For a brief moment this week, lynx have been roaming the Scottish Highlands once again. But this was not the way conservationists had hoped to end their 1,000-year absence.
On Wednesday, Police Scotland received reports of two lynx in a forest in the Cairngorms national park, sparking a frantic search. That episode ended in less than a day. Both animals were quickly captured by experts from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and taken to quarantine facilities at Highland wildlife park.
Yet their delight at a successful operation was short-lived. Early on Friday morning, the RZSS’s network of wildlife cameras caught two more lynx in the same stretch of forest, near Kingussie. The baited traps were redeployed and its specialists went hunting again, before the additional lynx were safely captured at about 6.30pm.
As far as I can tell the only real opponents to this are the NFU, who are basically just a mafia of rich landowners cosplaying as a farmers union in order to suppress wages for real farm workers and protect the inequality of land distribution.
If you asked a real farmer whether he would be up for getting compensated - even at market value - if one of his sheep was eaten by a lynx he would say “yes, it would save me the bother of rounding up the sheep and taking it to market therefore making it more profitable. Plus I already lose sheep to people’s pet dogs. What is the difference?”
Anyway, sheep farming is the least economically viable form of agriculture in the known universe. As an industry it is basically just an expensive national hobby.