IMAGINE being chased by a bear down a ravine and over a cliff to your death.

Well, there are 209 sheep in the Pyrenees who don’t need to imagine it. They were killed a few weeks ago in the French Pyrenees when they were chased off a cliff by a bear.

A lot of the press coverage of this sad event focused on the outraged reaction of the French Farmers’ Federation, who began bleating like a flock of alarmed sheep about how the presence of bears in their region was incompatible with the kind of bear-free landscape they wish to live in.

“Pastoralism,” they said in a statement, “which is a guarantor of biodiversity and of a living and welcoming mountain region, is not compatible with the reintroduction of large predators.”

So, you see, to maintain the biodiversity of the area, they wish to remove some of the biodiversity.

It’s important to note that the sheep owner in this case was fully compensated by the French government.

The bear was, regrettably, just doing what many large predators do. It wasn’t being malicious. It’s not like after it had shepherded the sheep to their deaths, it drew on a cigarette, gazed into the middle distance, smiling slightly, before murmuring: “Your move, farmers.”

The whole incident raised quite profound questions; about the rights of other species to life, the rights of people to live in a world where all the interesting creatures haven’t been wiped out, the rights of farmers to their livelihoods, and how to deal with the conflicts between expanding farms and nature that is happening at huge scale worldwide.

As someone raised on wildlife documentaries, it must be said: pastoral landscapes are boring. Even the word sounds like pasteurised. Cleansed, stripped of life. If we only allowed the wildlife that certain landowners find acceptable, there would be nothing bigger than a shrew out there.

An ecosystem without top predators is not only dull and bereft of wonder, it also leaves an ecological void which has to be filled by past-it footballers with guns, like Vinnie Jones, and no-one wants that.

There are plans afoot to reintroduce the Eurasian lynx into certain parts of Northumberland as a trial. I don’t need to tell you which industry is up in arms about this. But finding space for larger wildlife is something we are going to have to do, in the UK and elsewhere.

Especially living, as we are, during the Sixth Mass Extinction event.

Indeed, causing, as we are, the Sixth Mass Extinction event.

Reading the environmental news, which is consistently bleaker than the recent Sean Bean series ‘Broken’, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that humanity is the worst thing that’s ever happened to this planet, including the vast bit of space rock that blasted the planet asunder in a fiery maelstrom to calve off the moon four billion years ago, and Vinnie Jones.

As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in her excellent book The Sixth Extinction: “We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open, and which will be forever closed.”

With some (though, of course, not all) of the custodians of our land seemingly so frequently determined to cleanse it of all the less convenient animals, it’s tempting to get defeatist about this whole thing.

But in 2053, when we’re climbing into our VR pods to watch Planet Earth 16, narrated by an artificial intelligence programmed to sound just like David Attenborough, and there’s no wildlife on it apart from the rats, cockroaches and Vinnie Joneses that managed to survive the Sixth Extinction, let’s not pretend we didn’t know what was happening.