Lynx in Scotland: why illegal attempts to reintroduce lost species are surprisingly common

Four lynx were recently released in the Scottish countryside. Ondrej Prosicky / shutterstock

For more than 500 years, no lynx had roamed the British countryside. That changed with the recent release of four of these large cats in the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland.

This was an action that is widely assumed to be linked to attempts to reintroduce species that had been wiped out in Britain, as part of a wider rewilding movement. Supporters of these reintroductions typically want to atone for past extinctions, and want to create richer, more dynamic ecosystems.