Wild

Wild is the new buzz word in environmental circles. Robert McFarlane has written about The Wild Places, Jay Griffth described searching for the Wild, Cheryl Strayed walked the Pacific Crest Trail in another Wild, and George Monbiot's latest book, Feral is a call for 'rewilding' the least populated areas of Wales and Scotland by re-establishing lost fauna such beavers, lynx, wolves and even bears. He argues that the destruction of the large animals that topped the food chain altered the balance of the ecosystem and, along with the use of land for cultivation, (over)grazing, grouse and deer moors, 'nature reserves' and other forms of human activity, has produced an artificial and unhealthy environment. Rewilding would mean that large tracts of empty countryside would be left to revert to nature and to regain a natural balance without any conservation or interference. Re-introducing long-gone indigenous fauna would eventually produce an ecosystem in which predators and prey would reach a homeostasis and the wider world of plants and invertebrates would benefit in turn. (For example even the faeces and corpses of larger animals are valuable lower down the food chain.)

These ideas are visionary and hugely contentious. Is it really possible to turn around centuries of human impact? It is thought that there has been no original wildwood in this country since before the Romans came. Agriculture, settlement, transport and industry have created the landscape we know and love, for better or worse. However, there are already projects in many parts of Britain and Europe to remove coniferous plantation and allow native trees to regenerate, to allow unused agricultural land to revert to a natural flora, to re-establish beavers and even wolves. Wild boar and red kite are already thriving in some parts of the UK. (As are the less indigenous species such as American crayfish, mink and parakeets...)

It's probably too late for the Scottish wild cat. There are said to be only 35 pure bred individuals left in the wild, the gene pool having hybridized with feral and domestic cats like these two, doing their best to pretend to be Wild Things.