Shooting & fishing: Dammed if they do - why beavers should not be reintroduced

Published on Thursday 16 October 2008 15:17

I CANNOT imagine that beavers are much fun to hunt with hounds, otherwise someone would have done it. There are not, as far as I know, any 18th-century prints of Canadians in top hats and snow shoes pursuing beavers through the boondocks.

Nor, indeed, are there paintings of Swedish kings in full hunting kit, their favourite beaver hounds gazing soulfully up at their master. So I fear we may be in for a rather miserable time once the Scottish Wildlife Trust's (SWT) beavers eat their way through the wooden stakes of their Argyllshire reservation and go on the rampage, leaving a trail of matchwood and felled saplings in their wake.

I am one of the few people I have spoken to who thinks that bringing back the beaver might be quite fun. Everyone else in the world of salmon fishing goes completely apoplectic with rage. One friend threatened to strike me with a Norwegian book entitled 101 Ways to Kill a Beaver when I mildly ventured that they were rather sweet. Does no-one remember the Walt Disney cartoon Busy Beavers, one of his Silly Symphony series?

If the worst comes to the worst and the nation is overrun by urban beavers gnawing at its door jambs, there is surely a living to be made from turning them into sporrans – far more entertaining, with their funny little teeth, than boring old wildcat and otter heads.

Rather late in the day – the words horse, stable, door and bolt come to mind – the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards (ASFB) has had all the known beaver literature reviewed by An Expert and concluded that, far from being a good thing for our waterways, as suggested by SWT, there is evidence from Canada and Lithuania to show that beavers will and have dammed up streams and prevented salmon and sea trout getting to their spawning grounds.

Since nice Mr Russell, the minister for bogs and beavers, has announced that a trial release of beavers can go ahead, he is hardly likely now to turn round to the Bring Back Beavers brigade and say: "Sorry chaps, send your native European beavers back to Scandinavia whence they came."

What has upset the ASFB is that the SWT and, indeed, its Government supporters kept insisting publicly that there was "little" evidence to show beavers mucked about with salmon migration. But that did not mean there was no evidence or that it was not sound evidence – the ASFB was just a bit slow in finding it.

The word "little" does not mean worthless. It means not very much. And both studies show that beaver dams had seriously interfered with fish migration. In this country you may no more impede the rightful migratory course of a salmonid than gratuitously shout "Shaving Brush!" at a passing badger.

Since we abolished laws that allowed us to drag animals before the courts, the only people who can be held responsible in the event of an outbreak of illegal dam construction are the ASFB members who have a legal duty to look after the interests of salmon and sea trout. The SWT have been commendably cunning, not to say sensible, in picking a salmon-free patch of Argyll for its first beaver reservation. Thus, when the trial comes to an end, SWT will be able to say quite truthfully that not a salmon scale was harmed in the course of the experiment. At least not by the beavers that stayed home on the reservation.n [e-mail]

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