Fancy a fur hat? Best get beavering away

Hurry, hurry, last chance to bag yourself a wild Scottish beaver. I doubt beaver make a very sporting shot, but they make very fine coats and the fur is prized for felting hats, or at least it used to be. I have never heard tell of a beaver tail sporran, not even among North American Scots who are prone to strange aberrations of Highland dress, but there’s always a first time. I mention this only because come May you interfere with a Scottish beaver at your peril. Until then however, there is a small window of opportunity to harvest the pelts before the animals – or at least those that have been illegally let loose on Tayside and elsewhere – become fully protected.

Typically rather than adopt the “precautionary principle,” ie, wipe the buggers out before they do any more damage to trees and watercourses, let alone salmon (the experts have no idea what effect beavers have on protected salmon), the government decided that pictures of dead beavers on Facebook were a political no-no, and anyway most fishermen were probably Tories anyway. So let ‘em breed – the beavers, that is, not Tories.

After May should you so much as say boo to a beaver, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) will be after you. You will be taken from this place and battered to death with copies of the Wildlife and Countryside Acts, urged on by baying hoards of teenage veganistas. Actually, rather worse, the TV naturalist Chris Packham will probably get you, although these days he seems to be obsessed with grouse and the people that shoot them. That is not to say his chosen vehicle of vengeance on the landowning classes, the rather worryingly named “Wild Justice”, will not be on your case should SNH fail to take what Packham and crew consider to be the appropriate action.

For that is Wild Justice’s self-proclaimed remit: to force the likes of SNH and no doubt the prosecution services to face up to their responsibilities should they be found wanting; wanting, that is, by Wild Justice.

So look forward to a succession of judicial reviews. Wild Justice has already scored one hit without having to go to court, pointing out that SNH licensing a cull of Highland ravens to “see what happens” was rather short of the scientific standards required these days. Actually it seems a perfectly sensible way to go about things given that all sorts of caveats would need to be imposed on the cull without having to wait years for a scientific survey to tell us there are too many ravens in certain areas.

But hey ho. If you want a beaver pelt you’d better get on with it. Only joking. Sort of. n