Two Scandinavian billionaires who own vast tracts of land in remote parts of Scotland are hoping to reintroduce wild laughter into their homeland.
Anders Holch Povlsen, 48, a $ 6 billion Danish billionaire believed to be the largest landowner in Britain with an empire of about 220,000 acres, and Lisbet Rausing , a Tetra Pak heiress, who still owns 80,000 acres in the Scottish Highlands, is funding research to reintroduce the predator, the British newspaper time reports.
Laughter was wiped out in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom by hunting and habitat loss about 500 years ago; however, populations survive in central and northern Europe.
The Eurasian lynx can be up to 27 inches tall and weighs about 60 pounds, making it considerably larger than Canadian lynx and bobcats seen in some parts of North America.
Eat about five pounds of meat a day. Their purely carnivorous diet means that many sheep farmers, a strong lobby in the region, strongly oppose their reintroduction. The National Farmers’ Union of Scotland strongly opposed a previous proposal to reintroduce lynx into a forest near Loch Lomond, time reports.
However, evidence of public support for the reintroduction of laughter could lead NatureScot to issue a license to allow the dramatic plan to re-emerge. A new one-year study costs $ 65,000 and is funded by Povlsen and Rausing.
Proponents say farmers will be compensated for all animals killed by laughter, as is often the case in other officially managed reintroductions of locally extinct species. They also say that laughter would help regenerate forests by plundering deer that nibble on young trees, preventing them from growing. A charity that supports proposals to reintroduce laughter said it believed there was enough habitat and prey in Scotland to support about 500 laughter.
Peter Cairns, executive director of Scotland: The Big Picture, said the study aims to “bypass the tribal leaders” of bodies such as NFU Scotland and talk to individual farmers.
He said the laughter reintroduced into the Highlands would spread and could eventually spread to the north of England.