The animal industry already wants to cull English beavers, and they haven't even nativised yet
If it moves, kill it?
The government is planning to list beavers as a native species to England. There are positive outcomes to this, as it affords the creatures legal protection against wanton killing that they don’t currently enjoy. But discussions are already underway about when to cull beavers to protect rural capitalists.
Creation and destruction
On 10 April, The Times reported that “beavers are to gain protection as a native species in England”. As a result, beavers will be released into the nation’s countryside. This follows a nationwide programme of releasing beavers into enclosures that began in Kent in 2001. And its direct antecedent is the recently-completed five-year programme of beavers released on the River Otter, Devon.
The ‘rewilding’ strategy is touted by programme co-ordinators The Wildlife Trusts as the “reintroduction of an entire ecosystem that's been lost”. This claim is due to beavers’ widely praised ‘engineering’ skills. But these same skills are also a threat to major figures of England’s rural capitalism.
Phil Jarvis, environment forum chairman for the National Farmers Union, told BBC News that:
Beaver activity can undermine riverbanks and impede farmland drainage, making fields too waterlogged for cropping or grazing.
This seriously hinders farmers' ability to produce food for the nation.
Meanwhile, the Angling Trust published a “review of evidence” on releasing beavers into the wild in February 2021. The paper concludes that, due to a lack of long-term study data, “it is recommended beaver reintroductions are restricted to enclosed systems only”. It particularly criticises the River Otter study, saying it didn’t provide a “robust assessment” of the impact that beavers’ dams have on migrating fish.
Beavers were released into Welsh enclosures for the first time in March 2021. The plans faced similar concerns from the same parties.
Biting the bullet
Gaining native species status in England means beavers will be protected from unnecessary killing. However James Wallace, head of the Beaver Trust, told The Times that beavers mustn’t be “so protected that we can’t manage it”. While he proposed translocating as a primary method of management, Wallace also suggested it “might mean shooting” at some point in the future.
Beavers were reintroduced into Scotland’s wild in 2009 and given legal protections in 2019. However, the Scottish government also issued licences allowing farmers to kill beavers on Prime Agricultural Land. As The Ecologist outlined in July 2020, it appears as though shooting was a first rather than last recourse for mitigating economic damage:
Capacity for live trapping has not been developed as much as it could be because the emphasis from the start was on teaching people to shoot beavers.
75 percent of the farmers who have got licenses to kill said they would be happy to have the beavers trapped and moved but with the ban on moving them to most areas of Scotland, this just isn’t feasible.
That led to farmers killing 87 beavers in 2019, all of which were in the Tayside region. Sarah Robinson of the Scottish Wildlife Trust said this amounted to “at least one-fifth of the beaver population in Tayside”. And she went on to say that this “heavy cull has almost certainly had a negative impact on the conservation status of a protected species”.
Economically challenged
A broad overview of the discourse on beaver reintroduction shows that beavers are praised for their function. They are viewed as engineers that benefit the surrounding landscape, as a draw for eco-tourism, and even as human mental health benefactors. These are fundamentally economic arguments. They attempt to pass beavers off as a net positive by turning them into an absent referent, disappearing the creature behind their functional value to the economy.
As long as this is the ground on which the argument for ‘rewilding’ beavers is fought, then beavers will remain at the whim of economic interests. And as badgers, boars and grey squirrels have shown us, money is more important than life.
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