Jonny Hanson: Living with Lynx, Wolves & Bears - Rewilding & Large Carnivore Coexistence

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In this thought-provoking episode of Adventure Diaries, I’m joined by conservationist, academic, and author Jonny Hanson to explore one of the most complex and emotional topics in modern conservation: how humans and apex predators can share the land.

Jonny is the author of Living with Lynx: Sharing Landscape with Big Cats, Wolves and Bears, a compelling blend of field research, personal story, and social insight. From the mountains of Malawi to the peaks of Nepal, and from Scottish farmlands to the Snow Leopard Conservancy, Jonny has spent his life navigating the thin line between wild nature and domestic life.

We go deep on the ecological, emotional, and political dimensions of rewilding. What does it really mean to reintroduce predators like lynx and wolves to Britain and Ireland? What do they offer our ecosystems—and at what cost to farmers and communities?

Jonny speaks candidly about his own conflicted identity as both a farmer and a conservationist, the damage done by illegal predator releases in Scotland, and the urgent need to build long-term trust and governance if we’re to truly live with wild nature once again.

This episode is a journey into big landscapes, difficult questions, and the wild edges of our own imagination.

🔍 What You’ll Learn

• Why apex predators matter—and what they do that humans can’t replicate
• The surprising story behind illegal lynx releases in Scotland
• How rewilding taps into both our deepest fears and wildest hopes
• Lessons from Malawi, the Himalayas, and Swiss lynx coexistence projects
• Why conflict over predators is often really conflict between people

🌍 Resources & Mentions

• 📘 Living with Lynx by Jonny Hanson
  https://www.jonnyhanson.com
• 🐆 Snow Leopard Conservancy
   https://snowleopardconservancy.org
• 🎞️ Snow Leopard Trail – Jonny’s new documentary (screenings in 2025)
  Teaser: https://www.jonnyhanson.com
• 📚 Feral by George Monbiot – rewilding inspiration
  https://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/27/feral/
• 🎥 Gordon Buchanan – wildlife filmmaker (referenced story: grizzly bear in Scotland)

🧭 Whether you're a farmer, naturalist, or nature-curious listener, this one will challenge your views and expand your sense of what wild really means.

🎙️ Please make sure to click the 'Follow' the show – It helps more than you know.

Chapters

• 0:00 Snow Leopard Incident: A Wild Encounter
• 0:50 Introduction to Dr. Jonny Hanson
• 2:39 Jonny Hanson's Adventurous Upbringing
• 4:26 Early Influences and Love for Nature
• 8:46 Field Research and Conservation Efforts
• 15:49 Challenges and Complexities of Rewilding
• 25:17 The Role of Apex Predators in Ecosystems
• 29:06 Illegal Releases and Trust Issues
• 35:17 The Fascination with Lynx and Big Cats
• 39:58 Hollywood's Animal Focus
• 40:24 Misunderstandings About Coexistence
• 41:22 Snow Leopards in Nepal
• 44:04 Reintroduction Success Stories
• 45:45 Challenges of Predator Reintroduction
• 47:10 Economic Models for Conservation
• 54:12 Future of Rewilding in Britain
• 57:25 Promoting the Living with Lynx Book and Snow Leopard Trail Film
• 1:01:24 Final Thoughts and Reflections

Transcript

Chris Watson (00:00.312)
Do a bit of plugging. So that's us live now. So Jonny Hansen, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?

Jonny Hanson (00:00.906)
Get us through.

Jonny Hanson (00:06.494)
I'm good Chris, it's great to be on the show. I'm looking forward to an adventurous conversation with you.

Chris Watson (00:11.734)
Yeah, likewise, likewise, I'm excited about this. Yeah, because for all the adventure that's on the show, I do love a little bit of natural world wildlife content. And the frame for today is this fascinating book that you have just published, Living with Links, Sharing Landscape with Big Cats, Wolves and Bears. And I mean, it's quite a hot topic from so many angles and so many lenses, most notably,

Jonny Hanson (00:39.519)
Isn't it?

Chris Watson (00:41.486)
There's a lot of stuff going on in Scotland at the minute, will, you know, very, very recent, which we'll come onto. So, and that is a frame, but before we get to that, you know, kind of where we start the show, usually I want to understand a little bit more about Jonny, your background. So let's get some context before we get into that. Cause you've had quite an adventurous, an upbringing, you know, between Ireland, Ireland and Malawi. What, you know, what was that like?

Jonny Hanson (01:02.816)
to that.

Jonny Hanson (01:08.34)
Yeah, was a lot of it, like a lot of my life. sounds like it's just nonstop adventure. Most of my life then as nice quiet domesticity, just doing the dishes and putting the dishwasher on and all the rest of it. But there have been experiences and opportunities going back to very early age that have molded my me and but also molded my love of adventure. And I suppose before I even got into early adventures that I went on and participated in.

The earliest adventures that I experienced were adventures that I heard about from my dad, who also was adventurous. I reckon it's the Viking genes running through the Hansen lineage going back to the Scandinavian times, thousand years ago or whatever. in his 20s, painted it in development work in Lebanon during the Civil War. He smuggled Bibles through the Iron Curtain and some very narrow escapes. And he cycled around the world in the early 80s. So I grew up thinking that

that sort of behavior was completely acceptable and perfectly normal. And I then went about trying to better his adventures. I'm not sure I have, but I still got a ways to go. So that definitely got me started in terms of a lot of adventures in the mind. Like it's believing I can do this and I'm gonna do this. So when I have had a role model like that who had done all of those things, I said, well, if he can do it, I'm gonna do it. So I did.

Chris Watson (02:34.346)
Yeah, smuggling Bibles, I'm sure there's a few layers of the onion we could peel back and that sounds quite the adventure. So see, when you were younger, did you have an idea on where you wanted to be? Did young Jonny have a vision for what the future looked like?

Jonny Hanson (02:55.092)
Yeah, young Jonny 30 years ago when I was seven loved two very different things which have carried through into what I do now and actually have come together and what I do now including the book. One was that I had this love of nature and of wildlife and particularly of big cats. I just loved big cats, small cats, medium sized cats, which is what Lynx are technically. And I had just this love of the wild and this fascination with it, which I fed through.

documentaries and stories and National Geographic and then partly growing up in Africa and getting to see all of that in real life, not just on the silver screen. But at the same time, I had this other love of the domestic and I loved farming and I loved cattle and sheep. come from a long lineage of farmers who have farmed in Ireland for centuries. And I grew up in a rural part of the Republic of Ireland as well. And so I was just immersed in that too and came to really love and appreciate that. And so often those things are seen as

in conflict and sometimes they are and we'll talk a lot more about that on the show but I came to love them both and I got to the point where I said I don't want to choose between these I choose them both and I want to try and build bridges between them and that's what I do now specialising in this coexistence between large carnivores like wolves, lynx, bears and livestock farming, livestock farmers, livestock farming communities to understand how they can share landscapes together so

I can draw that straight line between 30 years ago and in mid 90s to now. I'm very privileged to get to do that because not everybody gets to follow their dreams in their hearts. It's a privilege to be able to do that and to able to share it now in book form and in podcast form like tonight is a privilege too.

Chris Watson (04:40.782)
Yeah, fantastic. was your exposure and experience to nature and wildlife then? And actually, what age were you? Were you a teenager or were you a bit younger when you were in Malawi?

Jonny Hanson (04:54.538)
Yeah, I was there for about two years as an infant. so probably some of my earliest memories, like I learned to walk and talk there. I don't remember that period of Malawi. But then when I was 11, it was always there. lived in Ireland all through the 90s from two to 11 and always knew we'd go back. was always fed stories of Malawi. And when I was 11 and 99, we went back and I spent all of my high school years there. So until 2007, so very formative. I became an adult in Africa.

And I, as I say in the book, I was born in Ireland, but I was made in Malawi and in particular I was made in the mountains of Malawi, which are crucible in one sense. They're big and they're hard and they're, you know, the bushfires and 30 plus degrees heat, not the sort of stuff we have problems we have with Scottish and Irish mountains, Chris, but it shaped me and it shaped my love of wild places and of nature and

But also people, you know, there people living in those places. So I came to accept and understand we sometimes have this myth of pristine nature that nature is somewhere where people are not. And therefore the problem is when large carnivores belong in places where people are not. So when they show up in the Scottish Highlands or in the future across Britain and Ireland or in Western Europe or North America where people are, there's a problem. So again, it challenged this preconception of nature is over there and people are over there actually.

Chris Watson (06:07.896)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (06:19.444)
We have been sharing landscapes with nature for millions of years. We are nature and that includes this relationship with apex predators.

Chris Watson (06:28.308)
Yeah, and we will come on to that. I think what I'm striving for in this show is not to today is, I I recommend we'll come on to a bit more of a plug on this book later, because there's some fantastic concepts in it and there's some stuff I want to kind of challenge a little bit on it in terms of like the thinking on certain things and how you balance, you know, because there's opposing views and stuff like that. is quite, there's various.

sensitivities with it but we'll come on to that so you people really need to pick this up because we have a short window today and it will not do this justice because there's complexities and there's it's just fascinating there's so many things that I've picked up on this and I mean I'm going on a bit of a tangent but some of the stuff that's happening in the Netherlands and I travel to the Netherlands you know every other week on business and I didn't realize what was happening with bison in the Netherlands as an example but we'll come to that so you know

Jonny Hanson (06:57.846)
No.

Jonny Hanson (07:17.718)
Okay.

Yeah.

Chris Watson (07:25.176)
People need to listen to this watch it, pick up the book and go down the rabbit hole. So that's all I'll say. So field research, you've traveled the world, you your field research, you know, over in the US, North America, over in, you know, the Himalaya and places like that. So talk us through how you go from being, you know, a youngster back in Malawi, coming back to the UK and then getting into...

Jonny Hanson (07:44.214)
Mm.

Chris Watson (07:54.862)
conservation, your journey into that, how did that come to be?

Jonny Hanson (07:59.135)
Yeah.

Yeah, I spent all my summers growing up in Malawi back in Ireland working on the farms of friends and my grandfather and my uncles. But when I was at university at Queen's University in Belfast, which I now work at, I decided it was time to up the ante and just go wild. So I went and worked with all these. Literally, I thought, right, big cats, I need to work with those. Birds of prey, need to, I had this list. I'm going to work through all these.

amazing animals, I'm going to find places to volunteer and work with them. And no sensible modern scientific zoo in its right mind lets a 19 year old anywhere near anything exciting. So I ended up working in, if you've seen Tiger King, places like that with people like that, some really dodgy dodgy places with no health and safety. And the animals were the least dangerous of the inhabitants in these places. But I didn't care.

Chris Watson (08:48.344)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (08:53.742)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (09:00.248)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (09:00.626)
I was 19, 20, virtually fearless, having the time of my life working with jaguars, tigers, rhinos, monkeys, emus, you name it. I worked with it, snakes, crocodiles, tarantulas, wolf dogs. And it brought just, I got to have animal encounters and experiences, some of which were quite terrifying, many of which were not that just took it to a different level. And I thought this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

but also bring it together with the farming, which is what we'll talk about. So it was a real adventure. My university summers were packed full of exciting things. At the end of them, the last summer, I went to Nepal and I just fell in love with the Himalaya. Chris said they are the greatest mountain range on earth and something just lit a fire within me. And I thought I want to come back here someday and do research. And that was the next link in the chain.

Chris Watson (09:37.25)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (09:41.624)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (09:57.23)
Yeah, and on that, I you are part of the Snow Leopard Conservancy, what's the official title? There's a Snow Leopard Conservancy program.

Jonny Hanson (10:08.278)
Yeah, it's a bit of an American term, number of Brits who have trouble saying conservancy, it's more of a, we would say trust or charity or something, but the Americans are doing with conservancy. The Snow Leopard Conservancy is a fantastic NGO that I've partnered with for my PhD, partnering with still as an affiliate, I advise them on social science and making a film about some of their work in Nepal that we'll maybe touch on briefly later.

Chris Watson (10:17.675)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (10:32.163)
Yes.

Jonny Hanson (10:36.156)
Again, what interested me is that they're based on science, rigorous science, but they're also based on working with local communities and not imposing conservation, which conservation has a bit of baggage around that, you know, going back to the colonial era. And there were people of their time with faults and flaws, like people in the future will look back on us and judge us as people of our time too. But nevertheless, there was some top down baggage, shall we say, that the Snow Leopard Conservancy

flips and actually works from the grass roots with local communities, many of whom are livestock farmers. So I worked with them and understanding how do how do small scale farmers share landscapes with large carnivores that we think are these romantic, beautiful creatures and they are, but they can be an almighty pain in the neck that actually can decimate your livelihood in a single night if they get into your corral or your clothespens. So a lot of adventurous ideas, but

The actual act of doing field work and talking to people and working with my team of Nepali research assistants, was some, those are big mountains, Chris, and there was a lot of carrying a lot of stuff and heavy weights and at high altitude and mountains are just, and those mountains, they just humble the human spirit and they humble the human blood.

Chris Watson (11:44.898)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (11:52.024)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (11:56.334)
I was going to say, I think in the literature you can quite clearly say it's had a profound impact on you and through the interviews and the experience and I believe there's a documentary or a short film coming out, is that correct? About that as well?

Jonny Hanson (12:09.718)
Yeah, that's right. So I've been working on this parallel project called Snow Leopard Trail about the Annapurna region of Nepal and my two of my Nepali colleagues there, Rinzin Lama and Tashi Gale. And that short film will be premiering this year and just highlighting their work. And also with tourism, what role can tourism play in turning the snow leopard from what at times is a liability that eats people's livestock into an asset that

actually people pay to come and be in its kingdom even if they don't see it or rarely see it. I've never seen a snow leopard in the wild so there is that challenge with snow leopard tourism but it's been it's absolutely shaped me and it's a lot of those adventures in Nepal I now take to understand this issue in closer to home in Britain and Ireland in a way that 10 years ago I didn't think I ever would be.

Chris Watson (12:47.885)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (13:05.102)
But it just made me think of something. I don't know if you've seen the thing that's doing the rounds on social media at the moment. It turns out to be fake. It's a composite image of a snow leopard on Everest. I you've seen that doing the rounds and it got quite a bit of hysteria. And it's been proven to be fake because there's nothing, there's no prey at that kind of altitude apparently. But there's some stunning images, but it's not doing the cause any good.

Don't know if you'd seen that or not, but yeah, not the best.

Jonny Hanson (13:38.568)
I think I haven't seen it recently, but I'd seen a version of it before. And yet it reminds me, suppose, in an age of AI where increasingly voices, images, everything is generated, that authentic connection that comes from adventure in outside, not just in wild places like Nepal, but in your garden even or in your local park, which is how most of us and how I experience nature most of the time. Those experiences are even more important than ever before.

Chris Watson (13:51.66)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (14:08.502)
because they can't be faked and that authentic connection is what we as people are looking for with each other and ourselves but also with nature.

Chris Watson (14:18.546)
Right, so with that said, let's come on to the book then. So what is the objective with it, Jonny? Because like you say, it is complex, it's got quite a, it's got various different angles that you come at it and you do it, you mean you do it very well, you do justice to the topic, but it is complex. So what are you hoping to achieve with the book?

Jonny Hanson (14:42.388)
Yeah, I wanted to really kickstart a balanced conversation about the complexities and give citizens in Britain and Ireland, whether their feelings are fixed on this topic for or against, whether their feelings like myself are mixed on it and they kind of like the idea, but they're not sure how it would work with farming, which is my concern in all of this. I wanted to really...

delve into that and investigate it from all angles and not just to as we often and increasingly in this age fall into the trap. It's just talking to people who kind of think like us and they repeat back to some version of what we already believe. I wanted to go out and talk to everybody about this from people on one end of the spectrum all the way to the other left wing, right wing, liberal, conservative, anti-

Apex Predator, pro Apex Predator and then everybody in between as well because it's never an us and them binary for and against. It's always a spectrum of perspectives and everything. And secondly, I wanted to bring this topic to life. There's an increasing number of scientific papers that are being produced and some people read them. I have to read them because it's part of my job, but

So often, stories go to die in science. I'm sorry to say it, but just academics murder stories and they take really exciting topics and they just kill it with impenetrable language and the scientific method as important as it is. So I wanted to turn this into a story and an adventure where I went off on my adventures and brought this topic to life and brought it to the attention of the folks in Britain and Ireland.

Chris Watson (16:01.449)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (16:24.33)
Yeah, how did you find the process of doing that and trying to decouple some of the technicalities, the science, the kind of jargon to make it relatable and just so that people can realize, because it is very, it reads like a bit of an adventure novel and it delves into science and it kind of strides, and it balances that very well, but how's your process? Because if you're an academic and you're doing that in your day job and then trying to get down and...

Jonny Hanson (16:33.75)
Hmm.

Jonny Hanson (16:39.286)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (16:48.598)
number.

Chris Watson (16:49.72)
get into that creative way of mind but still doing science justice. What was your process like writing this?

Jonny Hanson (16:55.998)
Yeah, that's a great question. So partly what I've done is I wrote based on the same 56 interviews on the same travels, I wrote a technical report. that's like it's really the social science that is the hard facts on this is how you do this. This is how you do this. This is how they do X, Y and Z in Colorado or Wyoming or whatever. And so that is there as standalone. And then we're publishing academic articles from that. But in writing this

There is a certain amount of science, I would say my had this rough. The recipe was two third story and one third science. So pretty much every chapter is two thirds story. So there'll be either one long story or two shorter stories. And then in the last part, we unpack some of the science, but we use the stories to understand the science and we make it. We make trying to make it fun as well, Chris. You know, life is too hard to just be too serious all of the time.

Chris Watson (17:50.402)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (17:53.334)
We need a bit of humour. think we Celts are particularly good at this compared to the English south of Hadrian's Wall. know, life is just too hard to be too serious. So we should laugh about it. there's some. I've tried to inject a bit of humour into the topic and the subject, which otherwise can be quite serious. And people obviously get very emotive about it.

Chris Watson (17:53.934)
Yes.

Yeah

Chris Watson (18:09.356)
That isn't it, yeah.

Chris Watson (18:18.094)
Yeah, it's a wonderful read and yeah, that's why I asked the question because you can see because you're reading it and you need to remind yourself, you know, there's serious aspects to this and then it does touch into that. So in terms of, so maybe thinking about the, you know, the 56 interviews that you've done across, and I'm particularly interested in what's going on in North America and their views as well, know, reintroducing wolves and stuff in certain areas, but

Jonny Hanson (18:42.134)
Hmm.

Chris Watson (18:48.238)
Did you have any static in terms of people not wanting to engage on the topic at all? how did you get the interviews and get people to engage? How receptive were they considering it can be quite a sense of the subject really?

Jonny Hanson (19:05.78)
Yeah, yeah, it varied widely just from like cold emailing people. I had some personal contacts through the network that funded my fieldwork that opened up particularly conversations in the agricultural space and that included in with North America, Western Europe, but also in Britain and Ireland. No one that I've seen has published research that has actually talked to farming.

leaders and farming unions about this because they feel as a general they're quite guarded and they're defensive because this is a hard topic. On the other hand the Rewilders and those who are introducing feel I think that history is on their side. Sometimes they feel that ethics and morality are on their side and that's definitely where there's a lot of energy and they're know they're proactive, they're optimistic, they're on the front foot. Farmers feel like they're on the back foot and defensive on this issue and that makes them then often reticent to talk about it. So because I

was and am neutral on this despite having kind of within myself a spectrum of opinions on this topic. That gives me a certain amount of legitimacy to talk to everybody and also because I have this dual background. I've kept livestock, I've run a farm but I've also worked with lions and tigers and not yet bears. my, and so again in this...

Chris Watson (20:09.944)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (20:23.874)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (20:27.254)
space that's the kind of role that I see for myself and that gives me access to people who probably otherwise wouldn't talk to me whether they're high level government officials who were state agriculture commissioners in Wyoming for instance all the way down to the rancher in rural Colorado who I just co-called and left and said you know can I chat to you and he said yes but I don't want my name included he was fair enough so it really

Chris Watson (20:50.764)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (20:53.554)
It just depended widely. There was some serendipity, was some very long term planning and there was people who gave me contact with other people, the usual. Just like unraveling a ball of string and to see where it all went.

Chris Watson (21:02.67)
So yeah, I mean I say it with this show all the time. I I do so much cold outreach on this and it's amazing how many time people want to engage and say yes. So without going on a tangent I think there's something to be taken from that. know if you've got an idea or a subject or if you want to write a book about something reach out to people because people are people and a lot of the time you'll get that response.

Jonny Hanson (21:22.858)
Hmm. Yeah.

Chris Watson (21:30.478)
Rolling back, because I was going to ask this later and I just because I'm so curious about this as a farmer who has kept livestock Being completely and brutally honest. How conflicted are you on the subject of that if you were to think about links being reintroduced and Potentially stealing some of your livestock. How you know Have you processed that as a scenario and try to put yourself in that type of shoe those shoes to see how

Jonny Hanson (21:54.582)
Hmm.

Chris Watson (21:59.374)
how you would come at that from that? Because I know, and before I finish that thought, I know that there's like, in certain areas, and I'm not so sure about the states, but I know in Europe, there's compensation for livestock losses and things like that. And to a degree in Scotland actually, around the sea eagle situation, but how do you feel about that? Have you thought that through really?

Jonny Hanson (22:22.228)
Yeah, I guess my experience of losing livestock, although I grew up around farming, I didn't actually farm myself until I set up and ran Northern Ireland's first community owned farm. This was after my PhD in snow leopard conservation. Although the species was different and the hills were a lot smaller, it was still about how do you balance conservation and development and how do you have landscapes? We did tourism as well. We did work with

refugees and asylum seekers, adults with learning difficulties, faith communities, everybody. It was about engaging people on the farm, both in the environmental and in the agricultural. But it certainly opened my eyes to running a small scale farm, albeit a social enterprise, the challenges of it. And so now when I come to think about this issue in Britain and Ireland, I think about it through the lens of my academic social science training and my academic papers and deconstructing ideas and putting them back together and theories and all the rest. But

I also think about it logistically from running that small farm. I think if I had to make those changes because I needed to fence differently or I needed to keep livestock, guardian dogs, llamas, donkeys, or I was losing livestock, I think to myself, what would that have meant for my daily routine? What would that have meant for my way of life? And how would that have impacted the bottom line of the farm business that I was running? And I think for me, I feel that it gives me quite

powerful insights into this because a lot of it does hinge on some real changes to how we farm and to potential impacts like the loss of livestock but even more than the real impact it's the perceived impact which are often much greater than the actual impact but with these species perception is reality it's very much like politics I myself have not the only livestock I've ever lost to a predator was

a goose to a fox and I talk about that in the book and I did feel really torn in that moment because I was so angry at that bloody red fox for killing my gander and economic effects of what it was going to mean for Christmas and not having goslings to fatten and raise and sell. At same time I just knew that you know the fox was just doing what the fox has been doing for millions of years and the gander was just lunch at a rough time of year, it probably had cubs of itself. So

Chris Watson (24:41.005)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (24:44.118)
That helps me to weigh up the scales, but there absolutely is a tension. I still feel the tension. And if it was me, you know, would I in a reintroduction area be happy to set up and run a demonstration farm and practice all these things? Yes. But I think it might be different if I was a multi-generational farmer who didn't like the idea and whose business was struggling to make ends meet. I think my perspective might be different.

Chris Watson (25:11.342)
And I think that's an important point because know farming in its current situation without you know being honest I don't know that the entire ins and outs of it but I know that it can be a very struggling and the industry where people are struggling and I think our politics and government systems don't particularly help farmers. So it's quite fraught as it is and the balance of trying to talk about the benefits the ecological benefits of introducing you know wild cats and

and predators essentially, it's such a complex subject. maybe on that point, what benefits do you see? And I know some of this is covered in the books, but what do predators offer by reintroduction to the ecosystems? If we take maybe the UK, Scotland and Ireland as an example, and we'll come on to some of the recent examples with links in Scotland, but what do you think that they offer?

Jonny Hanson (26:07.796)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (26:10.54)
the environment.

Jonny Hanson (26:11.894)
So apex predators have this powerful and profound role in ecosystems where although they are usually very small in number, they have this outsize ecological impact that cascades all the way down through the web of life. And apex predators means that they're at top of the food chain along with us, suppose. But those benefits mainly because they eat herbivores, so they eat deer. So they control and change the population of deer to an extent, but they also change the behavior.

of deer. So deer will maybe be less in this area and because they're in less in this area, there'll be more plant growth, that sort of thing. And one of those things is called trophic cascades. The other is landscape affair and folks who listening can go and Google those and read up more about that. But we as people, can farm and we can hunt, but we can't quite replicate those benefits that apex predators can do. they're really

amazing ecological benefits that apex predators can restore to landscapes at the same time, especially when they return to landscapes that are different from the way they used to be, where we are, where we have livestock and roads and wind turbines and houses. We often don't see quite the same effects as if they return to somewhere like Yellowstone, where there are very few people. And even then, it's a bit more complicated. So these species can have amazing benefits for nature and help.

restore ecosystems but they're not a silver bullet. They alone will not solve the nature crisis and we need to I think acknowledge that and also that when they come to somewhere like Scotland or even more so to Ireland where for example with lynx which eat roe deer we don't have roe deer in Ireland so will they eat cichidae which is an invasive species maybe but cichidae can be three times bigger than a roe deer so maybe not. There is a degree of uncertainty ecologically.

And there's then there's that degree of uncertainty with livestock. If there are lots of roe deer, they probably won't eat many sheep. But in some parts of Europe, they're eating zero sheep per lynx per year, which is not a problem. But in Norway, it's up to 17. And that's a bit of an outlier. It's mostly, you know, between zero and five. But even so, there's unknowns. And we, think we as a species, unless we're adventure junkies like us, we struggle with unknowns and risk.

Chris Watson (28:17.742)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Watson (28:30.734)
Yeah

Jonny Hanson (28:33.402)
And we should just be conscious of that. Some people don't like risk. And if it's your family farm that you've been on for seven generations, would you accept that risk? Would I accept that risk? I think these are valid points. And the book is really saying these are, I think these are valid points. It's not just conspiracy theories and bad farming unions are trying to stop X, Y and Z from happening. And if we want this to happen, we really need to think how we're going to address these concerns and fund the

Chris Watson (28:46.189)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (29:03.638)
package of tools that allow us to share landscapes with these species on the same timeframe of owning land. And what I mean by that is a pilot project to reintroduce the species might run for five years and the government policy that will fund it for five years. But species are in landscapes for decades and centuries, maybe millennia, and farmers are in landscapes for decades and maybe even centuries. So how do we make sure that the funds and the resources are there?

to match that timeframe. And so far, I think there's quite a lot of gaps there, Chris, that need to be filled and that I'm pointing to and hope to fill.

Chris Watson (29:39.662)
It has to start somewhere, though, it's almost like that kind of getting to the start point, because I think in Scotland we've tried to pass the legislation a couple of times and it's failed and we've had a new government fairly recently and they have said that they do not intend to, it's not in their manifesto to even consider this at all, is a bit, which you know...

Jonny Hanson (30:05.92)
Hmm.

Chris Watson (30:09.23)
you know, the fact it's not even up for debate is part of the problem in its own right, but we have had, and I think we'll talk, I was going to touch on it later, but we have had illegal releases of links. We had it in December, I think, up in the Cairngorms mountain range. They were spotted fairly quickly and captured fairly quickly and sadly one of them passed away, didn't survive. But as recently as this week,

There's been more sightings in the south of Scotland, in Dumfries, and they haven't been captured. So it makes me wonder, who's releasing these links? Where are they coming from? Because, I mean, they are adults as well, so there must be people somewhere that hold, that have got links held up in a farm or somewhere, because they're not being released from zoos, they're not pets. Any views on that?

Jonny Hanson (31:06.322)
It's a fast moving and very interesting topic to observe. I'm sure for the people on the ground, especially the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland having to manage some of this and probably NatureScot as well. I'd say it's very stressful. Try it with the media, fairly intense media glare, both social and traditional. So I don't envy those people. I think they're probably doing the best job they can given the circumstances. There's a lot of unknowns.

Chris Watson (31:21.134)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (31:26.03)
Yeah

Jonny Hanson (31:34.742)
It's just some very murky stuff going on. These animals are probably bred in Britain, I think. would be extremely difficult to import them illegally. But it's obviously been done on the sly in some way. I understand the frustrations, but I just don't think that this is the way to go about it because any sort of extreme action in any sort of

Chris Watson (31:45.08)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (32:03.412)
walk of life tends to result in a polar, polarisation to the other extreme where there's then a counter reaction which is just as extreme and that I think you can draw that straight line between the illegal releases and the Scottish First Minister just putting a red pen through the idea and all those years of work that various NGOs in Scotland and the North of England have been doing legitimately to build trust are just wiped out or certainly set back.

Chris Watson (32:19.63)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Watson (32:23.714)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (32:32.038)
And that's, it's a real shame because at the end of the day with, we're talking about lynx and wolves and bears and snow leopards and all the rest of it, but the act of reintroducing these species, especially because they can't return to Scotland, Ireland, themselves is done by us. And that means it's a social process done by people. And it means it's a relational process. And of all the things that make relationships work, trust is, is really up there as being.

absolutely crucial and I feel that this has really degraded some of the trust that was being slowly built and it just feeds conspiracy theories. I was talking to a bunch of sheep farmers recently in Northumbria at a meeting and I was just talking to them about this and you know one of them said to me if links are not dangerous to people, which I had said they're virtually no risk to people, if I had small children and I lived in a lynx reintroduction landscape I wouldn't be worried in the slightest.

Chris Watson (33:10.743)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (33:28.15)
And she said to me, but if links are not dangerous, why are they governed by the dangerous wild animal act in the UK? Which is a piece of legislation that covers captive links. And that's the sort of thing where conspiracy theories come from. There's an element of truth. Captive links, if you want to keep links in captivity, you need that piece of legislation. But it's nothing to do with wild links and those links in captivity, like the animals in the book in captivity that I encountered are far more dangerous to people because they've lost their fear.

keep off us as humans. So there's the potential for this to just generate a lot of conflict and a lot of heat and a lot of wild conspiracy theories. It's a real shame Chris to see it happening this way.

Chris Watson (34:08.834)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (34:12.67)
I'll probably say it back. mean, part of me, I mean, I'll be brutally honest with this as well. I hope I don't get backlash for this, but I find some of it quite exciting because I spend a lot of time in the hills and I think if I came across a links it, I would be bowled over. But I do get all the other complexities of it and the challenges that might bring people's livelihoods and the danger that they may perceive with some of that as well. So I'm not trying to...

whitewash that at all but there's just something about... mean, complete side note, when I was about 18, 20, 30 years ago almost, I seen a wild cat when I was camping, came out a tree, a black cat and it was about the size of a small dog and it still sticks with me to this day and that was just before you get to the Highlands and that...

Jonny Hanson (34:42.954)
No.

Jonny Hanson (34:54.934)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (35:09.634)
to think, to see something like that in the wild was, in all these years later, it's still, it's a very striking memory. quite, the idea of it excites me, but I don't want to gloss over the dangers and the perceived dangers that may come with, you know, illegal rewilding or whatever we want to call it. Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (35:17.205)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (35:28.502)
Yeah, but no, I would agree with you. I absolutely love the idea in principle and the idea of coming across a lynx or even a wolf or heck even a bear in the forests or mountains of Britain or Ireland. I absolutely love that idea. And that is based partly on not just on a romantic notion, but I grew up in Malawi running through the bush with the African equivalent of many of those species hyena and.

leopard on the edge of the city. We lived in Blantyre, one of the fastest growing cities in the world at the time, and yet on the edge of the city where hyena and leopard and then out in other mountains there were, bigger animals we saw on safari and so I grew accustomed to that and then in Nepal, yes, I've never seen a snow leopard but even just being in a landscape where a species like that is present, there are no words to describe it. is something marvelous beyond the telling of it.

Chris Watson (36:18.392)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (36:22.286)
Do you know the story about the wild grizzly bear in Scotland?

Jonny Hanson (36:28.884)
I've heard rumours of this on one of the Scottish islands.

Chris Watson (36:30.286)
Yes, exactly. So I went to see Gordon Buchanan a couple of weeks ago. So he's doing a tour, Lions and Tigers and Bears, it's called, about all about his career. Hopefully I don't give anything up. In fact, his tour will be finished by the time this is live. So he, and I didn't know this, there was some Scottish guy back in the seventies or where it was, had a pet grizzly bear, literally had a pet grizzly bear.

in Scotland and he used to take it on tour of the pubs and clubs and it would do this act and he went to an island and it got loose and was on the run for three weeks and some farmer just found it going about his job in the morning. Can you imagine that on one of the Scottish islands in the Hebrides and you stumble upon a grizzly bear? I thought that was hilarious but equally sad for the bear.

Yeah, so I digress, I digress. Actually, rolling back, why links? What is it that fascinates you with the links? More than others.

Jonny Hanson (37:29.653)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (37:35.445)
No.

Jonny Hanson (37:43.368)
more than say wolves or even bears. For me, I'm just a cat person. I love large carnivores in general, things with pointy teeth and pointy claws, but there is something about cats. And what I think happens a lot with species like this is that they become almost like spirit animals. We identify with them. So we often identify with animals that we think share similar characteristics with us. I'm a bit of a...

I was going to say a lone wolf, but that's probably not the right term to use. I'm a bit of a loner. like, I'm an introvert. I like time by myself. I need time by myself to recharge my batteries after spending it with other people present company excluded. And whereas cats, know, wolves are very gregarious and group animals and that's why they're so successful in part, but there's something about cats and it's that agility. They're incredibly.

cryptic and elusive just their way to move through landscapes that you almost never see them still waiting to see a snow leopard. Growing up in Malawi I heard leopards never saw them, saw lion once. These animals are on one hand these biological beings that live in these landscapes around us but they're also these psychological symbols that haunt our inner worlds as much as our outer worlds they kind of live in both of those worlds at the same time and

Chris Watson (38:45.858)
Yes.

Jonny Hanson (39:08.084)
They symbolized me like I talk about in the book. They symbolized the wild. They symbolized the wild as an idea. They symbolized the wild as a place. And through rewilding, then they symbolize it as a process that takes it from something that's far away in a Gordon Buchanan documentary or in National Geographic. And they bring it into right here and now in Scotland and Ireland and maybe England. And I love that idea, but some people don't.

Chris Watson (39:37.634)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (39:37.812)
I guess that the book is about acknowledging and trying to navigate the tension between those multiple perspectives.

Chris Watson (39:45.012)
Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, that's a very thorough answer, a very sincere answer. Again, that just made me think, because I'm fascinated with this topic just generally and I read a lot of books and magazines and, you know, that's why I of stumbled across yourself as well. I was reading an article not so long ago that basically surmises that there are also wild puma potentially roaming in Scotland and they have

the reason that they have come to that conclusion is through like sheep carcasses and stuff that they have found that they've sent for analysis of the jaw bone bites and stuff into the bones. So apparently there's rumors that there's wild puma roaming in parts of the Scottish Highlands, which I'd love to see more insight and research on. And again, because I spent quite a bit of time in the Highlands, would be good to know where those...

those hot spots are but has that come up in any of research at all?

Jonny Hanson (40:47.976)
funny, was doing my Dublin lunch on Friday night and someone asked me about this and on one hand I'm quite skeptical to be honest about that because of the lack of what I would describe as hard and concrete evidence but the fact that people keep saying this again and again and again so George Monbiot and Ferrell that famous rewilding book that

partly inspired me to go and look at this topic in detail. He talks, he has a chapter on just on this issue and how many people see these cats, even though they don't never quite show up in tangible evidence that would satisfy my desire for tangible evidence at least. It just keeps happening and it's not just because people are had too many pints on the way home from the pub or something. And he theorizes that evolution is at play. There's something on a dark night of shadow.

Chris Watson (41:34.382)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (41:42.678)
And I can well believe that because we, you know, you go back far enough, Chris, we all grew up in Africa. The human race evolved in Africa and we evolved being hunted by and in turn hunting big cats and wild dogs and large carnivores. So those memories, those instinctive responses to things that might eat us are there in us. And I think that sometimes leads to the perception that

these animals are more risk to us than they actually are. And on top of that, you have all these centuries of fairy tales and you know, Little Red Riding Hood has a lot to answer for that a big bad wolf is going to come and eat granny. The chances of that happening are so small, they can probably not be calculated. But again, the perception lives on. I think like, and I come back to again that these animals, they live out there in the landscapes of the world around us, but they also live in the landscapes of the world within us.

Chris Watson (42:21.55)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (42:40.846)
That's a very valid point and you do cover that quite well in the book. The stigma associated with, take Wills, Little Red Riding Hoods, everyone's scared. You grow up as a kid shit scared because you read these Wills are going to come at you. The three bears, they're coming at you at the forage. It's like...

Jonny Hanson (42:54.996)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Watson (43:02.06)
It's like that whole backdrop is in the subconscious whether we like to admit it or not and every time there's a Hollywood movie about something like this there's always like you know some, particularly if it's an animal focused thing there's something out to get you, know like even sharks to an extent you know complete, you know you're in their territory a lot of the time so you you don't get to see with sharks if you don't want to get bitten you know it's, but yeah I mean it is quite an important, it's quite a

Jonny Hanson (43:05.238)
Yeah. 100%.

Jonny Hanson (43:17.824)
Yeah. man. Yeah.

Chris Watson (43:31.808)
It's quite a, you know, how do you change that perception when something that's so indoctrinated across the world? It's not just a UK thing, you know, it's, you yeah, yeah. But what, see what that said, Jonny, what's probably the most misunderstood point that you think about the potential for coexistence, maybe say back in the UK? Is it just the fear mongering aspect that they think?

Jonny Hanson (43:54.848)
Hmm.

Chris Watson (43:59.618)
they are a danger to humans or more than just, you know, we kind of touched on the livelihood aspect and stuff, what in terms of the impact it could have on livestock and livelihoods, what would you say is the most misunderstood point in your opinion?

Jonny Hanson (44:16.182)
In my opinion, I think understanding coexistence between people and apex predators, whether we're talking about in the future or increasingly in Scotland in the present, here in these islands or we're talking about Nepal or Malawi or somewhere else, is that it is less to do about the impacts of predators on us, whether real or perceived, and it's more about the conflict between our different versions of these animals.

So to me, I'll give you a great example of that from Nepal with Snow Leopards. was in Nepal late 23, filming to make this short documentary and I have, you know, Snow Leopards are my spirit animal. I've almost worshiped them for my whole life and the power that those animals have over me, I have dedicated much of my life so far and will for the remainder to understand and work on the conservation of the species that I've never even seen and I may never see in the wild and I accept that. And so to me,

this in relative affluence going to these landscapes, even though I haven't seen one, this is it's a symbol of the greatest mountain range on earth. It is the most enigmatic and elusive of the big cats. is beauty personified. I could go on all night just talking about snow leopards, Chris. But when I was in Nepal making this film about my Nepali colleagues and their work there, Rinzin got a WhatsApp message from someone and he said, an adult.

female snow leopard and her three adult cubs got into a corral, so like a fenced in pen with a wire mesh. They got in somehow into this corral and they killed a hundred sheep and goats.

Can you imagine if that's your livelihood and you feed your children from that herd? And so the snow leopard is the same. The snow leopard is the same and it has been for millions of years. But the perspective of that herder or herding community is very different from the perspective I have or even my poly colleagues in a relative affluence and the fact that we're not living so close to the land that we depend on it for our sustenance and our life. So.

Chris Watson (45:56.65)
Ow.

Chris Watson (46:09.23)
Mm.

Jonny Hanson (46:22.356)
The real conflict over predators, it's less, and the coexistence issues, it's less about conflict between people and predators, and it's more about conflict between people over predators. Those different perspectives, the farmer, the rewilder, the scientist, the government official in the middle, the tourism entrepreneur, the forester, the hunter, it's about our different perspectives and how they can share landscapes. So at the end of the day,

Chris Watson (46:36.504)
Hmm.

Jonny Hanson (46:51.698)
sharing landscapes with lynx, wolves, bears is also about sharing landscapes with each other.

Chris Watson (46:58.254)
Yeah, to support that, what kind of use cases or successful use cases have we got to kind of base that on? know, take Scotland for example, links have been extinct for hundreds of years. I can't remember the exact date, but extinct for a long time. So what can I say?

And maybe not just links for links, know, because they may not have been introduced in the US for example, but what use cases have we got to try and base a potential success story against? You know, there's some stuff happening with different animals in the Netherlands. We touched on bison very briefly for example, but what positive use cases can we relate the potential reintroduction of predators to?

Jonny Hanson (47:52.394)
Yeah, it's a question. think Switzerland, there are some good examples as well as some warning signs of rain reductions. Switzerland is half the size of Ireland, population of eight million people. So I'm not sure how that maps onto Scotland, but you know, similar, there's densely populated cities, there's agricultural plains and then there's mountains with forests with low population densities, but people farming and a cultural landscape. So links.

There were links reintroductions for back into the 90s. Those went relatively well. There was some predation of sheep, but again, a compensation scheme and good governance. So not just throwing money at people, but actually the sort of processes that allow those different perspectives to be understood and voices to be heard so that it's not just, you know, shut up, bad farmer, go away, you got your money, but actually sitting down and listening.

and having the mechanisms to hear their perspectives, their concerns, that sort of thing. That lynx reintroduction in Switzerland seemed to overall work quite well. And lynx are now an established part of the landscape. Nobody, when I went there, really batted an eyelid. And I would say, we're not really worried about lynx. We never see them. They take the odd sheep, but we're not too concerned. And then they would say, wolves on the other hand. And wherever I went on my travels, even though I was wanting to talk about lynx first,

wolves second and then bears. Wolves tended to hijack the conversation and there is so that's a lesson for Scotland especially because Scotland is the most likely place for lynx reintroductions and for wolf reintroductions because of the space and the deer population is that it's it's harder with wolves than cats.

Chris Watson (49:26.446)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (49:46.038)
for various reasons. And that's not just a European or North American phenomena in Nepal where I've a fair bit of work. People accept snow leopards even when they have those what are called surplus killings, these rare incidents when they kill lots of livestock. Usually it's not like that. It's one or two here or there. But wolves, people, they get really under people's skin. They really do. I don't know quite what it is about wolves that just wind people up.

Chris Watson (49:46.531)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (50:11.01)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (50:15.784)
It can't just be Red Riding Hood because in parts of like Nepal, that's not in the cultural mix. It's not the story that's read to Nepali children in the way that it is to British and Irish children. There's something deeper. I'm not quite sure what it is. There's a couple of different theories. So lessons from Switzerland are it's easier with cats and it can be done well. And once once the species becomes a part of the landscape.

Chris Watson (50:27.096)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (50:33.358)
That's... yeah.

Jonny Hanson (50:42.826)
especially something as cryptic and obtrusive as the links, it just becomes a part of the landscape. So the challenge is not so much links or having them in the landscape after a decade. It's the process leading up to and then in actually reintroducing them. That is where the tension is and the idea of change almost more than the change itself. So it's how we manage all of those things.

Chris Watson (51:04.8)
Yeah. Have you come across any farmers that are really for it?

Jonny Hanson (51:13.014)
Not in my British and Irish interviews, I have to be honest. Although there was an agreement that governance was going to be really important, which sounds really boring, you know, policies, procedures, mechanisms for solving disputes, all that really boring stuff that's actually really important. The other thing was a couple of them talked about we wouldn't have a we would have less of a problem with this if they were in fenced enclosures. And I think

we should probably discuss the merits of what's called the South African model of conservation where they do have the vast fenced game reserves, private game reserves and we think of for wilding we think yellowstone, we think the Netherlands but the wildlife and nature recovery in South Africa has been extraordinary and it's seen vast ways of farmland turned into game reserves and explosions in wildlife numbers because

Chris Watson (51:48.75)
Mm.

Jonny Hanson (52:11.296)
but it was driven by the private sector and farmers saw that they could make more money from having wildlife on their land, mainly tourism, also hunting, than having livestock. So there's maybe a lesson there in that if we want this to work, we have to, I think, have the thoughtful profit motive, not the greed motive, but we have to make this work for people. We have to make it work for their livelihoods. We have to give them

a to see a links as an asset and a benefit from being in the landscape over and above the moral or ethical value. That's really important, but not everybody is going to have that desire that we might have that romantic notion or that sense of wonder. But if they said, I'm going to be 50 % better off financially by having this species in my landscape because of X, Y and Z, know, that's the language that is some people's

Chris Watson (52:54.709)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (53:09.802)
that's what they operate on and in their business, that's fine, that's 100%. We need to meet people where they're at on this issue. And there's gonna be lots of different reasons why we want these species back. So my point in summary is, I think we need to make farmers an offer that they can't refuse and make it work for them and their livelihood.

Chris Watson (53:26.784)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, And just actually on that very point, strangely I was reading, and I wasn't even doing this in preparation for this podcast actually, so I subscribed to BBC Wild Live in the March edition. There is an article in it. It's an opinion piece by Mark Carwardine and it's all about...

It's literally about predators in Europe and stuff and mean the quote at the top of it just says, seems hell bent on creating the most hostile environment for bears possible. But then it goes on to talk about other predators as well in some of these countries. I you touched on wolves there for example. The EU has just downgraded wolves' status making it easier to shoot them. They've given more licenses in certain countries across the EU to kill wolves.

Same with bear hun- bears in Sw- in Sweden, the numbers had dropped I think back in the 90s, even in 2008, they sh- they've shot back up and now they're, they're offering like, you know, 20 % more licenses to kill 20 % more bears and it's, and it's, it seems like such this, you know, you know, kind of seesaw effect that's kind of going on across, across Europe with that and-

I can say another point that I was, because I was quite interested in what was going on in Scotland, like the sea eagles being really scapegoated, you know, they were kind of reintroduced, I think, a number of years ago, around about the Isle of Mill, and I actually seen one two weeks ago when I was up in the Isle of Mill, which was phenomenal, and apparently the farmers are really blaming a lot of the lamb deaths on sea eagles in lambing season.

Jonny Hanson (55:06.965)
Power.

Chris Watson (55:19.424)
Out of 11,000 carcasses, only 33 were deemed to be from live lambs. The rest of them were scavenged, apparently, from lambs that seem to succumb to the vagaries of the elements or whatever else. But you can see how easy it is just to blame the predators on these things. So it's such a complex...

such a complex ecosystem in its own right isn't it? So you've got a job on your hands, I mean you've done a fantastic job with the book but I'm so torn with it all the time because I read that and I'm thinking, you know, I might have been reading that magazine five years ago saying, you know, the bear population is increasing in Sweden, fantastic, and now I'm reading it they're going to shoot 20 % more of them. It's like, you why?

Jonny Hanson (55:48.918)
Yeah, it is.

You

Jonny Hanson (55:58.347)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (56:17.176)
find it quite equally sad as well, again, I digress.

Jonny Hanson (56:24.544)
Well, it's these species we often have. They're very emotive. So we're dealing when we talk about coexistence with carnivores, we're not just talking about facts, but we're talking about feelings. We're not just talking about evidence. We're talking about emotion. And we're not just talking about stories or science, but we're talking about stories and all of that together. There's a there's a lot going on. And that leads to, as you said and alluded to often, large carnivores are often quite

Chris Watson (56:37.741)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (56:54.61)
low down the list of things that are causing livestock deaths, places that I've been and across the world and even if we could measure it through most of human history it would be number one would probably be disease, number two I'd say people stealing other people's livestock, all the cattle raiding of Irish mythology, you know there's a lot that going on including today. Yeah 100 % it's

Chris Watson (57:11.022)
Yeah, and the drovers of Scotland as well, there's a lot of that going on as well.

Jonny Hanson (57:21.494)
every culture in the world, know, that they're worth, they're worth money, they're worth stealing. So there's a lot of that. Just livestock doing silly things, weather, bad weather, you know, all of those things. Large carnivores might be number four or number five. But again, because of evolution and culture, we take these low levels of actual risk to livestock and even lower levels of actual risk to people. And it becomes much higher levels of perceived risk to livestock and definitely to people. And that, think,

These polarized perspectives where we love and we hate, we wonder and we fear, we romanticize and we demonize it. Anything that becomes very emotive often leads to quite polarized politics. Think of any like hot button issue, you know, if there's very polarized perspectives, there's usually a big political fight going on about it too. And you can really see that at the European level with wolves. You can see it in the US with wolves especially.

It leads me to conclude that whereas the ecology of reintroducing these species is really strong, and it's the strongest part of the argument, it's not a silver bullet, but it's still strong, the weakest part is the politics. And Exhibitor would be the Scottish First Minister very recently just putting a red pen, just like that. And it would be even worse if a project had started because you need, they will probably need multiple reintroductions to create a broad

Chris Watson (58:39.534)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (58:48.032)
genetically healthy founder population and that means we'll have a genetically healthy population of links or wells over a hundred years, which is kind of the gold standard that you think about this over and if a project was stopped part of the way through that could have serious problems for the species but if the policy and the funding for the compensation scheme say was also stopped that could have serious problems then for farmers. So the politics of this is it's the political animals that are the real problem here.

Not the pointy-eared cats or the pointy-toothed wild dogs, it's the political.

Chris Watson (59:17.964)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (59:23.384)
I was going to say, because it seems like there probably is an economic model with the right incentives. It's the red tape that Stalton is getting anywhere near the reintroduction really. yeah, it's, especially with ever changing governments as well, it's making it even more complex. Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (59:46.038)
Mmm.

Chris Watson (59:53.206)
What do you think the future for rewilding Britain looks like? What if you were to hazard a guess in the next five, ten, fifteen years? what if I, let me reframe that, what would your dream be, without giving all the insights away in your book, what would your dream be for the future of wild Britain?

Jonny Hanson (01:00:10.038)
I'm

Jonny Hanson (01:00:14.644)
Yeah, I think that's a better way to frame it because I'm reluctant to put timeframes on this and the timeframes of politicians, policies, even NGOs, even people, know, there's some big characters in this space who probably want to see this happen before the end of their careers. And I understand that, but that's not a good enough reason to rush it. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. But my vision for the future of Britain and Ireland and my

Chris Watson (01:00:21.261)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (01:00:44.926)
is that while I think at the moment this is pretty complex and contested and I think there's a lot of work still to be done to understand and prove that we would have the funds to manage and govern this well over long periods of time, I think there's a couple of things that are going to make it, I wouldn't say certain, but almost certain at some point in the future. I think that will be filling in a lot of the knowledge gaps and better planning and projections. But I think also

that we're going to have more and more forest and upland areas and as forest and woodland cover expands, especially for links, which are woodland specialists, you'll have deer populations filling that. So we're going to be creating the habitat and the prey base for this to happen. And then the third thing is I think there will be increasing public support in reintroduction countries, maybe in reintroduction landscapes. And at some point, some politician somewhere is likely to, these are all

going to overlap and some of these projects, I think it's only a matter of time. Even despite the setbacks, we should be taking a long term view of this and not just thinking one or two years ahead. But I would love to see and I want to see my native Britain and Ireland flourishing. want to see countryside full of nature, but also full of people, know, that nature driving wealth creation and job creation and

the value of nature, know, the most productive economy on planet Earth is planet Earth. And it is, you know, I have a talk I do called the entrepreneurial planet. I would love to see it the basis of food production and tourism and thriving nature and whether or not that will include lynx and wolves and bears remains to be seen. The next chapter in that story and in that adventure is yet to be written. Chris, let's see what happens.

Chris Watson (01:02:39.278)
Yeah, and I think maybe a subtle point in there is that a wilder Britain, more people out in nature having more adventure, all that good stuff, we're not saying this at the expense of the impact it may have on other people's livelihoods and farming, whatever it may be, it's trying to find a way that we can coexist. I'm saying we that I'm part of it, I'm I'm just a...

Jonny Hanson (01:02:49.364)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (01:03:07.968)
an advocate for nature and wildlife but it's a complex situation but I don't think the message here is it's at one or the expense of the other, it's how we find that kind of balance which I think you cover very honestly in the chapters throughout that book. What, you know, for people that haven't picked up or read this and firstly thanks for sending that, I really do appreciate that as well.

Jonny Hanson (01:03:35.446)
You're welcome.

Chris Watson (01:03:37.826)
What would you say to people, why would people pick the book up? I mean, hopefully they've listened and watched this and they know why to do it, but if you were to say, what would you say to potential readers? Why should they pick it up?

Jonny Hanson (01:03:52.82)
I would say no matter your opinion on this topic and even and especially if you don't have an opinion on this topic but you hear about it in the news and you're not sure what to think then this book will not decide for you because it's not about me imposing my thoughts on you but help you come to your own decision on what you think. And I've tried to do that honestly with humour by exploring a broad range of perspectives on it and bring it to life in an engaging way.

And for those whose perspectives are fixed, either they're completely against and nothing I say will change that or they're completely for and nothing I say will change that. There's still value in reading it because it will give you an insight into people who think very differently from you think. And in this very polarised age where we increasingly in social media and others only engage with people who kind of think similar to what do on this issue and in many others, it's actually really important to

have empathy for others doesn't mean we have to believe everything they believe or subscribe to their opinions and change ours but we should try to understand where they're coming from and that is at the root of how coexistence should work in Britain and

Chris Watson (01:05:09.838)
That's a fantastic answer because even if you have opposing views and you don't agree, it doesn't mean you need to dismiss, fall out or take the high ground. It's good to disagree and understand and try and open up your mind a little bit. So I fully support that position. Get the book, pick it up and have it read. will certainly open your eyes and ears. As it has done with me, I've been going down the rabbit hole with certain things across Europe as well. And it's that weird thing, it's like...

when you don't see a blue Toyota and then all of a sudden you see a blue Toyota three, four times a day, everything just seems to be, all these articles just seem to be appearing in magazines and stuff and on the news it just seems to be very prevalent at the minute. So it's a very timely thing this so I would definitely pick up the book and if you're fascinated by the wild on nature, particularly in Britain and Ireland, then give it a go.

What kind of responses have you had? Because you've been doing a bit of a tour, you've been some talks and stuff recently. How is it being received?

Jonny Hanson (01:06:09.686)
I'm in.

Jonny Hanson (01:06:14.144)
We've had, so I had my Belfast launch a couple of weeks ago, Dublin was Friday, London is coming up soon and Oxford and then I'll be at a bunch of festivals throughout this year with the book and the film in tow because they kind of overlap because they're both about coexistence and the film is about what can we in Britain and Ireland learn from my colleagues and from communities in Nepal and take back to our part of the world. And I think it's

Chris Watson (01:06:29.742)
Huh?

Jonny Hanson (01:06:43.254)
I think it's very timely, cometh the hour, cometh the author. I can't quite believe my luck at the timing of all of this. And on one hand, I was given off earlier about the damage I think that these illegal releases have done on the plus side. What it has done is make it a topic of national conversation. Even international conversation, people all over the world are talking about these illegal links releases. And for people in Britain and even in Ireland as well, to a lesser extent, the links has gone from

a deodorant brand for teenagers to a mutant-sized cat with pointy ears that we used to have and may well do so again in the future. on that count I think it's really important. Also by complete coincidence it happens to be very good timing for my book and I can't deny that well I wrote this book to be a guidebook for citizens of Britain and Ireland to think through this issue and this issue is very much alive, it is alive and kicking and

It is grabbing hold of us whether we like it or not. So I hope that people will find this guidebook useful on the adventure ahead.

Chris Watson (01:07:50.894)
So there's gonna, you know what the internet's like, internet detectives, are they gonna find out that Jonny Hansen released all these wild links into Scotland?

Jonny Hanson (01:07:58.262)
I've had a few comments about that. is the answer, I nothing to do with it and that's what I'm sticking to. That's the official one.

Chris Watson (01:08:09.646)
Fantastic. And if you do happen to be breeding them, I might pick one up off you. would make fantastic pets. No, joking aside, joking aside, this has been wonderful. Jonny, my next question was going to be about, know, what's next future projects, but you touched on the Snow Leopard trail. So when do you anticipate that would be out?

Jonny Hanson (01:08:14.932)
Hahaha.

Jonny Hanson (01:08:34.012)
It is it's finished now working with my colleague.

Chris Watson (01:08:36.814)
Oh wow. Was James Glancy involved in that as well?

Jonny Hanson (01:08:42.846)
Yes, James Lansley is my co-director. Has he been on the show at some point?

Chris Watson (01:08:46.486)
He hasn't yet, but I was messaging James, must have been six months ago or so, about some of his previous work and I just happened to notice that he liked one of your things on Instagram and then I looked at it, so I kinda put two and two together, excellent. Well might need to put a word.

Jonny Hanson (01:08:53.622)
Okay.

Jonny Hanson (01:09:02.826)
Yeah, two and two makes four in this case. James was the camera, cameraman, but also the co-director of the short and then our other colleague that James and worked with on his film about their time and about Afghanistan, Marty Stoker. So the three of us, kind of the creatives and then my two Nepali colleagues and also another Nepali colleague who did the drone work. So between us, we've created this 20 minute short, which is

Chris Watson (01:09:11.31)
Fantastic.

Chris Watson (01:09:18.646)
Yes, yep.

Chris Watson (01:09:28.151)
Yeah

Jonny Hanson (01:09:31.902)
It's a beautiful piece of cinematography, especially thanks to James's filming and Marty's editing. But also because of the Himalaya, you could wear a paper bag on top of your head and still look good when you're standing in front of the greatest mountain range on earth. There is no backdrop like it in human history or natural history. to have that, be able to go there and make that story.

Chris Watson (01:09:48.706)
Yeah.

Jonny Hanson (01:09:58.234)
is really humbling and a fantastic adventure and I'm really excited to be bringing it to British and Irish audiences at film festivals across these islands in 2025.

Chris Watson (01:10:08.878)
Where will that be listed on your website and stuff, or what, terms of how do we find out where that's going? Because I'd love to see that at some point.

Jonny Hanson (01:10:17.652)
Yeah, it'll be on my social media and possibly on my website as well. Also in my newsletter, which you can sign up to via my website, Jonnyhansome.com and we can maybe put the link in the show notes. I send out a quarterly newsletter and it has all the events and screenings and festival appearances.

Chris Watson (01:10:36.354)
Yeah, excellent, fantastic, fantastic. This has been wonderful. think switching lanes now, the closing traditions that we've got on the show of which there are three in this season. So, Paid Forward, Call to Adventure and Quickfire Fund. So, a light-hearted way to close the show to kind of try and understand Jonny a little bit more, just for context. So firstly, Paid Forward is all about your opportunity to raise...

Jonny Hanson (01:10:49.142)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Watson (01:11:05.045)
awareness for a charity or a project, something that you're passionate about. So what would you recommend that the listeners and viewers check out as a way to pay it forward?

Jonny Hanson (01:11:16.662)
So I would really highlight the Snow Leopard Conservancy of which I'm an affiliate which does phenomenal work across seven countries on community-based snow leopard conservation. are a great NGO and charity to support and I would check them out and support them in any way you can.

Chris Watson (01:11:35.7)
Excellent. I I should have said, I did suspect that would, that's what it would be, so that's one to me. And then a call to adventure. What would you recommend as an adventure activity, place, location, whatever it may be, something to spark inspiration for the listeners and viewers to do something adventurous? So what would your call to adventure be?

Jonny Hanson (01:11:39.958)
You

Jonny Hanson (01:11:57.408)
So my call to adventure, initially when you said that in advance, I thought the mountains of Malawi, which I grew up in, which are off the beaten track, some of the most amazing places. for me, there's an even more incredible place that I just wanted to highlight. I'm not saying this to be clever, but people will read the book and understand much of my life is quite domesticity. There've also been some significant challenges. And I think I've been honest about those because when you read about people who go and do extraordinary things.

they become almost semi-mythological beings and you think I could never be like that because I have X and Y in this challenge. So my point is that the greatest adventure in life is not the adventure without, but it's the adventure within. And that the greatest mountain range we face and need to conquer is not the mountains of Nepal, but it's the mountains of the mind. And so my cult's adventure is to look after your mental wellbeing and go into our inner landscapes and

look after yourself because life is hard and it's worth taking care of yourself.

Chris Watson (01:13:02.008)
Thank you, that is an adventure diaries first. I like it, love it. Excellent, that is, yeah, because by proxy, that's kind of the subconscious message that I tried to do with this show, so to make sure people go and have a bit of fun to kind of free their mind, but focusing just on the mind is great, thank you. Excellent, right, and now for the final segment, 10.

Jonny Hanson (01:13:05.407)
Is it?

Chris Watson (01:13:29.56)
quickfire questions and you can pass if you feel like it or you can just shoot from the hip. So Jonny Hanson, question number one of 10. You can have a dinner party with two guests dead or alive, who would they be?

Jonny Hanson (01:13:30.87)
You to go?

Jonny Hanson (01:13:34.92)
Okay. Alright.

Jonny Hanson (01:13:48.054)
I watched Gladiator recently so I want to say Marcus Aurelius. Definitely. Probably St. Patrick, was the patron saint of Ireland, he was around when we last had wolves, so you know two historical figures. I reckon I'd learn a lot from them.

Chris Watson (01:13:53.293)
Eh.

Chris Watson (01:14:01.272)
Yeah. I've got Marcus Rayless Meditations by my bedside. Excellent.

Jonny Hanson (01:14:08.502)
Nice. great quote. Sorry to quote bomb this. Marcus Aurelius said, a person's life has died the colour of their imagination. And that is one of my favourite quotes.

Chris Watson (01:14:19.79)
Wow, wow, wow. Excellent. Two, what is the craziest story or experience you ever had on your adventure travels?

Jonny Hanson (01:14:32.398)
I stood on top of 20,000 foot peak in Indian Himalaya, call stock angry as the weather closed in. Our guide was blind drunk. So we ended up climbing with no guide and my friend was really struggling with the altitude. Our other friend had turned back. It was just me and him. And I was I was getting scared. I was starting to look back over my life and give thanks for the the moments I'd had and wonder where do we ever get down. So we did. But.

It was sobering and humbling and yet in that moment I really felt so alive.

Chris Watson (01:15:06.366)
Amazing, Number three, do you have a hidden talent?

Jonny Hanson (01:15:13.814)
I grew up in a very musical family, played by the time I was 18, five instruments and was the front man for a band called Firebrand. So there you go.

Chris Watson (01:15:24.386)
Wow, wow, not just one but five, wow, fantastic, fantastic. Number four, what is your favorite movie?

Jonny Hanson (01:15:36.828)
that's a hard one. I really like the Lord of the Rings, which I know is three movies, but just that fantasy world that I can escape to. I haven't watched them in a while, but I've got lot of good memories of growing up watching Lord the Rings.

Chris Watson (01:15:47.822)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (01:15:52.908)
Yeah, the hero's journey. There's a new one coming apparently as well, which is exciting. Number five, your favourite book.

Jonny Hanson (01:15:57.27)
Happy day.

Jonny Hanson (01:16:03.988)
I presume I can't say living with lynx. I'm going to have to say. My favourite authors are Raymond D. Feist, who's like Tolkien, but better. And then Wilbert Smith, who writes, has written a lot of historical fiction about Africa. And I don't actually read that many environmental or nature books because that's my job. That's what I do. So in my spare time as a form of self care, I either disappear into the future with sci-fi into

Chris Watson (01:16:06.35)
You can if you want.

Jonny Hanson (01:16:32.776)
a fantasy world with heroic fantasy or into the past with Wilbur Smith.

Chris Watson (01:16:37.004)
Yeah, excellent. Number six, what was the last music gig that you went to?

Jonny Hanson (01:16:47.018)
been to an embarrassingly small number of music gigs. I think the last one, which is a good joint Scottish Irish venture was Snow Patrol. Long time ago. Yeah, good change.

Chris Watson (01:16:55.566)
fantastic. Yeah, wow. Yeah, fantastic. If you could snap your fingers and be anywhere doing anything, what would it be?

Jonny Hanson (01:17:07.472)
I would go back to Malawi to the mountains of Malawi in an instant.

Chris Watson (01:17:13.812)
really selling Malali and the Himalaya. Number eight, what scares you?

Jonny Hanson (01:17:22.932)
This is as much as I love the idea of mountains and all the risks and I'd love someday to climb at least one 8,000 meter peak when my kids are all grown up and financially independent of me so it doesn't matter if I pop my clothes. The thing that really terrifies me is the opposite of mountains which is caving and I have this fear of being stuck in a submerged crawl space with rising water. I just have that scared to be Jesus out of me. Really does.

Chris Watson (01:17:50.67)
Have you seen the videos of these people that do that on like Instagram and stuff? It's like, my god, it's horrific. Yeah, yeah. Of all the things, it's like, Yeah. No, I'm with you that actually. Number nine, if you could relive any moment in your life, what would it be and why?

Jonny Hanson (01:17:54.4)
Can't do it. Can't go there. Can't watch it.

Jonny Hanson (01:18:02.137)
man.

Jonny Hanson (01:18:18.005)
When I was 17 I broke the 400 meter record at my high school and it was a very quick moment because it was quite a fast time. I would relive that. So good. So good.

Chris Watson (01:18:26.318)
Excellent. And 10, and finally, what is the best advice you've ever had?

Jonny Hanson (01:18:39.114)
Be kind to yourself. And as much as saving the world is a noble goal, don't do that until you first look after yourself. Start there.

Chris Watson (01:18:50.254)
Sushi, excellent, that is fantastic. And that's it, that's it. That's it, coming to a close. This has been phenomenal. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for the book, Living With Links. Yeah, you know, plugged it a few times, but definitely get it. This has been brilliant, Jonny. Thank you ever so much for your time.

Jonny Hanson (01:19:12.522)
Thank you so much, Chris, and thank you to all your listeners for tuning in and stay in touch on socials and newsletter to follow the adventure.

Chris Watson (01:19:20.97)
Yeah, so where exactly should people go to find out more about Jonny Hansen?

Jonny Hanson (01:19:26.198)
JonnyHanson.com will get you all the social links and the teaser of the film which is already out and the quarterly newsletter. Sign up, that is the one stop place to go.

Chris Watson (01:19:37.77)
Excellent and I look forward to giving that a watch as well. Thank you, Jonny. This has been excellent.

Jonny Hanson (01:19:42.806)
Thank you, Chris. My pleasure.