is the fact that the authors are very clear that all their calculations are based on the assumption that the wolves do not disperse. They treat the landscape, and the wolves, as though the whole thing is surrounded by a wolf-proof fence. To be fair they do admit that this is a problem, but that is hidden deep in the text and even the eagle-eyed journo at the Times failed to spot it, or if they did, they did not realise its significance.
Without the fence, and, just to be clear, the fence is impossible, there is no hope whatsoever that the wolves would stay put. Why would they? They are forest animals and go where the best hunting is. Long before they got the poor deer down to the desired level, hunting would be getting harder and the prospect of better hunting on new ground would be irresistible. You can add to that young wolves or sub-dominant mated pairs are driven out of the pack or leave voluntarily. These individuals will travel hundreds of miles in search of new hunting grounds where they can start a new pack. So without the fence, and there can be no fence, a dispersing wolf could be in Melrose in a week.
There is another fundamental problem. The whole thing is theoretical. A lot of the belief that wolves are landscape engineers stems from a video by George Monbiot that creates the impression that the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the USA has resulted in exhausted grassland reverting to forest by the simple expedient of the wolves eating the elk that ate the trees. Obviously, wolves could do the same in Scotland, couldn't they?
Well they might, if the Yellowstone story was all it's cracked up to be. Unfortunately, it's not. If the paper is correct, and in just 20 years a population of around 160 wolves can trigger the conversion of thousands of square kilometres of open moorland to forest, you would expect the 30 year-old wolf population in Yellowstone to have had a similar effect. Indeed we are regularly led to believe that it has. Surely, the rewilders wouldn't knowingly mislead? Would they?
In the late 1970's there was a view that the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd was too big. As a result a late spring season was established to allow human hunters to kill female elk with the specific intention of reducing the herd. In 1996 wolves were reintroduced, whilst at the same time bears and cougar populations increased. As a result of these pressures, plus severe summer drought, and heavy winter snow, the number of elk in the northern herd dropped from around 17,000 to a low point of around 4,000 in 2013. The late spring hunt was ended in 2010, and by 2020 the population appeared to stabilise around 6-7,000.
It is important to understand that human hunters have consistently taken more elk from the northern herd than the wolves have, and that there were large numbers of grizzly and black bears, cougars, lynx and coyote preying on elk calves, and sometimes adult elk, throughout this period. It is therefore questionable how much of the impact can be apportioned to the wolves.
But more important in the context of the paper, and it's claim that around 160 wolves will lead directly to the establishment of a climax forest and the capture of 100 million tons of CO2, is the reaction of the vegetation, which according to the rewilders narrative was spectacular.
Here is what the researchers in Yellowstone, rather than wolf promoters in Leeds, say are the results of 30 years of wolf predation, aided by humans, and a suit of apex predators.
'There is some indication that elk-carnivore interactions are contributing to a release of willow and other woody vegetation', and, 'The proportion of browsed aspen, cottonwood and willow has decreased in some areas during recent years. Others argue that the lower densities of elk over the past two decades – resulting from the combined effects of predators (wolves, cougar, bears), human hunters, and weather – has necessarily altered the impact of elk browsing'.
Hardly a ringing endorsement, some indication, and some areas. Really? Is that it? Is that what thirty years of wolf predation gets you? Sorry, we got that wrong. Is that what thirty years of wolf, bear, cougar and human predation get you?
The idea that releasing wolves into the Scottish Highlands will trigger a forest to grow where the forests largely died out naturally thousands of years ago, when 30 years of wolf predation in Yellowstone has resulted in an impact as meagre as a proportion of some willow, in some areas might be less browsed, is frankly farcical. It makes a wolf pretending to be a sick grandmother look believable.
At what point do we say enough is enough. The land they are talking about belongs to people, don't they have a say? The landscapes they want to trash are beautiful and loved, does that not count for anything? The Highlands are the most biodiverse region in the country, and conservationists from Europe and the US are utterly dumbfounded that the plan is to wreck it.
Now we have a ridiculous piece of modelling that a child could see can never approximate to reality, but which, because it suits the re-wilders narrative will pollute every conversation from now to Doomsday. Thanks a lot.