Well, so this is Conservation and Science Podcast, where we take a deep dive into topics of ecology, conservation and human-wildlife interactions.
And I'm Tomasz Serafinski and I always try to bring you diverse perspectives on every environmental story, which means that sometimes on this podcast you may hear voices and
opinions that you're not necessarily agreeing with.
And that's okay, because this is how the progress is made.
And I'm doing that because I think we need more communication and understanding and less
fighting and division general in life not only in conservation, but we dealing with conservation here and today we're gonna drive right into one of the hotly contested
subjects, which is coexistence of large carnivores and existence with them and Our guest is once again, Johnny Hanson Johnny.
Welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much.
Sorry.
It's great to be back on
The show, know, of all the podcasts that I have been on since I was last on this one, yours is definitely the most recent one.
Johnny previously was on the episode 185.
So if you listen to this one, you can go back and listen to the previous episode if you want more large carnivore goodness.
What episode is this, What are we on now?
This one.
This one?
I think it is going to be 190.
six maybe seven.
Wow.
Yeah.
You know, I'm recording that well in advance to release.
So it's a tricky question.
It's a tricky question.
It's going to be at the 200 mark.
Congratulations.
It's going to be a big one.
200.
Yeah.
I'm gearing up to record, do something special for this.
So anyway, like we spoke the last time, Johnny, you have a book out and folks who are watching this.
not only listening, here's the cover of the book titled Living with Links and by the way, if you're watching this, you can watch it on YouTube and Spotify also on Spotify and if
you're listening, if you're only listening to this you're not gonna lose much you're just not gonna see our handsome faces talking and the cover of the book Johnny, I gotta start
with like what's up with the title?
Living with links, but the book is about so much more than just links.
Well, firstly, everybody loves a bit of alliteration.
So living with links just has a nice ring to it.
Secondly, we had actually previously called the book coexistence, but some of the feedback we were getting was that that term, which we had actually put a definition off inside the
front page.
I suppose if you feel you need to define something, you're assuming people won't understand it.
So the consensus was it was maybe a bit too technical.
And coexistence is about living with Lynx.
It's about sharing landscapes with big cats, wolves and bears.
So we wanted to make the book title a bit more what it's doing, what it says on the tin kind of thing.
But you're right.
It's about multiple species.
It's about sharing landscapes with large carnivores.
It's also about sharing landscapes with each other, which is what you've just said in the introduction to this podcast.
But in practical terms, Lynx are the most likely species to be reintroduced, certainly to Britain.
probably to Ireland, although whether that's a reintroduction is something we'll probably discuss later.
And as recent events have shown in this year, the topic has moved from something that's theoretical to something that's on the ground.
And I'm talking about the illegal release of, of Lynx in Scotland.
So this topic is, it's alive and kicking, Tommy.
It's alive and kicking.
Yeah.
That was a good mess with this Lynx released.
You could say that.
Johnny, I just want to start with helping the listeners to imagine a little bit what's going on in the book.
You're describing your visit to the place where Last Wolf was shot in Ireland.
Tell us, how was it?
there any special about this visit?
How did you feel being in that place that the Last Wolf was there in Ireland?
Yeah, so I live
quite close to the Glens of Antrim and the Glens of Antrim is one of the sites that is proposed for the last wolf in Ulster, I would say.
So the last wolf in Ireland, is therefore the last large carnivore in Britain or Ireland, actually in County Carlo in 1786.
But around 1712, records would tell us the last wolf in Ulster was shot in the Glens of Antrim on the Garham Plateau.
And that's somewhere where I walk regularly.
I skipped to those mountains.
And those hills as often as I can.
And I begin and I finish the book there because it's a very poignant place to think in geological and evolutionary terms.
That is only the blink of an eye.
It is but the blink of an eye.
And yet much has changed since 1712.
So much has changed.
The world has changed and this island, these islands have changed.
But it seemed like an appropriate place to start and end my journey as I think.
and help us to think through the book, this topic of should we have species like this back amongst us?
Yeah, I think this is in general that the timeframes that we as humans operate on are here I say incompatible with timeframes that nature operates on.
That's part of the problem, isn't it?
It is.
then you had said political times,
time for which is at warp speed.
They say a week is a long time in politics.
At the moment in global politics, it seems like 24 hours, everything can change.
So yeah, there's all these different timescales, the evolutionary, the cultural, the political.
There's a lot of, a lot of different overlapping timescales.
And just in general, think we as people struggle with change and particularly this change, proposed change of, of bringing back these species, it dredges up from our psyche.
deep in our, I think, our subconscious, all of these old instincts that we maybe can't even quantify or even qualify with science or anything else.
So talk about that in the book, but certainly it brings up history as well.
All these layers of history, particularly in Ireland, where we lived alongside wolves and they're such a part of our culture compared to say England or Wales.
for sure.
Listen, your background is both in farming and in conservation.
Some say that this is, you know, seemingly conflicting passions, whether they're conflicted or not, you can elaborate in a second, but I'm just wondering how these,
having, you know, uh, foot in both camps shaped your way, shaped the way you wrote the book and, know, how does it make it special?
And it's just a long way of asking like, why did you wrote that book?
Well, those two passions.
which are sometimes complimentary and sometimes are contradictory and possibly at times are in conflict have not just shaped this book, but they've shaped my whole life.
And the book, which is semi-autobiographical in that it's my story of wrestling with these twin passions.
And also as I became a professional and a researcher and a practitioner, twin parts of my professional life.
The book really unpacks that in relation to large carnival coexistence across the world.
And then especially in relation to Britain and Ireland.
And I drew on a couple of things, especially the ship that one was growing up partly in Malawi.
before I lived in rural County Monaghan all of the nineties, but in the late eighties as an infant and then through all of through the noughties as a teenager, I lived in Malawi
in Southern Africa and
Went from seeing charismatic megafauna, to use that phrase, on the Siddalbrit screen and in National Geographic, to actually seeing it in real life.
And not just in the national parks, places we define as wild, but on the edges of the city, was, Blantyre was one of the fastest growing cities in the world at the time.
And yet on the edge of the cities, we had forest reserves with, there was a clan of a hundred hyena, leopards, population of leopard, bush pig, baboons, all sorts of things.
But then.
in our garden, chameleons, the snake in my school bag at one point.
it was bursting at the seams of wildlife and it lived amongst us.
It didn't just live over there far away and that stayed with me.
But what I also realized and developed from that, which has carried through into what I do now with this book, is that I became aware as I became an adult that my interaction with
these animals living a relatively affluent urban existence was different from say someone who
was living in a rural area who depended on maize, maize monoculture, monocropping to feed their families.
And the herd of aloans would come through and they'd just wipe out an entire family's entire village's crop of maize in a single night.
The elephant or whatever the species might be is the same, but our perspectives were different and our perspectives depended on how close we lived to the land, how much skin
we had in the game, how much risk.
And what that for me then carried through into my
research with snow leopards in Nepal was understanding farmers' perspectives in snow leopards, understanding the impacts on farming communities from snow leopards in terms of
eating livestock, but also the opportunities from things like tourism.
And then I went into running Northern Ireland's first community-owned farm.
So bringing that to this topic, I put everything through the lens, two lenses.
One is the lens of my training as an environmental social scientist where I
deconstruct ideas and then I put them back together and I interrogate ideas.
That's what I'm trained to do.
But also I put it through the lens of having run a small farm, trying to balance conservation and agriculture and doing it on marginal ground, coping with the cascading
demands of market state and society simultaneously.
And so every aspect of what I say and think about, I don't just consider does that work?
scientifically and theoretically and what did the academic paper say?
But I also remember when I ran that farm and I said to myself, how would that have worked for my daily routine?
How would that have worked for the profitability of what was a social enterprise, but even so margins were tight?
And how would that have worked for my way of life, me and my family?
And the book tries to look at it through this lens, conservation and agriculture, the practical and the theoretical.
and bring it all together because there is no way anywhere in the world that we can have flourishing populations of large carnivores without also sharing landscapes with people
and people who often have livestock.
So this is a question.
It's a circle that has to be squared, Tommy.
There's no way avoiding it, whether we're talking about Nepal, Malawi or the Island of Ireland.
know, this is, this is actually leads me to, to ask you about
What are in your view and with your expertise, experience, what are the differences between perception of large carnivores, between people who are living in the rural areas
and people who are maybe not, you know, bearing the brunt of the inconvenience of having wolves or bears or whatever on the, on the landscape.
And I don't want to go into this, like, you know, like a urban rural.
rural divide trope, but there is a little bit, a little bit of it there, right?
There is, and it can become, as you say, this very binary black and white division.
think it's actually much more complex because you could have someone working in the city, skipping to the country, nice fancy house and their livelihood not dependent on the land
who says, absolutely, I'd love to have links, wolves and brown bears back because it's no skin off my nose.
It's not going to affect my
way of life.
as with this, as with this topic in general, there is, there is nuance and complexity.
And I always like to see things in terms of spectrums or continuums instead of these binary dichotomies.
But in general, a couple of examples would say that there often is some division or difference.
One example of that would be from Colorado where wolves have been reintroduced recently.
And that was because of a citizens ballot initiative on the
topic in 2020 and the vote was very narrow.
I mean, was tighter than Brexit.
So it was 50.5 to whatever, 49.5, really, really very close.
And almost all of the votes in favor came from the Denver metropolitan area and the rest of the state geographically.
I mean, there's this tiny patch that was pro pretty much the rest of the state was anti within that obviously a mixture of perspectives, but
That has then resulted when in some contention about how that actually has worked out the planning court, because those who voted for it are not those who are going to be living
for it.
And when I went to Western Colorado and I talked to an anonymous rancher off the record and that was his concern, said, I didn't vote for this, but I'm going to have to live with
it.
My cattle, my neighbor's sheep.
And so there is that division that can lead to tensions.
then once politicians
get involved because these animals are political animals, those are opportunities for politicians of any stripe to exploit.
In these islands, there's a bit of recent and distant work from Scotland.
There was, think, a study done in the nineties about wolf reintroductions and those who live closer to the proposed reintroduction site were much less keen than people who didn't
live close to the reintroduction site.
Having said that, studies from Scotland have said that
Well, these are polls.
So with polls, not quite as rigorous as an academic study for various reasons, but the links to Scotland folks using this poll were saying, actually, there isn't a big
difference between rural and urbanite.
Just one last example, which is really interesting, thinking about a European context that in a year and a bit ago, there was a survey of 10,000 Europeans across, I think, 10
European countries.
And generally,
Those were rural Europeans and they were generally keen on having large carnivores.
But one of the things that stuck out to me from that was when they were asked, what is the primary means by which you get knowledge and information about large carnivores?
It was documentaries.
And this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, but when I think back over all the documentaries that I was raised on, particularly David Attenborough, who is such an
inspiring individual, I'm sure he's inspired many of us, including many people listening to this podcast or watching it.
But so many of the stories, the large carnivores are over there and the people are over there and you never see them connecting.
Maybe a scientist, maybe a conservationist, but you don't see this messy complexity where you have large carnivores in rural and agrarian landscapes where we are with our people.
And so when wolves return to those landscapes, either conceptually and theoretically in these islands or somewhere like the Netherlands, where in a country
Half the size of Ireland was three times the population.
have hundred wolves in 11 packs and 40 plus wolf pups were born last year.
And when they show up there, the people I talked to said, these animals don't belong here.
And that is partly because the stories we have been fed on coexistence separate us from the landscapes where large carnivores are present.
And so we need stories.
And that's again why I've written this book to help us understand what sharing landscapes actually looks like.
Exactly.
And you know, like you said, like people who are just, you know, like they call it city refugees who bought a house and they're in the rural areas.
I think, I think there's also this, it's not going to affect me, but when the wolf will snatch his little dog, that's when the attitude will change.
And the other thing I want to say is like,
With Colorado, I was actually on a podcast as a guest and we were talking, it was a podcast in the US.
We were talking about the Colorado and the host of the podcast, he's a hunter and obviously, you know, we talked about the introduction Colorado and what you mentioned is
like, because the urban areas tends to concentrate people, then when you're doing a vote,
It's like this proportional amount of votes goes from the very tiny compared to the whole state geographical area.
And, and, you know, and then I remember like, is it, I don't think it's a good idea to put those things into votes.
a democratic thing.
It shouldn't be like that.
What you think?
well, part of the reason I went to Colorado was to compare this, to compare it to the Yellowstone reintroduction, which was federally mandated.
And there were issues then when, when
particularly in Wyoming, which is 90, 80, 90 % of Yellowstone Park.
And as they spread into the surrounding states, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho as well.
The problem there was then, and I still hear it when I was there 30 years later, the federal government imposing these flipping wolves on us per rural righteous.
So there was a state federal conflict there.
So I went to Colorado to see, did a grassroots bottom up approach?
Would it be different?
And I think
The answer is no, it's just a different version of the same conflict.
this time it wasn't, there were the same arguments about out of state actors, but they were out of state donors, for instance.
So the ranchers I talked to, and I talked to people across the full spectrum, people involved, people in the middle, people opposed.
And they said, this was this campaign for this boat was largely driven by out of state.
big dollars from out of state.
there's some truth to that.
What concerns me with Colorado and what makes me sad and certainly a mistake that we would need to correct in Britain and Ireland as it relates to this issue is huge amounts of
money were funneled into that campaign for the reintroduction vote.
And it worked even though it was really tight.
But are the huge amounts of money now available to fund the coexistence with ranchers over the next decades?
No.
Those same donors aren't stumping up and putting in millions to fund coexistence trust funds.
Let's call them in those landscapes.
And there's some great colleagues I meet at Colorado State University who have set up a Wolf Conflict Reduction Fund and they've brought together stakeholders.
And it's a really great and really exciting project.
They're like triage response when the wolves are reintroduced and there's a problem in this area.
They're there to provide advice and small amounts of money, but those, the months are small and they would like to have an endowment.
So I would have really loved to seen those same donors who put in millions to the vote, putting in millions to make sure that it works and it works not just for the urbanites,
but especially for rural dwellers and especially for livestock keepers because in these debates, I do think we need to listen to their concerns, especially.
because they're the ones whose livelihoods and ways of life are going to be most impacted.
And we should do everything in our power to listen to and respond to those concerns.
And again, that's the rationale and writing this book to help us think about those and to consider these multiple perspectives on this issue.
Yeah.
And there is another aspect of it as well with the compensations.
I think this is a situation unfolding in France with bears.
where they have fund and they even have like a free air quotes, dog, guardian dogs for the flocks.
And the farmers refusing to take funds and take those dogs because then it's perceived like if you take the money, then you're on the program.
And if you're really opposing it, then you shouldn't, you you're just opposing it and you're not going along with it.
So that's another layer of complexity.
100%.
There's so much of this is it's not even about the money.
It's about power.
It's about social groups.
It's about, for example, in, in France, in the Pyrenees, I'm not familiar with the details, but already based on what you said, I'd be wondering this probably complex social
dynamics, also known as peer pressure that farmers in a community would, you know, some who sign up to that might be seen as a sellout and selling out the farming cause and going
over to the other side.
What we do as people, it's inevitable and often sadly unavoidable.
And I saw that in Switzerland, some of my interviews where some people just, Switzerland is a wealthy country and they really resource not just the compensation, but actually
funding this whole, the coexistence toolkit, the dogs, the fences, the shepherds, and that's the really expensive, but it's not so varied.
It's not particularly expensive to fund the losses of livestock, even at twice the market rate.
It's fun they not hold package of deterrence and the coexistence toolkit responses, but there were some who said, we refuse all help because we don't want to be, we don't want
the bureaucracy and the red tape.
So there's that element, but we don't want, we just don't want to be involved with this.
We reject it.
And again, even Switzerland, which here in Ireland, we would think of the Alps as being wilder than the mountains and hills of Ireland.
But I went there and people said, these wolves don't belong here.
Maybe lynx, but these wolves, they belong in North America.
So I coined the term biological NIMBYism, which is that everybody loves a large carnivore when it's somewhere else.
And it's easy for us in Ireland to talk, and it has been for decades and centuries to talk about this because we're talking about Yellowstone and the Serengeti and whichever
wildlife presenter often travels.
But now that we're having to grapple with the complexities and the nuances, well as the opportunities of this issue on this Island, then it means we have to have these really
tough conversations.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of things to be ironed out, Tommy.
And again, I hope this book can help us to, to think that through.
Yeah.
it's, it's, you know, the,
Partially why I love this topic is because it's so wonderfully complex wonderfully again in the air quotes.
All right Listen livestock compensations you you mentioned life the compensations Are do they work is like from your experience?
Do they work or or is it matter of also like I don't want your compensations?
Because you know it is often
brought up by like, you have a compensation, need to have a good, right?
It's like this quote people say, like, we need to, da, da, da, da, have a good compensations programs.
And then you look at the compensations programs that are around and there's like so much misunderstanding, right?
People, even people who are, you know, very, I would say consider themselves educated about the matters, like talking about like European.
compensations, where there's obviously nothing like European compensations and each country has different things and even if those compensations are sometimes like, you have
a loss, you have a livestock killed and then someone needs to confirm that that actually was the wolf that killed and then there's a problem like what if your sheep disappeared
and it's never found?
How you get a compensation then?
And then the whole bureaucracy about, you know, the biologists coming in, taking samples.
Was it a wolf?
Was it a dog?
Was it like whatever?
And then you might get a call like I think in Lithuania, you get in compensation the following year.
Right.
It's like, whoa.
So tell me or tell us what works, what doesn't about those compensations, like how, how that should be structured.
And does it even make sense?
It's a great question.
And I feel like I could have written a book just on the compensation side of things, although I'm not sure it would sell very well.
But firstly, there's something about human behavior and money where we're quite fond of finance and even small amounts can change our behavior.
this is a very funny story in the book of me getting paid by my parents growing up in Malawi to kill mosquitoes and which posed a threat because of chiropractic malaria and how
that affected my behavior.
So do check that out.
It's quite.
amusing, but financial tools are absolutely essential to fund carnivore coexistence because theoretically they transfer the financial costs of sharing landscapes with them
from the public who generally want it.
Even if they're living in urban areas, they see either the presence or return of large carnivores as a public good, which they want to pay for either through
their taxes through public investment in nature conservation or through supporting NGOs through the donations.
You also want to have the same goal.
And the theory is that then the costs which compensate farmers for lost livestock are a way of transferring that cost from those who want it to those who actually bearing the
cost and losing livestock.
That's the theory in practice, as you've already alluded to, it is a lot more complicated and one big complaint about them.
across the world, was a meta-analysis, which is a study of studies that I cite, I think in 75 % of cases across the world, bureaucracy was a complaint.
I've seen it in Nepal with snow leopards, and I've seen it on my travels.
There's one example I use it because it struck me and it made me quite sad, was an example in the Netherlands where I met a farming family who had lost four sheep to a wolf,
probably a
young dispersing wolf, still figuring out how to hunt.
And it's often the case with those dispersing wolves that they're the ones that are often causing the most trouble for livestock farmers.
this was the first time wolves were coming into the area.
They lost four sheep.
And in many ways it was a textbook response.
The Dutch Nature Agency, Bage 12 was out that very day and they took swabs and that's textbook.
Neighbouring farmer also lost sheep.
Textbook response, same day.
But it was what happened next and what had happened previously that upset the Van der Wetterings and upset me hearing about it a year later.
So firstly, a coalition of Dutch conservation NGOs had said to the Dutch state, you need to expand the risk zone in which you're offering compensation for wolves.
This zone you've indicated, this Veluwe, which is the forested central part of the Netherlands, it's not big enough because wolves disperse, they're such adaptable.
creatures, will move out of this area.
So you need to have a bigger zone in which you will offer compensation.
The Dutch state, or it may have been the provinces who held the purse strings said, no, that's going to cost too much money.
So when they turned up in the Van der Wettering farm, the Van der Wettering went in the risk zone.
So although there was a textbook response to take the DNA swabs, that alone took several months to get a confirmed response.
Then the Dutch state after three months said, we will give you partial compensation.
Vendor veterans were not happy.
So they said, no, they sued the government and that took another couple of months.
And when I was there, the case was still ongoing.
They were deeply unhappy.
Now the Dutch state is one of the wealthiest in the world.
is to me, at least a model of efficiency and effectiveness.
The amount that would have cost to give them full compensation or even double the market rate.
I mean, we're talking 500 euros.
And so there's a symbolism to this that it's not just about the money, that in action and stinginess on the part of the Dutch state, which they've since they've made it easier
since, but it was too late for the van der Eertreiks.
It has turned them from being fairly ambivalent about wolves.
They weren't opposed to wolves being back.
They educated their children about them.
They said, you know, we've got wolves back in Alaska.
This is really exciting.
But the way that was handled has turned them into implacable opponents.
They will never accept wolves.
in the Netherlands, they're really not keen.
so the danger because of money and how these are handled is that fairly small amounts of money become really big conflicts.
And it's not just about the money, it's about power.
It's about symbolism.
It's about the state interfering in people's lives and livelihoods.
It's about urban elites getting on the hobby horse of having these animals back in rural areas.
It's, there's
You think this is just about Lynx, Wills and Bearish, Tommy, but it's an inch wide in that regard, but it's a mile deep.
It's about all of these other things that are going on in rural areas across the world.
And the danger for large carnivore conservationists is that species like Wills especially, but also Lynx and Bearish is that they become lightning rods for discontent.
come to symbolize interference and all of the things that we've said.
So we need to approach this with.
a broad mind, but also to think about the complexities of this and the nuances of it.
And while financial tools are absolutely essential, we need to think very carefully about how they're designed to minimise that bureaucracy.
But also I think in these islands, financial schemes, people who want to do this, you need to make farmers an offer that they can't refuse.
You need to make this as easy as possible for them, not as hard.
And you need to be as generous as you can be.
then some, so that it's people, it's worth people's while.
they're saying, I want to have these species of my land because this is good for my bottom line.
It's good for my way of life.
And they see this species as an asset instead of liability.
A hundred percent.
like time is money.
And I just can't imagine, like you said, the whole thing is like 500,000 euro and it drags for years of papers.
phone calls, responses.
It's just...
Yeah, that's a huge lesson.
That's a huge lesson.
Listen, on that vein, what's your take on the thorny subject of lethal control?
Is that something that is important and meaningful because it gives people a sense of agency over what's going on, even though the...
You know, maybe in terms of minimizing the conflict or minimizing the losses, biologically speaking, it's not that great.
It's not probably has less effect than one would think.
Some some say that it has the opposite effect because it disrupts pack structure, etc.
In case of walls.
On the other hand, right, when people feel powerless and they feel like the government, them.
make them powerless against the animal on the landscape that they could do something about it.
That's as one of my previous guests said, like that's where the hatred of wolf slings bear is born.
So from your experience across the world, what is the utility and importance of the lethal control?
It's an important question.
It is a thorny one, but it's not one that can be avoided.
Tommy.
And in seeking to reintroduce these species to Ireland, to Britain, or when they return naturally to Europe, are having these, we're introducing these issues and these topics and
we're going to have to wrestle with them.
so talking about it openly and calmly and acknowledging that there are multiple points of view, but also acknowledging that this is a matter of life and death and any topic that
involves issues of life and death, we should approach with care and with ethics.
And so it's.
important to have these conversations instead of just sweeping it under the carpet, but there is no avoiding it.
And we will be bringing this topic back as it has come back over in Europe, all the way up to the highest, the top of the political food chain with Ursula von der Leyen's pony at
towards the end of 2022.
pony.
then the Italian joker in Northern Italy, which was, think around the same time.
again, on a crowded continent of 700 million people where large carnivores have
made an astonishing recovery over the last 30 years.
There's more of many of these species than there are in North America living amongst us.
It is quite extraordinary, but in crowded landscapes and in the crowded continent that is much of Europe, especially the Western parts, there's no avoiding this thorny issue.
And you're right to highlight, especially with wolves, some concerns about disrupting pack structure and what that can actually then lead to those dispersal like that.
lone wolf that attacked the Van de Wetterings sheep flock.
think one of the solutions, and this will annoy some who may be romanticise rewilding, I think we need more technology and monitoring.
So for example, when I was in Wyoming, the Game and Fish Department's large carnivore team, they have a collar on every wolf pack in the state.
And when I was in one of their offices in Cody meeting Robo Bear, which we can talk about later, they showed me the screen and I could see the
indicators of where every wolf pack in the state was.
And I said, does that help you manage conflict?
Does it help you respond appropriately and know when there are problem animals or maybe a problem pack that's developing a bad habit with livestock?
And they said, yeah, gives them the data to make those data informed and evidence-based decisions as well.
But when we talk about large carnivores, the second part is that we're not just talking about evidence, we're talking about emotion.
We're not just talking about facts.
We're talking about feelings and ultimately we're not just talking about science, Tommy, we're talking about stories.
So things like agency, which I don't know, I'm not sure how you measure agency, but it's a feeling, right?
It's something we feel is really important, especially for those rural communities and livestock keeping communities that we've been talking about.
Who, as you've also said, feel that they, the government, Brussels, whichever national capital,
they in the country they live in, urban elites are imposing large carnivores on their conservation.
think having that, the choice probably matters even more than actually implementing it to feel that people are being listened to.
Certainly in Switzerland, where there's been a quite a poisonous debate about lethal control over the last couple of years, really toxic.
The farming individuals that I spoke to,
where they didn't use the term agency, but they were just wanting to have, they felt their way of life as being threatened and they wanted some sense of control to be able to take
it back.
Will shooting every wolf in sight, I think the proposals in Switzerland or something like 20 % of wolves, is that going to magically solve one of the problems?
I don't think it is.
So again, there's a lot of nuance and complexity here, but it's
We can't avoid this topic.
It's a tricky one, but it does, I think, give some degree of agency, but it also needs to be very carefully managed with data.
I think also there's some interesting...
Second part of this why I think it's important is I think we need to, especially with wolves and bears, less so with lynx because they pose almost no risk to people.
We do need to keep them afraid of people for the good of the species.
That may lead to, and there's this tension between the individual and the species, right?
here.
If that means as happened in 2024 in the Netherlands when a wolf knocked over a child in a kindergarten class that was visiting a forest in the Netherlands.
And then also the details are disputed and contested may have bitten or nipped nipped a child in the same class, possibly the same wolf.
And I'm not sure if it was the same or a different occasion.
To me, that's a sign that
that wolf is losing fear of people.
be a couple of videos that you've probably seen and some of your listeners have probably seen of wolves being very close to cyclists and joggers and families in the Netherlands.
I think those wolves need, whether it's through through hazing, they need to fear people because if that wolf, a wolf were to seriously injure a person, it's going to be really
bad for the wolf conservation in the Netherlands.
So we do need to maintain, I think, a fear of human beings.
so that they stay away from people for sure.
May not stay away from a lifestyle, but they do need to stay away from people.
And that is for the good of large carnivores as a group.
Even if that means that the occasional individual either is shot or shot with paintballs as has been proposed in the Netherlands.
But the court cases are flying.
I mean, it's really hard to have the sort of conversation we're having about this topic, Tommy, because it gets under people's skin.
And once it gets in social media, it just goes bananas.
Goose bananas.
No, no, that's why I am significantly limiting my participation in social media this year because it's just like not really helpful with any conversation.
Well, all I can say that if I was a kid, I was nipped by wolf, I would consider this being very cool that I was nipped by wolf, like who want to touch?
Well, that's a different thing.
My parents might have a different views on this as well as the parents of
of those kids.
No, but on the habituation, is the word I guess, to humans.
Not long ago we spoke on the podcast about the situation with bears in Romania.
When there, you're probably familiar with that, where the band hunting completely.
And then what started to happening is that bears, you know, they figure out quickly that people are feeding them.
So they're just flocking into the tourist areas, sitting around the roads and basically waiting for people to give them sweets and people giving him sweets, but the bear's hands
have a big freaking claws on it.
And the whole thing of people taking selfies with, you know, feeding bears.
You got the picture.
But then the interesting fact was, which I found counterintuitive, is that
when they reintroduced hunting again as a way of controlling those bears' then the bears that needs to be taken out first are the ones that seems to be more habituated.
it's not like, you know, my question was like, what is the percentage of the local hunters and what is the percentage of the tourist hunters who come from abroad and bring money and
et cetera, et cetera.
And the answer was like, initially it is all local people, because tourist hunters, want to have experience in being in the woods, while all the bears that they need to take out
first are all around the road, because these are the ones that pose the most risk and danger.
And that's also the bears that tends to be on the social media, have names and everybody who listens to that already sees the picture how messy that situation is.
So that is to your point that
For the benefit of these animals, they're better not be habituated because from that point, things are getting solved very quickly.
And you've just made me think of something else, is that if this is, if we're talking here about Britain and Ireland, if it were not to be regulated officially, I know we were
complaining about regulation and bureaucracy in the last question about finance, but
Particularly with issues of matters of life and death and lethal control, there is a degree of regulation and care that needs to be mandated and enforced.
But if it's not done in an official procedural way and brought into the open, it will still happen and it will happen legally.
And these are also be shot, trapped and poisoned illegally, partly because of that lack of agency that people feel.
So in my opinion, much better to bring it into the light and be open about it and make it official.
with sanction and training and data and ethics, then let it be done in the dark, illegally, I think.
hundred percent.
It's a hundred percent.
Johnny, I got to ask you one thing.
It's it's maybe a little bit of a sidebar here, but you talk about in your book about wolf, wolf change rivers situation in Yellowstone.
And it was like this big wolf change rivers.
And there was like, what about
if wolves don't change rivers and they were saying, no, no, no, you actually, know, they actually don't change rivers.
Could you give us, in a, just to, just to clarify some things for our listeners, what's this like?
Do wolves change rivers?
Wolves alone did not change rivers in Yellowstone.
Sorry if that bursts anybody's bubble.
It burst my bubble at some point in this journey when I watched the documentaries and I thought, wow, that's amazing.
And that
Story has taken hold of the public's imagination.
It's gone global.
We're having this conversation in part because we think some that wills will change rivers in Britain and Ireland, that links may change rivers in Britain and Ireland.
And to investigate that, and also because in my opinion, I'm old enough and cynical enough to believe that something sounds too good to be true.
It's probably too good to be true.
So I went to Yellowstone on my travels with a leading wolf ecologist called Joanna Lambert.
Who's based at the university of Colorado.
you know him?
Yeah.
I don't know.
don't know.
Yeah.
I don't know her personally, but I heard, heard about her.
She's quite famous.
Yeah.
Oh, is.
And you'll have to have her in the podcast.
At some point I can make an introduction, I went there her to really investigate this issue in Yellowstone.
We went to the Lamar Valley in Northern Yellowstone to the last holding pen from the 1995 reintroduction.
And we looked out on some of those very rivers that are.
have been immortalized in the Wolf's Change River story that George Monbiot has popularized.
And in my conversations with Joanna, and also then in reading some of the scientific liturgians, papers that have come out in the last couple of years, it's a bit more
complex.
So wolves did have a profound ecological impact.
That concept of trophic cascades, relatively small in number, but outsize impacts cascading all the way down through the layers of the web of life.
but also through changing the behavior of the elk because of what are called non-consumptive effects.
So that landscape of fear where they changed the parts of the landscape that elk were, that definitely happened and no one's arguing with that, but it wasn't the only factor in
changing rivers.
There were other factors, including the fact that beavers had been reintroduced to the neighboring state forest from the late eighties and they were naturally spreading,
dispersing into the park at the same time that wolves were dispersing.
the park and then you have this panoply of other factors that shape ecosystems like fire and disease and climate.
as Joanna pointed out, ecosystems don't work monolithically.
There are always multiple factors at work.
So where wolves, did wolves change rivers in Yellowstone by themselves?
No, but they were certainly a factor.
Would wolves and lynx change rivers in Britain and Ireland?
Probably not, but
Will they certainly have beneficial ecological impacts?
Yes, I think they will.
And that for me remains the strongest part of the argument, but it's not going to be a panacea for the nature crisis.
They alone will not solve that nature crisis, but they could be one part of the solution.
for clarifying that.
I wanted to have this out of the way.
Johnny, you mentioned that technology can play a part.
in enabling coexistence, really.
You mentioned already colored wolves, you mentioned various different things, fences, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, we're coming to like, obviously also term rewilding is central to some extent to the whole conversation about reintroductions and coexistences with the carnivores.
And the question obviously that goes in is like, okay, is it really wild in any way?
Right?
One of the previous guests on the podcast basically said that if there is a fence, it's not rewilding.
Like the fence is the problem.
Whether the fence keeps the animals in or keeps the animals out.
If you have a fence, it's not rewilding.
If it's farming, it's not rewilding.
And that leads me to the question, like, is it really
wild to any effect, right?
Is the wolf with the collar really a wild wolf?
Is it not your wolf, which just exacerbates the conflict?
And that in a sense, it's a very open question.
That is just an invitation for you to elaborate on that, because from this, we have to go to the point where, like in Europe, wolves naturally migrate and expand and they
wolves do wolves things, they're wild.
Perhaps that makes them easier to accept when you talk about reintroductions like in Pyrenees, like in Colorado, and like because of a geographical separation in Britain and
Ireland, you can make an argument that they're not wild, they're not gonna be wild.
The wildness of those carnivores are gone and it's never gonna come back.
So maybe why try?
Is it gonna cause even more conflict?
Again, very open question, but I'm sure you have some interesting insights on this.
Yeah, there's kind of two parts to the response.
One is the technological aspect of could technology facilitate coexistence, which I have some ideas on, which I'll share in a minute.
But before we get to the science and the technology bit, there is a deep philosophical
question here about what is wild and where wild is.
It's a pretty slippery term.
I have a whole chapter on philosophy.
spend it cycling around Missoula, Montana with an environmental philosopher.
And then I also meet another environmental philosopher in the Netherlands and we spend a bit of time.
And throughout the book, I keep coming back to what is wild and where is wild.
And it comes back a bit even to those
documentaries and those stories that have shaped those 10,000 Europeans, rural Europeans views on large carnivores is often in our stories and in our philosophizing about wild,
was somewhere where people are not.
It was somewhere over there that was distant in space and time.
And actually that is often a forest as well, closed canopy forest.
Whereas actually if you look at
many landscapes across Europe.
It's often, again, I come back to this idea of spectrums and continuums.
There's there between your urban CBD and your Alaska's across this weather, just this spectrum of landscapes, which have this shifting balance of how much order or people have
brought to the landscape and how much quote unquote disorder we accept from having wildlife around because they get in the way of us as people and they do things that we
don't like.
and all the rest of it.
And it's just, just constant shifting balance.
And even in terms of what ecosystems look like, it's often this mix of woodland, scrub, open pasture that probably characterizes a lot of European ecosystems and landscapes, at
least historically before we came along and changed them.
So when you have species like large carnivores, which more than almost anything else symbolize the wild as an idea, they symbolize the wild as a place.
And then through the process of rewilding, they symbolize it as a process because they take it as something that is far away in space and time.
And they bring it right into here and now, or in our islands and in Ireland and in Britain, they bring it into our future.
That can be a lot for people to, to get their heads around.
And it often leads to polarized emotions in this topic because while some of us, I hear the term wild and I think, wow, I run to the wild I go, it's where
I escaped to it.
is soulless.
It is salvation.
It is beauty.
is wonder.
But not everybody thinks like that.
For some it is threat and even throughout human history and European civilization, if you want to call it that, the wild is a threat.
It is chaos.
is damnation instead of salvation.
is something to be afraid of.
It is a landscape of fear to set against the landscape of wonder.
And large carnivals symbolize all of that complex.
philosophy in these very discreet individuals off the links and the wolf and the bear.
So there's a lot of questions here that science not only can't answer, but science can't even ask really deep questions about what constitutes reality and knowledge, where is wild
and what is wild and where on this spectrum of landscapes are willing to accept species like.
links, and bears?
it just in the Alaskans and the Yellowstones and the Serengetes, or is it in the Dutch countryside with its canals and its roads flanked by trees on both sides?
And is it even in the future in Mayo and Kerry and Galloway and Argyle?
These are questions that we have to think deeply and wrestle with.
And yet at the same time, philosophising with this topic is not going to alone solve all of our questions.
We do need the natural science and particularly
I think technology has a critical role in informing our decisions and giving us tools.
It is not instead of the philosophy and the relationships, but it is in addition to the philosophy and the human relationships and ideas that underpin coexistence.
And especially when we're talking about working with farmers, the threat to the routine and the livelihood in the way of life, that is because farming is hard.
The margins are tight.
The days are so long.
It's a tough gig.
And the idea that I'm going to have to change how I farm and how I live and fence in a different way, farm in a different way, it's going to affect my business, my business plan
and my bottom line is not just a philosophical threat, but it's a practical threat and it's going to cost more money.
So my point is if there are technological tools that we can use to automate a lot of this, I think we should be actively exploring that.
And what I mean by that is sensors on or in large carnivores.
whether on collars or maybe in the future actually inside them, the same with livestock.
So that when a lynx or a wolf in the Irish countryside approaches a field that has sheep in it, it's setting off a sensor.
It's setting off an alarm, some sort of something like a Fox light, which is this light that can turn on and be used at night, but automate that some sort of siren.
And again, those, these would have to change because predators will become habituated to this over time.
And
I would like to see those sorts of tools.
It's not something I have a great deal of knowledge on, but I'd like to see us thinking about those because I think they could automate that.
But for some, that is philosophically unacceptable because as you've hinted at already, and I found in my discussion, some people would not accept that degree of human
interference in the wild, but we have to ask, do we want a romantic view of rewilding or do we want a pragmatic view of rewilding?
And I would go for the pragmatic view.
If you want to have these animals back, it's going to involve compromise.
And if those sensors make it easier for farmers to accept that, if those sensors make it easier, mean that there's less individual animals that need to be shot or hit.
That's a win win.
So I would say try and accept that philosophically and the benefits scientifically and economically will follow.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a hard conversation because you have like, okay.
What are the benefits and is the colored walls that's going to be jolted if it goes too close to whatever, is it still going to fulfill those goals and those roles?
then they go like this pragmatic approach versus a little bit of this emotional as well, because I think that people, least some, at least if can speak about myself,
for having large carnivores on the landscape, it's not only their biological function that they're going to do this, that, change river or don't or whatever.
It's also this bit of like story and this, right?
Like it's like, okay, I'm not gonna see, I'm probably not gonna see the lynx, but just knowing that lynx is there, it's already a huge win.
And that's the thing.
Yeah, completely.
And you're absolutely right in only focusing on the ecology and to lesser extent, the economics of tourism, which I think have significant potential, certainly if Yellowstone
is anything to go by.
And this is often because rewilding and reintroductions are driven by natural science.
We can miss out on that philosophical stroke moral argument, which is that are, and the philosophers I spoke to, especially Christopher Preston in
Montana, said, and he's an environmental philosopher, written on this, landscapes are more exciting when these animals are back.
There is that sense of wonder.
And as you said, probably never see a lynx.
They're the ghost of the forest, just like my snow leopards are the ghosts of the mountains.
I've never seen a snow leopard in the wild.
Hasn't diminished my love of the species or my intention to spend my whole life working on them because there is a wonder and a thrill that comes from just being in a landscape
where these species are.
And especially as the species get bigger, particularly with bears, maybe to an extent with wolves, you're reminded that you're not top of the food chain.
And it's good for us as humans to be reminded of that.
It's humbling and humbling is an underrated, but crucial virtue for the human race.
So it's a really important part of the discussion.
100%.
Folks who listening to this, remember the title is links, living with links.
Sharing landscapes with big cats, wolves and bears.
The link is obviously in the description of the show if you want to buy this book and you should buy this book.
Johnny, I gotta ask you a question.
I said many times when talking about hunters and hunting and communication about hunting is that hunters are missing out on the emotional aspect of telling story about hunting
because usually they talk about, you know,
population control and this and that and how much money goes from hunting to conservation, da da da da.
And really these are not arguments that general public will process.
partially the success, for example, for about veganism and so on is because the message is emotional and simple, right?
Go vegan.
And I often say like, hey, as a hunters, there's too much...
focus on science and facts and not enough focus on the emotional story.
Tell me how do you see that in this space of large carnivores, restoration, reintroduction, coexistence, however you want to call it.
What is the balance in your view between having a factual data-driven approach and telling
well, story, but story based on like, this is gonna happen and you're gonna be control of deer and that, and what is the percentage of these emotional stories, which we know that,
you know, on average, if you present it with factual and emotional, emotional will win like 99 % of the time out of a hundred.
So.
Where is the balance in your view and do we need to shift the conversation more either direction as it stands right now?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I, I guess the precise balance may depend on our personal inclinations.
I'm not sure there's one specific answer to that.
I can see in different scenarios, just where we, the balance may need to shift.
So for example, a lot of arguments about having
wolves back are driven by the cup driven by people who've trained in natural science.
So there's a bias towards having that natural science data and the cases, the ecological benefits, the trophic cascades and the landscape of fear.
And that's really important.
And yet there are often then gaps in that social environmental social science, which is where my particular training and interest in that relationship between us and the species,
not just relationship that we hold individually.
but that we hold collectively and in groups or in tribes and those that conflict then that can often come between these different tribes.
So I think in general, we need more social science and social science and conservation is often about looking for numerical patterns in human behavior.
So it tries to mimic what natural science does looking for numerical patterns in the natural world.
But we actually need that, but we also need the sort of social science that's getting into like history as well.
politics that understands the qualitative and the nuance and the symbolic, the story element of these species.
At the same time, we've been talking about world's change rivers and how much it can swing too much to the story end where the story takes over and it's a really simple story.
But when you actually dig down into the science of it, there is nuance and complexity.
So I would be wary to put a precise
50-50, I think it can just depend.
Sometimes we will need to leaven the science with more story, more emotion, more feeling.
Sometimes when there's maybe too much emotion and story, we need to say, hold on a minute.
This is what the science says.
And actually we do need facts.
And I've tried in the book to really try to bring both together because we as, as human beings, we are quantitative and we are qualitative.
We live by words, but we also live by numbers.
We live by science, but we also live by stories.
And it's, it's that combination of the boat of both that we need that I tried to practice and that are key to understanding this topic.
know, I always finish the podcast with asking, you know, how do you think it's going to play out?
How do you think it's going to happen?
But I want to do something different this time around, because when I was reading your book, I, I thought that you were very careful to not commit to either side.
maybe a little bit too careful at times.
So I want you to come clean.
So I want you to come clean right now.
How would you like this to play out?
know, which size you're on, Johnny.
I'm obviously, you know, joking right now.
But what is your take?
Like how would you love to see this playing out?
Yeah, I have been careful.
And that is in part because I genuinely, it's not just a sales pitch, I genuinely do have mixed feelings about it.
And I continue to have mixed feelings.
And this book was my attempt to work out what those feelings were.
And after 85,000 words and 29,000 kilometers, 56 interviews and all the literature, I still have mixed feelings about it.
And I love this idea in principle.
I love it.
I would love to walk through those landscapes that I walk through every week and come across a wolf.
or links.
And I love it because of the scientific benefits that it would bring, but also because of the ethical, the moral dimensions, the wonder that I knew from being in landscapes with
large carnivores growing up in Africa and never seeing the leopard and the hyena, but knowing they were there just filled me with a magic that is cannot be put into words.
At the same time, the pragmatic part of me does worry about the social conflict that this could bring about.
in these islands.
for that reason, I think at this moment, I just don't think it's workable.
And I don't even think it's workable in Scotland and Northern England where we've had the most work done.
Now, I believe there are reports and things in the pipeline that have probably been delayed by the recent events that are probably going to come out this year that may help
to answer a lot of the concerns I have that I've laid out in the book and the report, because I think to do this properly and do it well, those need to be addressed and we need
to see
coexistence toolkit funding coexistence trust funds that will make sure it can be funded over the next century, not just over five years, over the next hundred years and
safeguarded from the meddling of politicians and the prevailing winds of agri-environmental policies, which just changed like that.
And because none of those things are not in place and not enough has been done, I think it will be some time before it can happen.
But I do think that
It will happen at some point.
It's moving even, especially in Britain, it's moving from mainstream.
It's moving from fringe to mainstream, even the last couple of years.
Recent events may slow it down, but I don't think it's going to stop.
But I think we should try, as we said at the very start, try and take a step back and think about a slightly longer term view and think about this in terms of decades and not
years.
I think at some point in the 21st century, it will take place.
And that's partly because
we will create the conditions for it.
Not just through answering all of these questions through research that I've highlighted and I intend to be answering many of those in the coming years, but also because I think
people will become more open to the idea.
I think at some point the overwritten window of what is politically acceptable to the majority of population will overlap with that general public desire for this.
And then as we reforest and rewild upland areas to meet
climate goals, especially in Ireland and in Britain, we're going to be creating habitat as deer populations expand to fill those expanding forests.
We're creating the perfect ecological, social, and maybe one day the political conditions for this to happen in the future.
But I would really stress the need to not rush it because if this is doing well, if it's worth doing, then it's worth doing well.
We come back to the charismatic nature of these species.
And I just mentioned this briefly in the book, these charismatic species and others like them, including cell leopards, they attract charismatic people.
I'm one of them.
So I have no problem with charismatic people, but these charismatic people can sometimes be quite controversial and add a whole nother layer of relational complexity to this.
And there are some big egos attached to this topic.
And if my point is, if people are trying to make this happen because they want to see it,
take place before the end of career or even the end of their life.
I'm sorry, but that's not a good enough reason to do it.
That's getting into Tiger King territory and that's not a good place to be.
If this is worth doing, it's worth doing well.
It's worth doing at a speed that makes sure it is thought through and funded and resourced.
And if that takes decades, then so be it.
Folks, listen, once again, there's only one call to action in this podcast.
Buy the book.
The link is in the description.
And while you're buying the book, you will also support my work because I will get a tiny teensy commission from each sale.
You're not going to regret it.
It's one of the best books about large carnivores I have read.
And I read quite a few.
Johnny, congratulations on the book.
It was great.
And thank you for your time.
Thank you so much, Tom.
Always a pleasure to be on your show and congratulations and almost getting to 200.
Big achievement.
Soon enough.