The notion that wolves might be reintroduced to Ireland has been sporadically controversial since Green Party leader Eamon Ryan floated the idea in 2019.
This week, Green Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity Pippa Hackett said she would not be against the idea but stressed there were “certainly not” any moves to bring forward the policy. Ireland’s ecosystem “isn’t yet capable of coping with wolves” and the animals would “all be shot” if they were reintroduced, she explained in an Irish Times interview.
Killian McLaughlin, founder and director of Wild Ireland in Co Donegal, which is home to a number of wolves, suggests a better way of phrasing the question of whether or not wolves should be introduced would be to ask: “Do we have a choice?”
“Should we continue the way we’re going, or should we seriously consider the consequences of the way our practices as humans are taking the earth? And are we prepared to live with those consequences? And if we’re not, then we should seriously look at how we start undoing the damage that has been done over the last 300 years,” he says.
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“It’s not even 300 years since we had wolves in this country ... 1786 was the last wolf, which really isn’t that long ago, but it’s only now we’re starting to see the negative effects of not having a top predator in the ecosystem.”
McLaughlin likens an ecosystem to a car, saying that a car needs lots of different pieces to run properly, and if even one or two parts are taken out, then the car “will basically fall apart”.
“Wolves would have been a really, really important part of that ecosystem, or a really important part of that car, and when we took them out, all the other parts went out of balance. That’s why we’re seeing high deer numbers, we’re seeing deforestation caused by deer overeating.”
There are also less-obvious impacts to there being no wolves in Ireland, such as foxes becoming the largest predator in the ecosystem, which has a negative knock-on effect on ground-nesting birds such as curlews and corncrakes, McLaughlin says.
He believes the ecosystem cannot sustainably continue without the top predators, and if people are serious about their futures and their grandchildren’s futures, then they must look at the ecosystem in its entirety, including wolves.
“I’m proposing a sustainable ecosystem recovery with an alpha predator as a part of that ecosystem; that’s the most sensible option.”
Although he understands farmers’ fears for the safety of cattle and sheep, McLaughlin claims “those fears are kind of unfounded in most of the world. Where wolves are, people are still able to farm alongside them.”
Another location which is home to wolves is Dublin Zoo. Marc Enderby, assistant curator and European breeding programme co-ordinator for the grey wolf pack there, declined to say whether or not he believes wolves should be reintroduced. But he said in theory the reintroduction could improve landscape and waterways.
“Wolf presence will actually keep deer numbers down and actually keep deer populations a lot healthier.
“At the minute, there’s no predation on deer, particularly in Ireland and the UK, and so those herds don’t have anyone to predate on them, so they become quite sickly and the overall health of that herd is quite low because sickly animals are lasting longer.
“Wolves would actually predate on those easier animals, the sick, the old, and it would improve deer in terms of health, but it would also mean that numbers of deer are kept low and they would not stay in one place for any length of time,” Enderby says.
However, one challenge that could be faced is dispersal rate of wolves, Enderby adds.
“Say if you were to release them in the middle of Ireland, you would have them outside Dublin within a couple of years, newly formed packs, because that’s how quickly they disperse. So there would be massive challenges there, politically and ethically, it’d be huge. We’d have to change a lot. I don’t know how feasible it is.”
Lucy O’Hagan, founder of Wild Awake Education, says Ireland is not ready to bring back wolves because there needs to be a greater process of “decolonising ourselves culturally and socially” before that can happen.
There would need to be good community engagement for people to identify with the need for their return, or they will simply be killed, she says.
Hackett too said any process to reintroduce could only be decades away, and would require engagement with farmers.
Manchán Magan, author of Wolf-Men and Water Hounds: The Myths, Monsters and Magic of Ireland, says that Ireland does not have enough wilderness, biodiversity and national parks to support the reintroduction of wolves at present.
“We’re in a time where sheep farmers who are getting older and gradually look like they’re being phased out, they’re in a time of feeling under great threat and fear of their livelihood.”
However, Magan believes the reintroduction of wolves should be aimed for in future, saying farmers in other countries have managed to work around such predators.
“The beauty is, they will prey on the weakest of the animals, the animals that are most likely to have Lyme disease or TB, the deer or whatever other animals they’re going after.
“It would really help actually to have these apex predators, the wolves and the lynx, who would be, in theory, preying on the deer and the feral goats and the other animals that are really going to damage the cereal and tillage farmers and crops, rather than the cattle and the sheep farmers.”
McLaughlin concludes:
“The arguments for not reintroducing them don’t have much scientific findings or they’re not backed up by any studies or any evidence, whereas the arguments for reintroducing them are backed up by thousands of studies and scientific opinions about how good they are for the ecosystem.
“The ecosystem existed for millions of years, and the way it was, it works, it doesn’t need us to manage it. We have managed it in a negative way, where we’ve taken out lots of elements from that ecosystem and now we’re expecting it to do what we want it to do.
“So yes, it might be an inconvenience for farmers in the short term to have wolves back, but the long term implications would ... be a lot more inconvenient. They won’t be able to farm at all because of climate change, and all these negative things are happening without having a healthy ecosystem.”
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