Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 96

task of deciding whether they should live or die. 16 This is a cop-out.
The boar belong to everyone and no one, and we should be allowed
to make a collective decision about what happens to them. It also
ensures that, in most cases, the boar will be culled, without consult-
ation, deliberation or research, because landlords are the group
typically most hostile to the existence of any wild animals, except
those they wish to hunt for sport. Already, boar are being killed here
by the Forestry Commission and other owners at rates that could
wipe them out. Among the commission's justifications is that they
cause 'substantial damage' to woodlands. 17 What does this mean? The
notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers
well below its natural population is nonsensical. What the Forestry
Commission calls damage a biologist calls natural processes.
There might be a means of allaying the hostility even of the most
resistant owners: allowing boar to become the one kind of animal they
value - game. In Sweden, France, Germany, Poland and Italy, a power-
ful lobby now defends the boar out of self-interest. These are the hunters
who stalk them in the woods and shoot them with high-powered rifles.
Their licence fees are used to compensate the farmers whose crops the
boars damage. 18 Licensed hunting in France appears to have trans-
formed the public perception of this species, from agricultural pest to
treasured native wildlife. And there are other, less destructive means of
making money from them. Jenny Farrant, a farmer in East Sussex, first
became aware of the wild boar on her land when they rooted up her
hop bines. 19 Instead of waging war on them, however, she decided to
make use of them, and now sells boar-watching holidays. 20 If the land-
owners now killing them indiscriminately give us the chance, we will
soon come to value and cherish wild boar, just as we might come to
value and cherish most of our once and future wildlife.
The boar I had come to see are one component of the most ambi-
tious rewilding project in Britain. They live on an estate of 10,000 acres
in the Scottish Highlands, purchased a few years ago from the family
of a deceased Italian big-game hunter by an organization called Trees
for Life. This estate, it hopes, will become the core of a great tract of
rewilded land. The project is driven by one of the most singular men
I have met.
Had someone described Alan Watson Featherstone to me and some