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The head of the government’s wildlife regulator has said he remains enthusiastic about reintroducing lynx to Britain and would be “absolutely delighted” if it could be achieved during his two-year term.
But Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England, said debates over the animal’s release were “still quite polarised” and more engagement was required to understand how communities would be affected.
The Lynx UK Trust has submitted a draft application for a trial return of lynx to England’s largest forest, Kielder, in Northumberland, using wild animals rescued from culls in Sweden.
The charismatic but elusive labrador-sized cats live in forests and prey mainly on deer or rabbits, posing no threat to humans.
The species was hunted to extinction in Britain, finally disappearing from Scotland in the middle ages. By the 1950s there were barely 700 Eurasian lynx left in Europe, but in recent decades the population has bounced back to 18,000, boosted by a reduction in persecution and successful reintroductions to areas of Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and other countries.
Natural England officials have told the Lynx UK Trust that a trial reintroduction cannot proceed because the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) rules it illegal under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act.
According to the trust, this could be solved with a simple statutory instrument – a legal tweak – but the charity’s chief executive, Paul O’Donoghue, said Steve Reed, the environment secretary, had not responded to attempts to arrange a meeting despite giving an initial warm response. O’Donoghue said that if the government would not review the trust’s application for a licence for a trial release, it would launch a court challenge.
Asked if he believed lynx could be reintroduced, Juniper said: “It should be looked at and I know people are looking at it.” He said he hoped that “a cross-border conversation with colleagues in Scotland” could boost prospects for the return of the species.
“Lynx do need big areas of habitat and there could be some opportunities to combine nature recovery over parts of northern England with what’s going on in southern Scotland,” he said. “It is still quite polarised and some of these things will remain divided no matter how much effort you put in, but we need more engagement to understand how communities that would be living with these animals would be able to continue with what they do. There are in some places still serious doubts about that.”
O’Donoghue said calls for more engagement were a waste of time and money. “Unless he has been living under a rock for the past 30 years, Tony Juniper must know that sheep farmers will never change their position on lynx reintroduction, making more calls for more engagement utterly futile,” he said. “The sad and stark truth is that currently the government are actively blocking any legal attempt at lynx reintroduction.”
As well as the draft application from the Lynx UK Trust, two other charitable collaborations are conducting consultations over lynx reintroduction. The Missing Lynx Project is exploring the feasibility of reintroducing the carnivore to Kielder, while the Lynx to Scotland partnership last month produced a 100-page report after consulting 53 stakeholders including farmer interests about a potential return to the Cairngorms.
The report identified potential conflict between lynx and sheep farmers and recommended payments for losses and coexistence, as well as a funded rapid-response system for farmers experiencing sheep predation. Any reintroduction in Scotland requires approval from the Scottish government after another public consultation and ecological assessments.
Four lynx were illegally released in the Cairngorms in January, with one dying and three females recaptured and rehomed at the Highland Wildlife Park. Rogue rewilders were blamed, but the animals were tame and many believe they were simply released from a private collection.
O’Donoghue said the Kielder reintroduction area in England – where Lynx UK Trust had an application declined in 2018 – would be ideal, offering the spacious landscape that most benefits lynx in a forest environment with relatively few sheep-farming interests.
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“I have no idea why the government are so scared of lynx. Lynx have naturally recolonised countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands with great celebration and no issues,” he said. “Lynx are proven drivers of both economic and ecological restoration. They would generate millions of pounds every year to the local economy in Kielder, providing both green, sustainable jobs and improving the health and resilience of forest ecosystems. In Germany, a reintroduction in the Harz mountains has been so successful that a second reintroduction is now planned in Bavaria.”
Juniper agreed that lynx reintroductions such as that in Harz had boosted regional economies with lynx-related tourism. Juniper also sits on the board of the Fauna & Flora charity, which has projects helping Romanian farmers coexist with the wolf and bear.
Juniper said: “It’s not so much about the ecology of whether these animals would have enough to eat or whether they’d have a big enough home range, it’s much more about the social conditions that they arrive in and the attitudes of the communities that would live with them. And so we probably do need to do some more work there to be able to get to that point. But that’s work in progress and people are working on that and Natural England is talking to those folks who are doing some of that work.”
Asked about a potential legal challenge over the latest lynx reintroduction application, a Defra spokesperson said: “This government is absolutely committed to restoring and protecting nature and we support species. We will continue to work with Natural England on species reintroductions in England.”
It is understood that the government wants more evidence of the effects of the management of large predators before any reintroduction is considered.
O’Donoghue said: “The fact that the UK is one of the only countries in the world without an apex predator should be a source of huge shame for the government. We are in a biodiversity crisis. It is time for the greenwashing and needless conversations to stop and for real actions to occur.
“It really is a no-brainer. Lynx are the perfect predator to reintroduce as they pose zero threat to humans yet provide so many societal benefits.”
