This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The purpose of hugh warwick’s latest book is, he asserts, “to find the middle ground” in a debate over the efficacy and ethics of killing animals for conservation. Cull of the Wild succeeds, but only in part. While the discourse is well written, thoughtful and entertaining in places, he swerves the centrism he seeks, largely due to one glaring omission, of which more later.

Warwick is clearly a very gentle man, an expert in the conservation of the now threatened but much-beloved British hedgehog. He is also a “Vague-un”, not fully plant-based, admitting that buttery cakes and real milk in his coffee are responsible for him falling off the vegan wagon. Warwick makes clear from the outset that culling, lethal control or plain, old-fashioned killing one animal to save another is a notion he “loathes”. 

While adjectives such as “cute” and “fluffy” awkwardly abound in his descriptions of animals and birds, in each chapter the author steels himself to visit practical conservationists going about their bloody business of killing. Their targets are invasive or non-native birds and mammals which pose direct threats to rarer native fauna.

Especially notable is the excellent chapter where Warwick meets Dr Craig Shuttleworth, who has made it his life’s work to protect Anglesey’s red squirrels by culling tens of thousands of grey squirrels. The author here writes with striking honesty, leading the reader to a slow dawning of realisation that the only way native Nutkin will survive is through the systematic eradication of the domineering American grey. 

Equally erudite are Warwick’s conservation conversations with Professor Tony Martin, a man hell-bent on ridding the UK of the North American mink. Here again you find authentic analysis, tinged with Warwick’s own melancholic conclusion that death is indeed the solution if species such as the water vole are to endure the onslaught of the voracious escapees from fur farms. 

in researching his book, warwick visits many locations where wildlife conflicts take place, meeting numerous ecologists, zoologists and other assorted academics who undertake the task of killing for conservation. Obviously Bloomsbury’s advance didn’t stretch to funding a trip to New Zealand for his essay-like chapter on the disastrous consequences for the native fauna there caused by Victorian meddlers releasing hedgehogs, yet his knowledge of the specific subject matter makes up for any absence of first-hand experience.

Now back to the absence in the book — its Achilles heel, which prevents it from being a true voice from the middle ground of practical conservation: in the UK, most culling of wild animals to protect others is not carried out by academics but by gamekeepers, overwhelmingly on wild bird shoots, not the highly-stocked commercial pheasant shoots that Warwick decries at length.

The author talks to only one “gamekeeper”, Dr Mike Swan from the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. I know Mike well; he is a remarkable and practical countryman, but not in truth a gamekeeper. As his PhD indicates, he is first and foremost a scientist. 

Warwick claims that the reason gamekeepers are absent from his book is because “they are not talking to me”. This is hardly surprising when he dismisses them as simply “kill[ing] wildlife to enable rich people to kill wildlife for fun”. This is a million miles away from my own experience. 

his simplistic notion that professional moorland keepers, partridge keepers and wild bird keepers are mere bloody experts in death avoids the truth that their primary role is to keep wildlife alive. 

I wonder whether this seeming determination to include only academics in the conversation, and exclude the less scholarly gamekeepers, stems from a personal squeamishness about their earthy proficiency at killing or from an old-fashioned prejudice against these rustics who may know more about nature than he does? 

Thanks to Warwick’s aversion to gamekeepers, Cull of the Wild misses fully addressing the most contentious issues. While the final chapter is a masterclass in the psychology of the often brutal relationships between human and non-human animal life, his pointed avoidance of keepers left me disappointed. 

Perhaps I am too close to the world Warwick finds so bloody and horrible, or am I, like him, too entrenched in my opinions on what is best for our flora and fauna? I would be pleased to invite Hugh to meet some real gamekeepers at work: apex predators are, after all, fascinating creatures.