Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 112

twenty minutes, the forest began to move again as the bulls hauled
their bulk from the pond then stood on the bank, looking around as
the cows raised their heads from the water, beards dripping, before
backing away through the mud, while the calves jostled, afraid that
they would lose touch with their mothers. Wisent have now been
reintroduced to many parts of eastern Europe, to Germany, Spain, the
Netherlands and Denmark, though in some of these cases they remain
within enclosures, awaiting a wider release. The population has risen
to around 3,000, but, as they are all descendants of just thirteen ani-
mals, the genetic base is dangerously small.
Beavers have been released, at the latest count, on 161 occasions in
Europe. 50 Reduced by 1900 to tiny populations on the Elbe, the
Rhône, in the Telemark district of Norway and the Pripet marshes in
Belarus, their numbers have risen 1,000-fold, to some 700,000. 51
Golden jackals, after being driven out of much of Europe, are now
multiplying in Bulgaria, Hungary and the Balkans, and moving into
parts of Italy and Austria from which they might have been absent
since the Iron Age. (The date of their disappearance is quite specula-
tive, as the fossil and historical evidence is patchy.)
But this ecological revolution, though occurring in almost every
other country in Europe, has left Britain untouched. There are several
reasons. Species such as wolves which can extend their range freely on
the Continent cannot reach these islands unless someone buys them a
ferry ticket. Farmers have been slower to leave the land here than they
have elsewhere: it seems that the further people are from the towns,
the sooner they give up, perhaps because of the sense that life else-
where is passing them by. Few parts of Britain are as far from large
settlements as some of the farmland in Spain and Portugal, southern
France and central and eastern Europe.
But this explains only part of the difference. The contrast between
attitudes to nature in these isles and on the Continent is striking. I
have often been told that Britain is too small and crowded for rewild-
ing, though the same consideration has not stopped the Netherlands,
which has much less land suitable for cultivation. I have also been told
that we cannot afford it; though this has not inhibited Romania or
Bulgaria or Ukraine.
Perhaps Britain is the most zoophobic nation in Europe. We appear