For the past couple of years, I have had the pleasure of hosting New Scientist‘s rewilding weekender at Coombeshead, a farm in Devon, UK, that is being magnificently returned to nature. At the end of this two-day trip for paying guests, we hold a straw poll on which large mammal the audience would like to see reintroduced to Britain. Both times there has been a hands-down winner: the lynx.

I was reminded of this when news broke in January that four Eurasian lynx had been spotted – and later captured – in…