How wolves were driven to extinction in Britain

Our relationship with the wolf in ancient times was not always difficult. The Venerable Bede
(673-735), an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar, was the first to write about wolves in Britain.

In a description of ‘Anderida’, or Ashdown Forest in Sussex, he observed its landscape to be “All but inaccessible and the resort of large herds of deer and of wolves”.

When Aelfric, the Abbot of Eynsham, wrote his colloquy more than a millennia ago, he too was relaxed in advising that it was ever the shepherd’s lot to “drive […] sheep to their pasture, and in the heat and in cold, stand over them with dogs, lest wolves devour them”.

Though there are no references to wolf hunting in Anglo-Saxon documents, when William the Conqueror defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, his triumph brought a new order to the country and hunting was elevated to the most noble of recreations.

Wolves as adversaries, were, along with wild boar and deer, protected by the ‘forest laws’ for the pleasure of royals and aristocracy. Designed by the Normans to reportedly “leave the English nothing but their eyes to weep with”, this decree forbade anything to be taken from the forest, from firewood to fruit. Any person who merely disturbed a deer might find even their weeping days were over, as blinding was deemed a suitable punishment.

While the Romans may have been the first to export the white wool of their hornless sheep from Britain, by the mid-1400s these animals had become the most important of assets.

Wool paid for churches, castles, wars and treasure chests. The early medieval churchmen toiled to maintain the flow produced from their bleating hordes. Wolves were “devilish” and “cruel” when they “scattered the good shepherd’s flocks” and as a result, every form of persuasion to ensure their persecution was preached.

Remissions from sin or criminal activities could be obtained on presentation of severed heads or tongues. It was all so obvious once you understood that the neat, ordered, farmed lands where the ripening fruits of finance flourished were righteous, while the wastes, wetlands and woods inhabited by wolves were demonically disordered.

This twaddle, when babbled from every pulpit, ensured that people believed that stabbing, beating, flaying, burning and poisoning wolves was good. In the end, we destroyed their age-old sanctuaries, dismissed them in fables and told tales of our great courage and their cowardice. It’s how victors forever frame those they defeat. But it’s not the truth.

In Britain, despite our worst doings, their memory still lingers. More than the legacy of any other native creature, like the wind-blown blossom from a wild fruit tree, wolf place-names strew the sediments of our land. In old Norse and Saxon, in Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Gaelic and English, their power to evoke remains strong.

Britain's lost beasts: when did the moose, wolf and bear go extinct in UK?

On the west coast of Scotland, Lochan a’ Mhadaich Riabhaich (the loch of the brindled wolf) lies like a sapphire, twinkling in the summer glory of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Do its waters recall the dappled wolf drinking? Had it paused to look down and consider its reflection, as animals often do, it could never have known the future impossibility of a wolf looking back.

In 1596, the cartographer Timothy Pont observed that, in the extreme wilderness of Strathnaver, in the north-west of the historic Scottish county of Sutherland, there were “many woolfs” and went on to note that the landscape there “never lack[ed] wolves more than are expedient”.

In 1630, Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun affirmed that there was still good hunting in Sutherland as its forests and chases contained an abundance of deer, wolves and other fauna. Evidence from elsewhere infers that at least a few lords preserved wolves in dwindling numbers for a time to prolong their own personal pleasures of pursuit.

It is likely that they lingered longest in Ireland. In 1786, a wolf that had been killing sheep was brought to bay by the “coarse, powerful hounds” of John Watson of Ballydarton in County Carlow. Rather a fine oil painting of the old man exists in the archive of the Royal Dublin Society. In the stark surrounds of his flagstone kitchen, he sits firm-faced in a red hunting coat at a table. His black polished boots have a turned-down rim of soft tan leather and on the knee of his white breeches a pale Kerry foxhound rests its head. Posed with one leg forward while the other is drawn back, both of his feet are planted firmly on the skin of a dark wolf lying prostrate on the floor.

The return of wolves to Europe

Getty video

Though the English Channel, like a citadel’s moat, forbids the natural return of the wolf to Britain, elsewhere in Europe their recovery over the course of recent decades has been truly astounding.

A real conservation success. Following strict protection under the terms of the Bern Convention in 1979, wolves moved steadily year on year westwards from the east. Nowadays, perhaps 17,000 roam the landscapes of Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Denmark, Germany and France, in lands from which they were harried less than a lifetime ago.

Maybe that number itself is wolfishly elusive and there are nearly 2,000 more, but whatever the total, the return of the wolf has been widely welcomed by societies whose outlooks and lifestyles have, in large part, changed beyond all recognition.

Happy endings are, however, hard to come by. When a wolf killed a pony called Dolly belonging to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in September 2022, old opponents pounced out of the darkness to stand on their hindlegs, twinkle and strut to the familiar refrain that wolves were bad for farming business.

On the 4th September 2023, von der Leyen fronted their chorus in vaudeville style by urging local and national authorities to take action within existing derogations from wildlife protection laws that allow individual wolves to be killed when they become a danger to livestock or humans. Soon after, in Switzerland (where the protection that enabled their return was ratified more than 40 years ago), despite any scientific, evidence-based or credible economic rationale, politicians bowed to farmers and approved a cull to reduce the estimated 32 packs in its territory to just 12.

The sweeping cull, which was designed to culminate in some packs being entirely extinguished while others merely sacrificed their cubs, began on the 1st December 2023. By mid-December, long-standing Swiss environmental organisation Pro Natura, along with WWF, BirdLife Switzerland and the Swiss Wolf Group, lodged a court appeal arguing that the cull threshold went far beyond what was permitted under Swiss law and was “very unscientific and politically motivated”. It was consequently suspended and packs such as the splendidly named Jatzhorn, Stagias and Hauts-Fort gained a reprieve.

The 20th century American naturalist Aldo Leopold, who was an early advocate of the need to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, understood their pivotal role. His moment of revelation came when he approached a wolf he had shot whilst working as a predator control officer for the government at an early stage in his career.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” he wrote in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac. “I realised then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.” But, he concludes, “Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise [...] I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”

How wolves could restore landscapes

If you want an illustration of what a wolf-less landscape looks like in a near-to-home sense, just take a walk in the British countryside. In our woodlands and plantations of conifers in dark rigid lines, ever-rising herds of Asiatic or Mediterranean deer combine with our own native red and roe to pluck bare the seedings and flowers of the forest floor.

Elsewhere, in things called fields, impounded by structures such as fences or hedges, sheep in their myriad millions shear the land bare. On our mountains, the old dry stone walls erected by every culture to contain their bleating hordes have often fallen into disrepair, and as a result the animals roam free.

Once you understand the nature of this impact, it is overwhelming. Fewer tree seedlings, fewer shrubs, fewer grasses, fewer mosses, fewer bogs. And so, like a falling comet, the numbers of creatures that rely on these plants and habitats hurtle to oblivion.

A growing community that understands that Britain is one of the most nature-impoverished nations on the planet wants action. Films, documentaries, research articles and sympathetic media reports have in recent years presented a well-reasoned case for wolf restoration. Forest life would be regenerated if deer declined, and pastures would become more wildlife-friendly very swiftly if sheep were removed or reduced.

In terms of habitat and prey availability, wolf reintroduction is feasible. One study indicated that between 10,139km2 and 18,857km2 of the Scottish Highlands is already suitable for between 50-94 packs. It’s the cultural fear that will be hard to overcome. Yet slowly, the wolf’s appeal is rising.

Wolf-watching tours are now available in Spain, France, Italy and Germany. One day soon, when farm subsidies finish, other income streams will need to be sought by land owners.

But for those that want to reintroduce the wolf to Britain, there won’t be any cavalry coming. No force of worth to do good. The nature conservation bodies of standing will probably hum and haw, while the government’s own wildlife advisory bodies will barely twitch in response.

Other views must be fostered in the knowledge that a new vision is both vital and right.

How wolves were driven to extinction in Britain - and why their return would help heal the landscape