Angling Trust takes the easy option on otter culling issue

I AM a member of the Angling Trust, and I support this body wholeheartedly. But I feel that some of the comments on otter predation in its own magazine, ‘The Angler’, are misleading.

After saying that it cannot support calls for an otter cull, the Trust follows up with the statement ‘otters are an indigenous predator and have co-existed with healthy fish populations for thousands of years’.

Well, for much of the time in human history otters were hunted, which obviously kept their numbers in check.

What’s more, their favourite food, the European eel, wasn’t in serious decline, so most of our sport fish were relatively safe.

Nor was the cormorant subspecies that is decimating fish stocks all over Europe and Scandinavia adding to the problems we are now suffering after those thousands of years when the otter was ‘co-existing with healthy fish populations’.

Don’t get me wrong, I love wildlife in general and in particular, and I am not one of those who call cormorants ‘The Black Death’ or indeed advocate the mass culling of wildlife, otters included.

Whether or not otters and cormorants need controlling is obviously debatable and contentious. I sometimes feel that certain environmental groups don’t see fish as a form of wildlife worth protecting. Birds and mammals, yes, but fish?

What is coming home to roost is the fact that otter spraints are now found to be rich in the remains of wildfowl, and the RSPB now has to fence off parts of some of its reserves because of otter predation on some of the rare bird species that it is trying to protect.

Whatever the answers may be, if indeed there are any, to the conflicting interests of humans and wildlife where country sports and conservation issues are concerned, remember that anglers practised conservation before it became the buzzword it now is.

I do feel that the Angling Trust should be less misleading with its statements and more forceful in its dealings with those organisations that flood social media and the ‘liberal’ press with their emotive propaganda. Mervyn Linford, Lavenham