The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 223

word 'vermin' to describe our native wildlife. Instead they say
'unwanted, invasive species'. They seek to suppress nature, to prevent
successional processes from occurring, to keep ecosystems in a state
of arrested development. Nothing is allowed to change: nature must
do as it is told, to the nearest percentage point. They have retained an
Old Testament view of the natural world: it must be disciplined and
trained, for fear that its wild instincts might otherwise surface.
The result is back-to-front conservation. Wildlife groups seek to
protect the animals and plants that live in the farmed habitats of the
previous century, rather than imagine what could live there if they
stepped back. They take a species like the red grouse, or a club moss
or a micromoth, which happens to thrive in a place that has been
greatly altered by humans, and they build their management plans
around it, seeking to keep the land in the state which best secures its
survival. In doing so, they shut down the opportunities for other spe-
cies to establish themselves, either naturally or by reintroduction.
Sustaining the open, degraded habitats of the uplands means keeping
sheep. It does not seem to matter whom you talk to in the hilly parts of
Britain: farmers, government officials and wildlife groups will all tell
you that the answer is sheep - what was the question? If you challenge
their management of the land they invariably invoke the horror of
'undergrazing'. But how can a native ecosystem be undergrazed by a
ruminant from Mesopotamia? Is our wildlife under-hunted by Ameri-
can mink? Are our streamsides under-colonized by Himalayan balsam,
our rivers under- infested by red signal crayfish, our verges under- occupied
by Japanese knotweed? It is a nonsensical concept.
Even the grazing of cattle or horses in the uplands, which some con-
servation groups characterize as the benign alternative to sheep,
means maintaining habitats that would not exist without us. During
the Boreal and Atlantic periods, when warm, wet weather returned to
northern Europe, the giant aurochs, or wild cow, appears to have been
a forest animal. Analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in its
bones shows that it lived on woodland plants. Domestic cattle, by
contrast, from their first appearance in northern Europe, largely ate
grass, growing in clearings created by people. The chemical differ-
ences are so discrete that they can be used to distinguish the bones of
wild cattle from the bones of domestic cattle. 31