Tracking the Highland Tiger by Marianne Taylor

Author:Marianne Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER FIVE

A Bloody History

Conflict is everywhere in nature: predators trying to kill prey; prey trying to kill predators by escaping and thus depriving them of their food; competitors doing battle over resources; parasites and thieves, mimics and cheats. Every individual animal is struggling to attain advantages that will allow it to survive and breed. Richard Dawkins says that all behaviour is driven by the selfishness of our genes and their blind need to exist into perpetuity. Through all this conflict, balance of a kind is the usual result because there is interdependence as well as conflict. But when one of the animals involved in a conflict of interests is Homo sapiens, the outcome tends to be the same every time.

In chapter 1 we looked at the wildcat’s history in Britain. When the last ice age ended some 12,000 years ago and Britain was gradually freed from its permafrost prison, many mammals that had retreated to what is now the mainland were able to return. They crossed via what was then dry (well, perhaps damp) land, connecting eastern England to north-west Europe. Among these recolonisers were wildcats – and also humans.

The modern geological epoch, the Holocene, began about 11,700 years ago. This time also marked the start of the Mesolithic period – the last era in which human beings were pursuing a truly hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They collected plant matter and used simple (but quickly more complex) tools to hunt animals. In Britain, which quickly became fully forested as the ice retreated, those animals were the likes of red and roe deer, wild boars, and some that are now extinct such as the mighty Irish elk and the native European wild ox, the aurochs. Smaller furry quarry might have included mountain hares in some areas, but this was before rabbits or brown hares were living in the British Isles. People would also have speared fish and caught birds when they could. Communities were not necessarily permanently settled in one place, but neither were they constantly nomadic and many long-term Mesolithic dwellings have been discovered.

At this time in history, there would have been no appreciable conflict between humans and wildcats. The wildcats didn’t compete with human interests in any obvious way. Fossil remains show that wildcats were present throughout England and Wales and they spread north into Scotland as the climate warmed up. There is also evidence that they reached several island groups, such as parts of the Inner Hebrides and the Isle of Man, and they almost certainly got there by swimming rather than being transported by humans.

It is also quite likely that wildcats reached Ireland. Anecdotal reports from the last two hundred years are quite convincing but they are not backed up with any actual specimens – there is no real evidence that wildcats lived in Ireland any more recently than the middle of the last millennium, despite exciting nineteenth-century accounts of fearsome tiger-striped felines that (like their counterparts in Great Britain) could attack and kill almost anything, including people.

However, enough

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