If beavers are a protected species, why are so many being killed?
Public policy towards beavers is skewed in favour of the agricultural lobby and the result is the slaughter of many of these amazing animals, writes author Derek Gow
The news that 87 beavers have been killed under official licence on the Tay in this last year makes sorry reading. Their passing and the deaths no doubt of countless others are a tacit example of the inability of many members of our own species to emerge from the gloom of their cultural lairs. Despite all the independent evidence that beavers return natural life to landscapes near death and by doing so detoxify water courses we have ruined the evidence of lodge burning, bludgeoning and brutality of all sorts indicates clearly that this is so.
While the failure of rationality is a personal matter the inability of political power to dictate a strategy, based on science and evidence is troubling. History demonstrates all too well that this is a common failure which is actually quite normal. For all time wild animals that opposed human interests or which attracted our attention in any way have always been forced to yield until either their extirpation is complete; they are left living in areas so remote as to be unworthy of pursuit or – as in the case of the beaver – the drivers of their commercial exploitation have collapsed. Time after time we have proven to be an unremitting foe relentlessly dedicated to violent destruction. As it is with animals so it is with people. Other cultures which encountered the more ‘advanced civilisations’ of the European powers in the not so distant past were worthless ‘savages’ or ‘wild beasts’ too. The hunting of bushmen was permitted. The killers of Black Kettle kept his scrotum as a tobacco pouch. Malays were tallied with their severed ears. The Irish had tails and the elimination of the Chinese ‘yellow peril’ as an aspiration of the Tasmanian Stock Growers Association only failed when government subsidies dried up.
When bullying, braggadocio in buckets for all the normal reasons – jobs, profits, progress, national interest, right – is allowed to flow unfettered butchery always follows.
Sorrow and regret only ever come with hindsight long after the bad is done.
Politicians and their infrastructure of underlings are charged by society with the power to temper this tendency. It’s a weighty burden and it’s perhaps unsurprising that it buckles and corrupts all but a few.
While the partisan promise of the Scottish Minister for
Agriculture Fergus Ewing that any improvement in Scotland’s much diminished fauna would only be achieved ‘over his dead body’ no doubt played well with his acolytes better things were expected of the Environment Minister Roseanna Cunningham. As the 2019 winner of the RSPB’S Nature of Scotland award for political commitment to restoring the beaver one would have thought that her vision of the future would have been clear. Instead she too also promised that “Scottish farming will not be compromised by beavers”. It was her instruction that no other populations could be created elsewhere by the movement of individuals to locations where ideal habitat exists and where the possibilities of conflict were low.
Without options of this sort the killing was inevitable.
Understanding why is important.
In a fashion reminiscent of 1660s Boston where there were good Indians (Algonquins) and bad Indians (Mohawks) with a school-marm understanding she fashioned a myth of right and wrong beavers. Although these forms are physically indistinguishable – they are both after all only beavers doing what beavers do, feeding on vegetation, building dams and caring for their families – that was her case. To be good your status must be fragile and limited to Argyll where you would have to have a licence to exist. To be wrong you must be prospering on Tayside where another licence could be given to individuals to shoot you as and when they liked. Little evidence was required to justify this course of action – one applicant who was concerned that beavers were likely to worry his cows failed to clarify if this applied to complex crosswords or tricky mathematical equations – all you had to do was shout loud enough.
While all involved tried to maintain a fragile masquerade of reasonability the senselessness of what happened was piteous. Scottish Natural Heritage provided the excuse that as the lethal control of beavers is undertaken elsewhere in
Europe as a management method – when their populations have credibly reached ‘good conservation status’ – that this could be applied in Scotland. While no one knows how many beavers there are best estimates suggest that the figure is unlikely to exceed around 700 individuals. In Bavaria which is nearly the same size as Scotland and where an entirely competent mitigation process which we could easily copy works well lethal control removes circa 1,200 individuals annually from a still expanding national population of 23,000. For nearly half a century the Bavarians did all they could to avoid this end.
It was not their first response. Some anglers aside it’s the farming lobby which has really juiced this issue. Although the origins of the Tay beavers are unorthodox this is only the case because of silly rules which we as a species have invented. It’s not a real thing.
While no one knows how many beavers there are best estimates suggest that the figure is unlikely to exceed around 700
Before the landscape was ours the wetlands belonged to the beavers. As I write a colleague has sent me a lidar based map of old paleo-landscapes nearby. In it you can see the capillaries, veins and arteries of the old water courses. Draining, irrigating nourishing the land. All cauterised by us into single channels or ramrod ruled drains which bear no resemblance to their earlier delicate intricacy. Long before us it was theirs. Beaver dams trapped and held the silts and sediments through generations of effort over millennia. They created the fertile loams we now prize as farms. While their effort provided our gain as they return like dispossessed aboriginals it’s not theirs any more. They must live in reservations elsewhere which are inevitably poorer than their old lands. Like the good Indians and the bad it’s the price of progress. No culture of theirs is worth consideration.
Within closed ranks their enemies agree that this is reasonable. Their voices are heard and acted on out of all proportion to their worth. Simply scream food production and the politicians will tumble. Your political pals will always play along and pay up. They are an industrial lobby. The last to exist in its Jurassic form roaringly unchanged. While their lumbering counterparts of ship building, car manufacturing or coal were culled from the landscape of state support in the 1980s they alone remain replete in their Tolkien caverns lined with loot. They have little regard for the damage they do. Toxins in water courses. Eroding top soils. The collapse of biodiversity. Flooding in villages from their activities again and again and again.
I undertook a radio interview with one of them a few weeks ago. He whined shrill about beavers and the damage they did. The costs they imposed on his business were a critical threat to its viability. He was losing £5,000 a year. It all seemed so serious – if a little vague on the detail – that I checked his imperilled income flow from the public purse just to see how dire his situation really was. In 2018 his farming business was in receipt of close to £140,000 of tax payers’ money, £46,000 of which was for agri-environment and climate change achievement.
While I doubt very much if he is going to be visiting a food bank shortly in his Landcruiser he certainly had no room for beavers.