BY BERT BURNETT
Scotland’s environmental agency NatureScot has unveiled a new twenty year strategy to restore its native wildcats, with the ambition of seeing populations recover and thrive by 2045. The strategy brings together 26 organisations to coordinate conservation efforts for one of Scotland’s most threatened native species. The plans include restoring and reconnecting habitat, establishing new wildcat populations, reducing hybridisation with domestic cats and tackling threats such as persecution and road deaths. Conservation breeding and release programmes have seen 46 wildcats released, with 24 kittens born in the wild last year to wildcats released in 2023. Now the aim is to build on that progress and expand recovery across Scotland, creating populations that can eventually survive with much less human intervention. The vision for 2045 is a Scotland where wildcat populations are restored, expanding and able to coexist alongside people.
Mad.
Let’s get one thing straight. The Scottish wildcat is, for all practical purposes, already gone. In 2019, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported that there was no longer a viable population living wild in Scotland, with extinction highly likely without carefully planned releases. The population estimate of between 115 and 314 individuals is almost certainly outdated and overly generous. The real number of genetically pure wildcats is likely far lower. So what does NatureScot do with this information? Does it accept reality? Does it redirect resources to species that can actually be saved with the money? Of course not. It launches a twenty year strategy.
In January 2026, NatureScot awarded the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland over four hundred thousand pounds to build on the success of the Saving Wildcats partnership. This is part of a five point two million pound grant round distributed across thirteen projects. That is five point two million pounds that could have gone toward housing, healthcare, or any of the other services Scotland’s councils have been forced to gut. The funding will support a fragile new Cairngorms based population on their journey to recovery. Fragile is an understatement. This population exists entirely at human expense, bred in captivity, released into the wild, monitored by GPS collars, and fed supplementary food. This isn’t conservation. It’s a zoo without walls.
Let’s look at what this project has actually achieved after years of effort and millions in public funding. Forty six wildcats released since 2023. Twenty four kittens born in the wild last year to released wildcats. Ninety five percent survival of released cats in their first ten months. Impressive? Not when you understand the context. The surviving cats are heavily monitored, with GPS collars and supplementary feeding. They’re not truly wild. They’re outdoor pets with tracking devices. And even NatureScot admits that hybridisation, through interbreeding with domestic cats, remains a threat to the long term future of the species. The fundamental problem, that wildcats interbreed with feral domestic cats, hasn’t been solved. It can’t be solved by releasing more captive bred cats. NatureScot has been running trap neuter vaccinate return programmes on feral cats since the project began, neutering 132 cats. There are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of feral cats in Scotland. NatureScot is trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon.
Here’s the part that should make every Scottish taxpayer furious. NatureScot’s operational budget has grown from fifty eight point three million pounds in 2022/23 to sixty five point five million pounds in 2024/25. Its headcount has risen from 777 to 820 employees. It has 130 staff earning over fifty thousand pounds, six earning over eighty thousand pounds, and one earning over one hundred thousand pounds. All of this while local councils, the bodies actually responsible for the day to day environmental services communities rely on, are being cut to the bone and beyond. The Scotsman’s Brian Wilson noted the absurdity. It’s not as if councils don’t have their own environmental ambitions which they are unable to fulfil because they are skint. These would probably be more closely aligned to the priorities of their communities than NatureScot’s agenda.
This isn’t NatureScot’s first rodeo.
Consider the Nature Investment Partnership, a scheme announced in March 2023 with great fanfare, promising to mobilise two billion pounds in private finance for nature restoration. By early 2024, the ambition had been quietly downscaled to one hundred million pounds. And then, just before Holyrood broke up, the rural affairs minister admitted that no private finance had yet been directed through the partnership into on the ground projects. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. The private bank Hamden and Co withdrew. The investment managers Lombard Odier disappeared. The world leading scheme that was supposed to position Scotland as a global leader in natural capital was a dead duck. And now these same people, the ones who promised two billion pounds and delivered nothing, want us to believe they can save a species that’s functionally extinct by 2045?
NatureScot’s own strategy admits the wildcat was declared functionally extinct in 2019. Let me repeat that. Functionally extinct. This isn’t a species on the brink. It’s a species that has already fallen off the cliff. The new strategy sets a target of 2045 for wildcat populations to be restored, expanding and able to coexist alongside people. That’s nineteen years from now. Nineteen years of funding, salaries, conferences, reports, and consultants. Nineteen years during which the cats will continue to interbreed with domestic cats, get hit by cars, and die of disease. The honest truth is that the wildcat is a lost cause in the wild. The genetic integrity of the species has been too compromised, the population too fragmented, the threats too ubiquitous. The money being poured into this project would be better spent on species that can actually be saved, or, radical idea, on the public services that Scottish communities actually need.
NatureScot’s wildcat strategy isn’t conservation. It’s bureaucratic self preservation disguised as environmentalism. It’s an organisation justifying its sixty five million pound budget and 820 staff by clinging to a doomed project that allows it to tick a box marked species recovery. The wildcat is gone. It’s tragic. It’s a symptom of centuries of persecution and habitat destruction. But pretending we can bring it back through captive breeding and GPS collars isn’t conservation. It’s denial. Scotland’s taxpayers deserve better than a quango that spends their money chasing ghosts. The wildcat strategy should be shelved, the four hundred thousand pounds redirected to something useful, and NatureScot should take a long, hard look at whether it exists to serve nature, or simply to serve itself. The wildcat is dead. Long live the wildcat. Now stop wasting our money on it.
Bert Burnett is a retired gamekeeper of more than fifty years’ experience.