Does Northumberland really want to see the return of lynx?

Spectator

3 days ago

Farming is hard, and sheep farming especially so. Sheep are endearing but awkward creatures, generally looking for the most inconvenient way to die. The weather is usually miserable. Lambing is an annual torment. The government is always dreaming up new ways to make things harder.
In a real sense, I'm writing this because sheep farming is so hard. That's what persuaded me to leave the bleak, beautiful hills of Northumberland and make my living from writing and talking in bland, warm rooms in London. But my heart is still there, in the hills. My family too, and their sheep.
So I continue to take an interest in the life of rural Northumberland, including in various attempts by well-meaning campaigners to reimagine the place as a stage for their environmental dreams. One such dream is the reintroduction of the lynx.
For several years now, various groups have been pushing for the release into the Northumbrian countryside of the Eurasian lynx. These are magnificent beasts whose advocates say could play a vital role in local ecosystems.
Not everyone is entirely persuaded, however. If you spend your waking life trying to keep sheep alive, the idea of 70-odd pounds of teeth and claws prowling your fields at night might just raise a few questions. But such doubts would spoil the story that lynx advocates appear keen to tell. Even though previous attempts to bring the lynx to Northumberland have been roundly rejected by local people, the lynx people are undeterred and continue to make their pitch.
The latest drive comes from the Missing Lynx Project, a coalition of wildlife groups. It's got some headlines this week with a report that it says shows strong public support for releasing lynx into Northumberland's Kielder Forest and the surrounding areas of Cumbria and southern Scotland. Here's how they put it in their press release:
A year-long social consultation has found that 72 per cent of people in the project area of Northumberland, bordering areas of Cumbria and southern Scotland, support potential lynx reintroduction.
That line has already bounced around the media: '72 per cent of people in the region support their reintroduction', the BBC reports faithfully. Except that's not what the actual report says.
This report details a commendably serious and reflective attempt to examine public opinion relating to lynx introduction. But that attempt is based on a large exercise in sampling bias. The 72 per cent figure comes from a self-selecting group drawn from people who visited a pro-lynx exhibition, attended talks, or voluntarily filled in a questionnaire organised by the same group campaigning for the reintroduction. These aren't ordinary members of the public drawn at random and representative of the wider population – they're the already-engaged, the already-interested, the already-convinced. Here's what the paper actually says about the survey data:
As the questionnaire collected data from the 'active voice,' people who are interested in the topic or that have engaged with the project, the respondents that answered the questionnaire may not reflect the results at a regional or national population level.
Compare and contrast that with the press release and headlines about 72 per cent of people in and around Northumberland backing the return of the lynx to Northumberland.
The detail of that self-selecting sample is even more interesting. Of the 1,075 people in the area who completed the pro-lynx survey, no less than 42.9 per cent are employed in the 'environment and conservation' sectors.
So, far from showing that the general public in Northumberland supports a controversial conservation project, the latest bit of lynx-lobbying actually shows that a lot of people who work in conservation and who engaged with a pro-lynx conservation project are in favour of a lynx-based conservation project.
At the same time as spinning its consultation report, the pro-lynx camp is also highlighting a new paper in the Journal of Environmental Management which uses data analysis to show that Kielder Forest in Northumberland would be a lovely place to introduce a few dozen large carnivores.
Again, it's a serious bit of work by academics and wildlife experts who earnestly believe that giving Britain some 'top carnivores' would have real ecological benefits. I'm sure they mean well. But the overall impression given by those two documents this week is of a coalition with an idée fixe – a pre-determined desire to let lynx loose somewhere, anywhere, in the UK. Quite where doesn't seem to matter to the lynx lobby, just so long as it's good for the big cats.
The data paper is an overt attempt to identify places that would suit lynx. It devotes far less space to anyone else's needs. There are neat statistical estimates for how many lynx might be killed by cars, but no such modelling of potential livestock losses. All local farmers get – tucked away in an annex – is an airy concession that it is 'possible' the lynx would eat their sheep if deer populations turn out to be lower than expected:
Although the current evidence from Europe suggests lynx do not frequently target livestock, it is possible that smaller livestock, such as sheep, might be predated in areas close to suitable lynx habitats or if wild prey species are of lower abundance.
From the perspective of people who farm sheep for a living, that's not something to ignore. Hence, every time before that when the lynx lobbyists have tried to push big cats into Kielder, local opposition has blocked them.
In 2015, the (Wales-based) Lynx UK Trust proposed an initial trial release of 18 lynx into Kielder. Farmers objected, warning of threats to livestock and questioning how the animals would be monitored and contained in such a vast and remote forest. The plan was abandoned, for a while.
Then in 2018, the trust applied to Natural England for a licence to release six lynx. Defra rejected the application outright, saying it failed to meet international reintroduction guidelines and carried 'a significant risk' to livestock.
Yet here we are again in 2025, with pro-lynx claims that – to put it mildly – appear to gloss over the possibility that local people, and farmers in particular, might not be keen on the lynx agenda.
I'm not, as such, writing this to oppose that agenda. That would be somewhat hypocritical: I don't live there any longer, so it's not my place to say what should happen there. Instead, my point is that the people who live and farm in Northumberland should be the ones who decide whether large wild carnivores are set free in their woods and fields.
The countryside is not a theme park. It's not there to fulfil the fantasies of rewilders looking for Instagrammable biodiversity or policy wins for their mailing lists. It's a working landscape, where people make a hard living from hard land. Those people deserve better than spin and lynx-lobbying.