As long as they're not big bad ones that go round hassling pigs, I'm ok with it.

They'll need lung function tests to assess their huffing and puffing capabilities.

Clever! :)

I actually laughed out loud at this, well played

What about the ones dressing up as old ladies?

Look m8, you cannae judge a wolf if they/them choose to identify as an old woman, it's a brave new world squire, get with them times :p

"Why do you want to be a woman Stan?"

I want to have the right to have babies

Let's all agree that you have the right to have babies.

If they're happy expressing themselves as aged human females who are we to discriminate

Or that one wolf we all have to ask the time off

Hot tip: when he says it’s lunchtime, fling your hang sangwiches at him and leg it.

We’ve enough of those (read: landlords)

I live in a brick house. I'm feel pretty safe.

That'll do pig, that'll do..

Underrated comment 😂

Woodlands have to be reintroduced first and maybe in 100 years they can think about the wolves

Woodlands cannot be reintroduced due to overgrazing by sika deer, which is what the wolves are for.

But once the wolves have eaten all the deer, what do we introduce to eat the wolves afterward?

Bears, big frickin brown bears. Then when there are too many bears we introduce tigers.

A cold snap in the winter will then kill off the tigers

I also hear commitment and monogamy does the same thing

Lions? And tigers? And bears? Oh my!

Have we forgotten the last time we had a 'tiger' in Ireland?!

BOOM BABY the BOOM IS BACK YEAH!!!!!!!!

We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the wolves. But aren't the snakes even worse? Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then we're stuck with gorillas? No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

Seymour! Stop thinking about snakes! Pervert!

The idea is to replicate an ecosystem that evolved over millions of years to be self balancing. Wolves and native deer balance each other out

I appreciate you giving an honest and serious response but I was just making a Simpsons joke.

Lions. Because when the lions die, their bodies become the grass. The Wolves eat the grass. So they are all connected in the great circle of life.. apparently

This is like that old lady who swallowed a fly all over again

This is an awful lot like that episode of the Simpsons. "Gorillas, come winter they'll freeze to death"

Thanks, that's interesting, I'll read about it!

Encourage deer hunting. Allow deer hunting with private citizens on public lands. Kind of similar to the model we use in Canada to control white tailed deer population. There isn't any need to reintroduce wolves.

I'm sure there're plenty of cougars in wicklow......

Bears too I hear, if you know where to look.

Lol

I think the people who actually are qualified on this have said it is not suitable to reintroduce wolfs to anywhere in Ireland

Wolf here, glad of the opportunity to dispel some of the hurtful stereotypes. We are honest animals and will not kill your sheep. We have a lot to offer the local community and just want to contribute to society.

I heard about this fella on Wall Street. He has a record. We shouldn't be letting them in.

Wolf expert here: studied in biodiversity of western island nations reintroducing large mammals snd the effects of these mammals on the natural order of thee quantum leap mechanics in wolves and i have no idea what im saying to be honest

As a fellow wolf expert all I would add is woof woof

As a member of the NWO Wolfpac all I got to say is Tooooo Sweeet 🤘🏻

🤘 🐺

4-4-4 Life! 🤘

(except for AJ Styles)

Wolves have an enormous range and theyre not in any way compatible with livestock. In the places they do thrive they're far enough away from general populations and walking trails.

Wolf expert here. Wolfs love to clime trees. And little wolfs like swimming in riffers. The girl wolfs like climbing on the rooves of houses. As it stands, the wolfs woldn't be very comvortable in our country as we don't have enoff trees and clean riffer water.

I'm no expert but I would wager it's more feasible than folks would think, there were still wolves here in the 1600s, when the forest cover was around 10%, the same as it is today. And some countries, like Italy have alot of wolves even though they're way more densely populated

Our forest cover is estimated at 11%. I think broadleaves account for 3% of our total landmass, the other 8% being conifers, which are essentially dead forests, offer very little in terms of habitat and biodiversity. I would wager the current landscape is entirely different to that of the 1600s.

unless we have large national parks for them to roam on, its likely will start targetting farms

It'd be interesting to see if farmers get punished when the wolves innevitably attack sheep and they're forced to act defensively.

Stop farming sheep so

Fuck Sheep

Welsh person here… if you need advice on optimal positioning and tips on safe sex dm me.

exactly! Name ONE good thing sheep have ever done for us!!!!

https://youtu.be/MbFux7_RQpA?t=160

You'll take my lamb chops out of my cold dead hands

Wolves: "Your offer is acceptable"

How about some Lynx ? a lot less likely to look at you as a lunch option... unless your 5 ​ 

I think we could reintroduce Lynx right now

Lynx Africa

Why you hating on the 5 year olds?

Why are you letting your 5 year old child walk alone across the Wicklow mountains ?

​ 

If not friend then why friend shaped?! 🥺

We need less young ones anyway, a worthy sacrifice

Only lynx I want to see reintroduced is Lynx Oriental

The mountains aren’t big enough. Wolves like to roam and we’ve encroached to much. There’s very little wilderness up there

Wicklow National Park is 3000km2 (20k hectares, 49k acres), it's now being expanded by another (2k hectares, 5k acres) from Kippure to Glenasmole. Google says between 10km2 & 18km2 will support 50 - 94 packs of 4 wolves... So the Wicklow park area would be 1/3 of that? 17 - 31 packs of 4? Also says a wolf can roam up to 2590km2 so that's the whole park area.... So we can have 1 wolf.... Yup, no idea what I'm on about. 

The park is good sized, but it has a lot of people in it, human habitation, and roads. You need a lot more areas without humans and roads. Source: I’m a wildlife biologist in the US, who just got back from Wicklow

I for one support your humble suggestion to cleanse Wicklow central, west & south of people and return it to the wilds.

As someone who lives in north east Wicklow I agree with this. (Sorry west Wicklow but you knew this purge would come sooner or later) /s

Id be happy if we got rid of Arklow, everything else is fine:)

hear hear! Motion proposed, seconded and carried! Drown the place. For great justice.

We had this discussion in the UK about reintroducing wolves to the Scottish highlands but the problem is the roaming, they would be in Manchester by the end of the month and London within 2. Wolves can’t be kept in one area they like to move around.

>they would be in Manchester by the end of the month and London within 2 No they wouldnt, they would head straight for Wolverhampton

Wolverhampton is a city of wolves dressed up as people I recon.

It’s kind of the opposite of that. Let’s say all the human-dimensions stuff goes perfectly and everyone wants wolves, well with all those roads and human contact the wolves will be dead in a few months from stress or hit by cars. Again, that’s assuming that everyone is onboard and no one shoots any

What if we domesticate them? Problem solved.

Ecology student here. The available area in Wicklow is not large enough for wolf introduction. With a wolf population the size that this ecosystem could support, it would be near impossible to avoid rampant inbreeding and therefore a rapid decline in the health of the population after only a few generations. This would require constant attention from wildlife services which I doubt we could afford given our current budget. This is not to mention the fact that there would doubtless be major opposition especially from farmers in neighbouring areas. I would absolutely love to reintroduce wolves, but it’s not feasible without a major expansion of our national parks and a massive increase in funding to our wildlife services.

what about other proposed locations such as Kerry or Donegal ?

Ehhhhh. Even Killarney is shakey. The thing about predator reintroduction is that you need at least a hundred deer per wolf to support the population. Combine that with the requirement for large wolf populations to avoid inbreeding and you end up needing *a lot* of deer. And a lot of deer means a lot of land. If Killarney has a deer population of ~2000 that means maximum one pack of wolves. One pack which will need to be heavily managed and kept away from hikers and civilians, and will likely need regular introduction of fresh DNA in the form of new wolves to avoid inbreeding, something which brings its own issues. Our national parks are tiny in comparison to those on the continent or even in the UK. Unfortunately, the reason for these problems comes down to, you guessed it, the brits. European nations can have large national parks because much of that land was previously the personal estates of Europe’s great monarchies, which shifted into public ownership over time. Ireland however, was a colony of the British, and had almost all of its land divided up and auctioned off by the British government in the 17th and 18th centuries, hence why so little of our land is in public ownership (7%, as opposed to 28% for France and 38% for Germany, to name a few.) Given the above, we have the unfortunate dilemma that those who own private property generally are not keen on giving it up, and if they do they better we’ll get payed. This makes expanding our national parks brain-meltingly expensive. In fact, our largest national park, Killarney, is the size it is because it was founded as the personal property of (IIRC) queen Victoria.

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We deforested it ourselves, early farmer settlers cleared the island for cows

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I swear to God, Donegal has some of the most remote areas in all of Ireland.

If we start to rewild our upland areas and expand our national parks, it would be feasible but it would take decades. Do you think we could reintroduce Lynx right now? I know that it's debatable if Lynx ever existed here.

Lynx are the most reasonable predator to re-introduce, and would keep our deer population in check. They prefer to hunt in woods and would have a minimal effect on sheep and none on cattle. Another species to look at is Beaver. While they were never native to Ireland, they're good for similar landscapes in the UK and would help with our river ecosystems.

Yeah they wouldn't affect deer population much but would affect behaviour. If you introduced Lynx to Killarney national park, it might help the oak forests to rejuvenate

It's not debatable now, there are fossils.

Ok. Last I heard is that the only evidence was a bone found in a cave somewhere. Also no evidence of beavers. Lots of bears were here though, but I don't think we'll ever reintroduce bears although black bears are relatively harmless

Aye, but somebody didn't import lynx bones 9,000 years ago and hide them for a laugh. They were native. Balance of probability is very strong that beavers weren't.

Yeah they were likely here. We could reintroduce Lynx tomorrow in Wicklow and Kerry. It wouldn't even be noticed. We could do Bison also.

You'd have a ton of farmers shooting them when they inevitably roamed onto their land and you can't really blame the wolf or the farmer.

If we are worried about major opposition from farmers we will never do anything positive for Ireland’s ecology.

Unfortunately that is democracy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The farmers make up a considerable voting bloc in this country. And without doubt, they cause more harm to our ecosystems than any other of the nations demographics.

But without them, what do we eat?

To be fair, when do we do anything positive for Ireland’s ecology?

There is enough crazy inbred mountain dwellers in Wickla already! 

A wolf pack needs about 600km2. Wicklow is about 200km2. Killarney is 100. Mayo is 110 and Donegal is 160. If we expanded each to 600km2, they could support a wolf pack. So we could support 4 wolf packs if we increased the national parks

Where do you get this number? Generally going by area is a poor metric. The productivity of the ecosystem (Basically biomass increase / time / area) is by far the most important factor in how many predators an ecosystem can support. Irish forest would be able to support far more wolves than an equivalent area of arctic tundra, both of which areas where Grey Wolves are found.

No we could not, they are gone from this Island as long as we are here. Look at the size of yellowstone 8991Km^2 of reomote wilderness there is nowhere like this here

They're only gone a few hundred years. Last wolf was shot in 1786. 237 years ago. Yellowstone has 10 wolf packs. If we expanded our national parks, we could support 4 or 5 wolf packs but that would take decades. If we expand Wicklow, Kerry, Mayo and Donegal national parks to 600km2 each, that's 2400km2. We can also rewild upland areas in other mountainous areas like Galway, Tipp, Waterford, Down etc. It's possible but would take decades of planning. The logic of introducing wolves is to change deer behaviour so that Atlantic rainforest will replenish all along our western areas.

If we start to rewild our upland areas and expand our national parks, it would be feasible but it would take decades. Do you think we could reintroduce Lynx right now? I know that it's debatable if Lynx ever existed here.

Just wall off Longford and put them in there

I'm with you, OP. I would love for wolves and other fauna to be reintroduced to Ireland, but the simple fact is our natural forests are all but gone. No work is done to expand them, and what forestry we do is done with god awful trees that provide nothing to the land. If we want wolves, we need to reassess our approach to our forests.

Could be completely talking out my hoop here and don’t have an opinion on it. From what I’ve read about it this is a pilot scheme and the idea behind it is that deer numbers are getting out of control, and are overgrazing plant life and damaging trees and the ecosystem in general especially along rivers. They also cause car accidents and spread diseases to cows and sheep. There was a famous study where they did this in Yellowstone as the ecosystem was collapsing. https://wicklownews.net/2017/04/wolves-to-be-introduced-into-the-wicklow-mountains/ But aye I can’t see how it would work without expanding natural forest areas.

I'm familiar with the Yellowstone success with this, but I didnt know we had large deer populations in the mountains. That's great news! If the ecology is there to support the wolves, then I'm all for it, but I hike and camp in those mountains and I just can't see how a wolf pack could live there without massively improving the forests. Not even just expanding, but improving. Most of the forests in those mountains are coniferous trees used for forestry. They support practically no life. I only know of two small natively forested areas in Wicklow.

Proper deer management and conservation is what’s needed and has been for years,but it’s easier for some mad idea that wolves will balance the system is ludicrous,what will happen is the deer population will grow higher until the wolves have all the sheep and anything else killed off that’s way prey,and when it gets to that point they’ll find it’s easier to migrate out of the national pk and prey on easier pickings elsewhere,wolves foxes,cats etc will always go for the easier prey that takes the least amount of energy for most reward,

we need to fund rewilding of land into forestry first.

There's not enough unpopulated area for a dozen wolves, let alone a dozen packs.

I feel bad for the gorillas who will freeze to death in the winter when they are released to take care of the wolf population 😔

But what animal takes care of the gorilla population.

Velicoraptors?

Ah FFS then we'd have to bring in a T-rex, it just gets too dangerous then. So I think we agree, no wolves.

Emus. Vicious cunts they are

Took down the Australians

Or cassowaries!

Damn. You must hate the people of Wicklow if you want to release murder chickens into the area.

Ah we're fucked when it comes to culling the gorillas, just treat them with respect, call them sir, and maybe they won't kill you

It wouldn't really be feasible with our relatively tiny national parks [https://bioweb.ie/reintroduction-wolves-ireland/](https://bioweb.ie/reintroduction-wolves-ireland/)

Also Wicklow native here, I would love to see it in some distance future. However, I think we need a vast reforestation project first. Wolfgang Reforest are doing their bit here in Wicklow but this could take 100s of years. There is also the issues of land use, ownership, farmers also not wanting to give up the land.

> I feel that there is simply not enough woodland for even a dozen wolfpacks in the mountains. Probably not even for one. Lynx on the other hand...

Not a bad idea, lynx would fill the same role as wolves and dont need half as much space

I think this is the main thing - we have gazillion more ecological problems before we start thinking about wolves. Incidentally, it’s not just deer population control. It’s making deer more cautious in their behaviour and getting them to move on quickly before grazing any individual area. Birds of prey and lynx can help with that though.

Not enough space for lynx either unfortunately... They are smaller than wolves but need lots of space too, and they're really tied to living in forests (whereas wolves can roam across open country too). People don't realise how ridiculously small and fragmented our woodlands are in Ireland.

Whilst I love the idea in theory, wolves have a very large range. Our parks are simply not big enough and there is too much livestock around. Imagine the outrage the first time they kill a load of sheep or a family pet? For comparison, Yellowstone national park is 900,000 hectares. The biggest national park in Ireland is the Wicklow mountains at 20,000 hectares.

Nah. It'd just be a disaster waiting to happen.

AFAIK wolves need vast swathes of land to successfully breed and roam in and nowhere here is actually suitable

Ad with sharks wolves have had a bad reputation set upon them from movies. If you look into wolf attack stats they're exceptionally rare. Although you absolutely have a point about lack of natural landscape. We should simultaneously work on rewilding the countryside with native woodland. Emphasis on native, not the commercial woodland we currently have about the place. Overall yes, it's not only a good idea, it's arguably essentially to revive our damaged ecosystem.

Knowing Ireland some people would start nicking the wolfs shipping them in the back of vans to sell in the UK as some kind of rare dog breed.

I'm all for it but we don't have the habitat for it yet. My big idea is to start rewilding our upland areas as this is marginal land and makes very little money for farmers. Instead of subsidizing sheep farmers, we pay them to not graze sheep in upland areas. If you look at just Kerry, you could rewild a huge area of land within the Ring Of Kerry and also the Dingle Peninsula. You could also include West Cork. This would be plenty big enough for a wolf pack. This will help restore the oak forests as deer will avoid any areas wolves are. You could pay the farmers to build trails and hiking cabins and mountain bike trails. Thru-hiking is becoming very popular in the States and Europe. Imagine hiking from Killarney to Derrynane over a long weekend, staying in hiking cabins along the way. I think Bears would be unrealistic as would face too much opposition. Bears are a bit scary but wolves are afraid of people and are similar to foxes really. We could reintroduce Lynx tomorrow as they're very shy and you wouldn't even notice them but there's some debate if they ever existed here. I think it's win-win for everybody. We could start in Kerry but really we could have an Atlantic rainforest from Donegal to Cork/Kerry. Lab grown meat and dairy might destroy the livestock and dairy industry in the next few decades.

yep, rewilding is absolutely necessary for protecting our eco system will also work as a carbon dioxide trap over the long term, which is imperivative in combating climate change. We criticise South America for cutting down trees, but our country isn't any better, just because the forestry cutting was a hundred years ago, we have a responsibility to rewild

Definitely, wolves aside rewilding is a must generally speaking.

This is an absolutely lovely but completely daft idea. There’s just not enough room or forest for them at the moment. It’s all well and good until some hikers doing the Wicklow Way get lost and end up being supper for a pack of hungry wolves. They would be a menace to sheep for sure, and farmers could be compensated for that, but when humans get attacked its a different ball game. When people are willing to sue for tripping on uneven ground, can you imagine the lawsuits for PTSD if people even caught a glimpse of one, and who would they sue? The council, the landowners, Eamon Ryan? The wolves in the four courts would be licking their lips.

Wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare. Even bear attacks are rare. Wolves are afraid of humans. Similar to foxes. They just run away. They will kill lots of sheep though but the solution is fences, dogs and payments to farmers.

I'd love to see it done but will never ever happen. Too much risk. Deer need to be culled, relax gun laws or have the defense forces do it. Donate the venison and don't have it handed over to a meat processor crony of a politician.

We should all be eating way more wild venison in this country

I adore wolves but it is not feasible at this stage. There are tons of wonderful projects that could be done though.

It will make hiking more exciting

Why are all these comments about “not enough woodland”? Wolves are highly adaptable to different habitats. They don’t need woodland. On a related note, it’s going to be very hard to re-wild with a load of deer eating everything. I wonder what animal could solve that problem.

So they can start pretending to be our grandmothers? Absolutely not.

[considering someone sued over slipping on the boardwalk ](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/circuit-court/dublin-woman-sues-parks-service-over-fall-on-wicklow-way-1.2519391) near Djouce I don't think Wolves would go down too well.

Not enough space for Wolves. The Lynx might be a better shout.

Not a hope OP, Wicklow Mountains National Park is way too small to sustain a pack of wolves, they need thousands of square kilometers and the park is only 200sqkm. I live only a few km from the parks borders and everywhere around me on the mountains are free roaming sheep..Wolves would kill them in no time so there's isn't a hope this will ever go ahead as farmers won't let it happen. The IFA are literally the most powerful lobby group in Ireland so they'll stamp it out this idea in jig time..

It would give the farmers something else to poison I suppose - they'll eventually run out of birds of prey and foxes.

I think it'd be much better if we introduced roaming packs of wolves into inner city Dublin. Could deal with the scrote problem.

The book irish Atlantic rainforest cites a figure that every wolf released saves 300k from fewer deer hitting cars. And it talks extensively about how it really would be the best shot for natural forest regeneration in Ireland. Feral goats and sika advertising are real issues. The island used to be 80% native forest, now its about 1%

We need to house our own wolves before we start letting foreign wolves into our lands? We dont know what background and values these wolves will have. And the forrest are already at full capacity and the food chain is already strained so why should we take these freeloading economic wolves in

All well and good until a wolf takes the head off some young one. There's not enough room. Nothing wrong with hunting deer for population control.

You're dead right, ireland simply doesnt have enough wilderness anymore, they'd encroach on human settlements eventually

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wolf\_attacks\_in\_North\_America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks_in_North_America) There have been three wolf attacks on humans in North America in the last 30 years despite a wolf population of about 70k across the US and Canada. Wolf attacks are exceedingly rare.

Yes North America, tiny compared with the vast untouched forests and plains of the Wicklow Mountains.

😂 I take your point but I don’t think the conclusion that it would result in an attack on a person is likely. The sheep would be terrorised though.

You just know it’d happen and become scandal of the year in this country

If they can thrive there, yes. What gives us the right to live in a sterile landscape stripped of so many wonderful creatures and then act all sad when we hear about poachers killing lions in the Savanna?

I'm very against it. My uncle was killed by wolves. EDIT: Sorry, I just double checked. It was heart disease.

That’s what the wolves want ya to think

No no! They reintroduced them in the Netherlands and Germany, lots of sheep farmers have had their livestock attacked. This is an island, if wolves want to go here, let them swim. The only place in the world where you can go camping, hiking etc without having to worry about wildlife. No snakes, bears, wolves... Keep it that way. We all like biodiversity, but wolves are not the way to go.

We’d obviously also need to reintroduce little girls with picnic baskets

I can't see any issues in reintroducing wolves into a population where a significant proportion of farmers have sheep. No problems on the horizon whatsoever. /s

We don't have anywhere near enough wilderness to be able to introduce an apex predator like wolves. There are about 9 packs of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the US (that's about 123 wolves). Yellowstone is about 9,000 km2 in size. To put that into perspective, County Cork is 7,509 km2.

Lived up in the Wicklow mountains for a few years and, while it would be nice to see, it wouldn't work. There's too much livestock on commonage and even people walking off-path on deer trails in the woods would lead to issues. There's simply not enough open space for them to live and hunt freely without causing run-ins when humans and livestock.

Well that's an interesting solution to the housing issue anyway.

Just don't let your daughter out wearing a red coat!!

Probably better to introduce smaller predators that are more suitable for the size / wildness of the country. Something like lynxes, maybe.

I think it would be good, we haven’t had an apex predator in the Wicklow Mountains since Larry was arrested

The farmers would shoot them all dead

While I'd love to reintroduce large predators like wolves into Ireland at some point, unfortunately it's not a realistic proposition right now. We need to massively expand the area of natural land, especially native broadleaf woodland, before we can do anything. We currently have the second-lowest forest cover of any European country, it's nowhere near enough to support a self-sustaining wolf or lynx population in the long term. What we do have is also way too fragmented, it needs to be connected up with wildlife corridors to allow animals to spread and interbreed. We also can't expect wolves and lynx to stay put where we want them to, they have large natural ranges and there isn't a hope in hell that they'll stay within our artificial National Park boundaries. If you release a wolf pack into the Wicklow mountains, they'll spread out and roam around, it's what they naturally do. And that's when you'll run into trouble, if you introduce a wolf pack onto an island with 7 million people and millions more cattle and sheep there is inevitably going to be conflict. It'll probably take at least a few decades of habitat restoration and changing farming practices before we can even think of doing it.

They're too mad, send them to Donegal Instead.

I think we should introduce wolves specifically to eat farmers. It'd help a lot with climate change.

It's a bit of a circular problem because the deer are part of the reason there's very little woodland in the mountains in the first place. They prevent any new forest growth by over-grazing. So you need to control the deer population, best done through reintroduction of wolves, but there should be more forest first, but you can't expand the forest much because of the deer so you need the wolves...and so on

Wolves don’t deserve that

Good lord, there's barely enough room to exercise a basset up there for all the cultivated land. Where on earth are wolves going to go?

There is absolutely potential here to do it, though it would need to be managed well. With our climate goals and impetus on forestry, if we got to a point where we had a substantial stretch of land with no sheep of cattle, it could work. Considering the trouble farmers have with dogs hikers bring on trails up there, I can imagine fierce push-back with wolves.

The only good Wicklow Wolf is the brewery.

Ireland should follow Scotland's example first and start replanting native forests. That is the first step before bringing back any native species.

I'm not from the area nor a farmer but here I am talking anyway. I think it'll be grand, way I see it is that we don't own this planet, never did and it's about time we stop treating animals like obstacles. They gotta live somewhere and we should be learning to coexist instead of destroying everything they call home.

https://preview.redd.it/nq2lxxuwa23b1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b5a1b6602a25b3ca7bda833ccf4b2a5df98ee018 They are already here.

They will go straight to the flocks of sheep, it will be a disaster

I’d rather a couple of Eurasian lynx. Surprisingly, they don’t need too big a territory. if there is enough food in a small space, they’ll happily stay put..

I would love to see them introduced, but we just don't have the space for them. If we had a nice large pocket of land, replant loads of trees etc then yeah. But also I feel like it's unfair to take them from where they currently are. Not sure where they'd bring them in from, I'm assuming it would be Random wolves from different packs, I doubt a captivity pack would survive even in the Irish wilderness, so they'd need to what - Take a random load of wolves, transport them here and just let them go? I imagine that would fuck them up too. Just leave them where they are. Plus you're really hedging bets and hoping they get along. I guess in order to avoid inbreeding etc, they'd come from separate packs, there's a chance they don't bond and won't be happy they've lost their family either.

As a Canadian in awe of camping without threat of mauling… selfishly I’d like to keep this peace. But, sure.

What’s stopping them from attacking us? I know they wouldn’t be introducing them if they would but I’m curious as to why not..

Start with wolves, then follow that up with bears, mountain lions, tiger and hyenas.

All good as long as we bring back shnakes for balance

There are a few wolves in Phoenix park already.

I live in a brick house. I feel pretty safe.

We should reforest half of the damn country first. Too many fields being sat upon by farmers like Smaug hoarding his gold.

Think farmers with livestock would be worried no?

Of course, thats why i want to hear what they think

Sheep farmer here in Carlow. Closer to Blackstairs Mts but not a million miles from Wicklow. It’d be a monumental task to get people to agree to this, I won’t lie. From the POV of a farmer; they’d need assurances that their livestock will be safe from predation. Sheep grazing of the upland areas would have to be ended (which I actually don’t think would be as hard to implement as some people think), but lowland farmers in the surrounding areas would need to see an in-depth plan for how wolves will be kept away from their fields. Only thing I can think of is miles and miles of 6-7ft high fencing, which is fairly impractical. Another idea I saw was to reimburse farmers for lost livestock, but this is wildly impractical as I could see the costs quickly spiraling out of control. I know there’s plenty of deer in Wicklow, but in fairness if I was a wolf I’d much rather chase after a heavy, slow moving sheep than a sprightly deer.

It's proven to improve the forests that they are re added to. They are meant to be there this entire time but we're killed off. I'm all for it as our country should be thriving nature wise but we're covered in fields thanks to the English and don't have many wild animals that are bigger than a fox.

That's one way to reduce the interest in hiking in Wicklow

That's one way to reduce the interest in hiking in Wicklow

Before doing that they need to ban keeping sheep in upland areas and compensate the sheep farmers so they can do something else or sell up. We need to reforest a lot of upland areas and you can do that with the sheep there. They eat all the saplings. Also need to shoot a lot of the deer.

That's the last thing I need. Now they're bringing back wolves. What next? Bring back smallpox? We all had fun with the smallpox, didn’t we? Is it time smallpox had a reboot?