New BBC Alba documentary spotlights the rise and fall of the Scottish wolf
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THE rise and fall of the wolf in Scotland is to take centre stage in a new BBC Alba documentary next week.
For 12,000 years wolves and humans shared Scotland’s landscape. However, as hunter- gatherers became farmers, wolves became their enemy and were hunted to extinction. Yet is the story of the Scottish wolf over?
These questions and more will be pondered on Am Madadh-Allaidh/Wolf which is set to air on Tuesday evening.
Wolves arrived as the last ice age ended, following – like Scotland’s first human hunter- gatherers – the herds of deer and reindeer that crossed a now lost land bridge from Europe.
For thousands of years wolves and humans shared the landscape as ‘apex predators’, with the wolf entering human art, myth and belief.
Naturalist Roddy Maclean sees parallels between how wolves and humans communicate and work together.
“They’re very capable. They can communicate together. When they howl, each one in the pack has a different voice and they can identify each other from their voices.”
New carbon dating of a wolf bone, found in the Highlands, reveals it to be more than 6200 years old. The bone seems to have been broken, and then healed naturally.
This casts a light on the social cohesion of the wolf pack, as Dr Andrew Kitchener of the National Museum of Scotland explains.
He continued: “Wolves live in packs so they hunt together and I guess if one is injured or not feeling very well then it gets a share of the food.
“So injured animals like wolves, or lions in their pride, can sometimes survive when one of them is injured.”
When humans gave up hunting and gathering and began farming the wolf became the enemy. Dr Aonghas MacCoinnich of University of Glasgow sympathises with the early farmers.
He said: “They had very hard lives, short lives, brutal lives.
"If we think of the number of challenges against the people who raised cattle and raised animals – it’s hard enough to do that anyway without wolves, but, if there were wolves too, that increased and worsened the difficulty.”
Many places throughout the Highlands are claimed to be where the last wolf was killed, but Dr MacCoinnich is sceptical.
“We can’t be sure when the last wolf in Scotland was killed. There are different stories from different places. All of those stories are without certain historical evidence.”
Nature writer Jim Crumley, who makes fun of ‘last wolf syndrome’, believes that Scotland’s last wolf probably died alone of old age in a cave.
"It’s a terrible arrogance to assume that we killed the last wolf,” he said.
“There would be one last wolf that we killed but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the last wolf.”
Shortly before 1700 the howl of the wolf was heard in Scotland for the last time. However, could they return?
The loss of wolves meant the job of keeping deer numbers down fell to humans.
Am Madadh-Allaidh airs on BBC Alba on Tuesday, October 3 and will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.
