Nine Lives Down

Scottish wildcat conservation is a tricky business, dogged by rampant hybridization, habitat loss, illegal poaching, and, more recently, calls from ecologists to declare the creature functionally extinct. While conservation bodies refuse to declare the fight over, the wildcat’s precarious position raises questions regarding extinction and its place in the wider conservation narrative. In this article the author tackles the possibly futile attempts by conservation bodies to save the Scottish wildcat from the brink of extinction in Britain’s “last wild place”—the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the North West Highlands. Through an analysis of past, present, and future configurations of the wildcat in the popular imagination, and an examination of its status as a “ghost species”—surviving on borrowed time due to anthropogenic intervention—this article aims to conceptualize the wildcat’s conservation as a sort of haunting. Existing as a wild emblem through a concentrated media campaign of inflated presence, it nonetheless remains hidden through hybridization and absence: a spectral being. The article therefore suggests that to truly save the wildcat is to account for its ghostliness and urge that conservationists instead accept the likely absence of wildcats in order to do the painful—but necessary—work of letting go.