Collective Ink, 2025
ISBN: 978-1803418520
Reviewed by Caroline Warnes
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On one level, No Paradise with Wolves is a story about a young couple, Katie and Luke, who buy a derelict dairy farm in the Asturias region of Northern Spain and the trials and tribulations they experience whilst doing it up and creating a home for themselves and their young family. On a wider level this book explores some much larger themes including the nature of rewilding and the potential conflicts of interest this can create, particularly between wildlife and local people. It also champions the importance of increasing people’s awareness of, and understanding of, Nature so they are more likely to appreciate and look after the natural world.
Luke is a wildlife photographer and filmmaker and, after meeting Katie on a game reserve in Zambia, they travelled and worked together making wildlife documentaries around the world. Finding the constant travelling and hand-to-mouth lifestyle exhausting, they eventually decided that it was time to settle somewhere and create a more sustainable lifestyle. Having fallen in love with the Asturias region of Northern Spain whilst making a documentary about the Iberian Lynx, they decided to make this their home. They eventually found a farm that they felt would be suitable to create a home and sanctuary both for themselves and for nature. They named this place Wild Finca.
The book outlines the sheer hard work that was involved in making the farm habitable and improving the land, both to grow food to feed themselves and, eventually also their two children, and also to increase biodiversity generally. Whilst not wishing to farm the land in the traditional sense, Katie and Luke experiment with keeping various native livestock species, managed mainly as conservation grazers. There was a very big learning curve while they worked out what worked and what didn’t, and Katie does not shy away from outlining the many things that went wrong along the way, some down to their own mistakes or those of other people and some down to bad luck. However these negative experiences are far outweighed by positive ones, including the increasing biodiversity on the farm and the children’s growing delight in the nature surrounding them. The book also outlines some interesting interactions with local people, many positive as Luke and Katie received a lot of help and support with their venture, but a few less so, particularly with hunters, both on and off their land.
One of the wider issues, alluded to in the book’s title, is the presence of wolves in the Asturias. These Iberian wolves are descended from an isolated population that survived the heavy persecution of wolves in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Over the years their numbers have fluctuated due to a variety of factors including habitat loss, changes in food availability and ongoing persecution. Recently numbers have been increasing, in part due to government-instituted bans on wolf hunting, and wolves are now spreading back into areas where they have been absent for many years.
For many people, including Luke and Katie, the presence of wolves is very positive. Having an apex predator to control numbers of grazing and browsing animals such as deer can have many beneficial effects on the environment and is a cornerstone of the rewilding process. For example the environmental benefits of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park in the USA have been widely studied and cited. However wolves can be a significant threat to the livelihoods of traditional livestock farmers, of which there are many in the very rural area surrounding Wild Finca. Katie and Luke first saw the slogan “Con lobos no hay Paraiso” (No Paradise with wolves) on a car parked outside their local supermarket and very soon encountered local people with very polarised views about the benefits or otherwise of living with wolves.
Katie outlines the tensions between these two sets of people very well, and at the same time exposes some of the fundamental difficulties associated with the concept of rewilding, including conflicts between the needs of the environment, the needs of the local people and the need for food production, which are highlighted in the different responses to the spread of wolves in the Asturias.
Through talking to different people Katie learns that farmers living in areas where wolves have always been present have learned to minimise livestock losses by using Mastins or livestock guarding dogs to protect their animals while they are grazing and by bringing them into safer enclosures at night. Farmers in the areas where wolves are now returning are not used to using these strategies and therefore more likely to lose animals to wolves. However, farmers in both situations are unhappy because they don’t feel they are sufficiently compensated for the losses caused by wolves. They want hunting to continue either to control the numbers of wolves or eradicate them totally. The pro-wolf people argue that the increasing presence of wolves offers opportunities for Nature tours and wolf watching experiences, which generate money. However this money does not tend to directly benefit the farmers who are living with the problems caused by the wolves. Unless this changes there will be ongoing tension and the risk of illegal wolf hunting continuing in areas where it is currently banned. This is something that will need to be addressed if wolves are to continue to survive and spread, both here and in other places around the world.
Katie also recognises how important it is to increase peoples’ general awareness of and understanding of Nature, and that this is particularly important for children. It has been shown that people who feel more connected to Nature tend to have higher levels of wellbeing and are more likely to act in environmentally friendly ways. Katie outlines how her own children have really enjoyed and benefitted from learning about and experiencing the Nature and environment around their home, and the family now offer guided tours of Wild Finca to small groups of school children and other interested people in the hope that this will increase their connection to and appreciation for Nature. Katie’s hope is that one day everyone will be able to enjoy living in a paradise with wolves.
This book is a very interesting read, for the unfolding story of Luke and Katie’s development of Wild Finca as a home for their family and as a place of increasing environmental biodiversity, and also for the insight into some of the wider issues associated with Nature conservation, particularly where apex predators such as wolves are being reintroduced. My only quibble is that there were a few places where the text could have been edited more carefully to avoid some small slip-ups. For example on one occasion Katie mentioned that Luke had gone off with the three dogs when at the time as far as we knew they only had two dogs and the third wasn’t introduced until the following chapter. However these were minor issues and do not detract from the main story or the wider messages of the book.