The problem with beavers is that they go around building dams all over the place with no consultation with the ducks or water voles and no consideration of any environmental damage that these dams cause. Where is the environmental impact statement? Where are the mitigation measures? Why has there been no public enquiry – one that allows all water and water-bank creatures to have their say? This is unconscionable behaviour by the beavers, and all affected creatures should raise their voices and their banners in protest.
They’d probably have a go. If they, too, are affected they should get their banners out. Although, come to think of it, they may not want to draw too much attention to themselves in front of the ducks and water voles; best they just orchestrate from behind the scenes
I think reintroducing cougars from Canada is the obvious solution here. They will keep the beaver population down – as well as pets and the occasional small child. Balance will be restored.
Whoops, better make sure that everyone knows what I mean – I don’t mean that little beavers care about the environment, I mean that beavers care little about the environment.
Beavers create habitat for water voles and wild fowl! I’m sure if the bank side creatures could have their say they would welcome the return of beavers.
You folks should introduce bobcats. This would not only be an ecological balance for the beavers, but should elicit some hilariously entertaining Daily Mail coverage.
Unfortunately, Mr John Lewis Stempel is speaking from a position of complete ignorance about beavers. He needs to read the extensive research and studies both on the UK and overseas.
Stephen Quilley
6 months ago
We have beavers on our land in Ontario. They’re cute. I like them being there. Sometimes they are a pain in the ass- 5 apple trees, blocking the outlet culvert on a small lake etc. Occasionally I have shot them. New ones come back. It’s all fine. But if Britain has beavers – then Britain has to reintroduce the same pragmatic willingness to cull them – shooting or trapping (preferably using the fur and meat). That means they can’t be a protected species; and there has to be a pragmatic hunter’s appreciation of the natural world. Bring back the trap-line, keep them under control and there are costs and benefits….all good. Treat them as a natural icon that can’t be touched, protected by the Islingtion luvvies in charge of Natural England, and it will be a disaster
CHARLES STANHOPE
6 months ago
As the Ancient Greek sage Hesiod*put it so well: “moderation in all things”.
Indeed. There are always exceptions to every rule, even the rule that there are always exceptions.
Neil Ross
6 months ago
Shocking 2,000 beavers are roaming the U.K. countryside! This works out at 1 per 34,000 human beings, who have had roads, railways, airports, bridges, dams, power stations, villages, towns and cities built for them. Of course beavers are the problem!
Elliott Bjorn
6 months ago
So what eats beavers? They are pretty big……50 pounds
Wolves, wild cats and lynx in Europe ….in USA coyotes and mountain lions, alligators and grizzly bears too. So how is that going to work?
I will tell you – cars will be the predator. As the beavers eat all the food because the bears, lynx, and wolves are not keeping up, then they have to keep moving about to find habitat – but it already has beavers, so they have to keep moving, and keep moving and … Splat! the British apex predator, the car, has claimed another of its prey.
Absolutely. What most of those who love the idea of all these reintroductions don’t want to admit is that unless we literally introduce every single species that was once here en masse and in the precise proportions that they need to be to achieve a near perfect balance, that human beings, and as you say, their vehicles, have to step in and control the populace of anything we reintroduce due to the lack of other predators and the reality that the vast majority of the populace here don’t want to live alongside any animals that they fear might target them.
Again, agreed. If we want our river systems to respond favourably to reintroductions like beavers, even with careful population management of the beavers, we’d also have to do something about the masses of artifical interventions we’ve made to river systems by re-routing them for the sake of human habitation and building all over flood plains.
I’ve volunteered as part of ecosystem restoration projects in the past, all of which have been very modest, and all of those projects recognise that the restoration process is intensive, invasive, and ongoing, and requires endless numbers of volunteers to maintain it as we cannot restore the self sustaining systems that used to exist, they are just too vastly complex and nuanced for us to reproduce in their entirety.
Made me think about the cow-catchers on the US trains back in John Wayne’s time. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a great pressure to introduce beaver-catchers on the cars.
As long as its not an Aixam or ‘bike – then both the beaver and the human may well cop it – and beavers breed way quicker than people
Robbie K
6 months ago
What a miserable cynical piece. Considering it was over hunting that erradicated the beaver from Britain in the first place it only seems reasonable there should be a conservation programme to reintroduce them.
It’s the typical attitude of a farmer – anything that threatens the profit margin must be destroyed.
Since the removal of the beaver from the UK, the human population has grown tremendously. There is no room for their furry dam-building shenanigans any more. If we want wetlands, as the article suggests we can build beaver-mimic dams. And since we have nothing big enough to predate them (officially-I’ve seen evidence that we have!), we will end up having to cull them anyway.
It is actually possible to co-exist with nature, with a little effort. One needn’t attack it with a flame thrower, or shotgun, if it’s a bit inconvenient.
Ah yes. The argumentum ad captandum* and the argumentum ad hominem. Could you provide some actual rebuttal of Mr Lewis-Stempel’s points, please?
*Though that one won’t affect most of Unherd’s readers, who aren’t particularly sentimental.
Let’s just go with his argument for the moment, although one could make similar claims against the case for raising children – the destruction, inconvenience, cost, stress, filth and annoyance, just to scratch the surface. Yet parents love them don’t they? And it’s all worth it just to see their happy little faces. Furry in this scenario, as pointed out by Rick above.
Just ask the Iroquois here in Canada how much beaver pelts are worth. Through the fur trade they grew massively wealthy and powerful trading with the Europeans for everything from manufactured goods to black powder weaponry. They even waged a massive territorial war on numerous other smaller indigenous nations, appropriately called the ‘Beaver Wars’, because they’d hunted the beaver population in their own territory to extinction. The little bastards were basically furry gold and the everyone knew it. And I don’t think anyone stopped to ask “wait, what about wetland conservation?”
So what you’re saying is that the insatiable desire for top hats in Europe caused peace loving First Nation peoples to start killing each other with weapons cynically provided by said Europeans. Another shameful episode in European colonial history..
How much do you know about First Nations history? The Iroquois were a warrior people, and about as far from ‘peace-loving’ as you could get. They routinely attacked smaller, weaker tribes for a variety of reasons, including to replenish their numbers after a loss in battle, killing the men and forcibly adopting women and children into being Iroquois in what were called ‘wars of mourning’. And they weren’t alone in such practices. The point of my comment was that the idea of North America as this untouched, Garden of Eden-like paradise before the coming of the ‘evil white man’, and of the First Nations as these saintly noble-savage types in tune with nature is a romanticized myth with little grounding in reality, much like the fantasies of ‘Rewilding Britain’.
I’m sorry if I missed any irony amidst your condescending moral exhibitionism, but admittedly it is a little hard to hear you from way up there on your exceedingly high horse, so hopefully I can be forgiven for that failing.
“I’m sorry if I missed any irony amidst your condescending moral exhibitionism”
You’re trying to have it both ways at the same time. In fact she was not being a moral exhibitionist, she was mocking the sort of people who would really be like that. I took her at face value too. The thing with sarcasm and mockery is that you have to get as close to ‘the line’ as possible without actually being taken seriously, thus ‘mistakes’ are inevitable. No foul.
I guess being peaceful was a fatal error for any tribe in pre-Colombian Americas? (And not much help after TBH) Does anyone on here know which tribe(s) drove the Norse out of Vinland and Markland? They never seem to get a name check but certainlt put the Norse off having another go – stone age 1, iron age 0.
Could have been the Mikmak, maybe? I know they lived in what is now Newfoundland/Labrador, at least at the time of the early British colonies, but whether or not they did at the time of Vinland I’m unsure of. None of the pre-contact cultures of North America kept written records, only the ones in central/south America tended to, and though their oral histories are astonishingly accurate for the most part, they are still prone to the pitfalls common to such kinds of unwritten record keeping. The Vikings themselves didn’t have any peaceful contact with them, probably because of an inability to communicate, and only referred to the natives as ‘skraelings’ (which apparently loosely translates to mean ‘weaklings’, most likely in reference to their shorter height and smaller build).
And to be fair, the natives didn’t wipe out the Vikings, they just made it so interminable for them that they begrudgingly admitted it wasn’t worth staying and abandoned the Vinland colony. Still credit where credit is due, standing up to those mail-clad, sword-wielding giants with nothing but stone arrows and flint tomahawks is still quite impressive, I won’t deny that.
They are called the ‘Maritime Archaic’ people by archeologists. They were different people than the Beothuk on the island when Europeans came back in the 1500’s.
Yes, Linda, that is exactly the case. So, lace up your hair-shirt, tighten that chalise of ancestral-gotten imperial privilege, and hang your head in shame for the plight of the innocent bucolic lands of native peoples all over this world.
“For-shame…, I cry to the unmoved stars, …Oh, for the sins of my forebears – I would give up all that we have to . . . . . . . oh, hang on a minute. . . . . “
Your earlier comment seemed indistinguishable from the genuinely held, earnestly expressed beliefs of the sort of native-fetishizing, West-hating progressive utopianists that get drawn to these discussions like flies to manure. If you really are just taking the piss I suggest you work on your satirical phrasing.
I still don’t see what the ‘joke’ was, and so if I came across as ‘pompous’ it was because I was responding in kind to what I was perceiving. Clearly I did misjudge the situation, though I was obviously not the only one. Internet comments are not the best medium for sarcasm or nuance. I admit I made a mistake, and if I seemed hostile it is because it’s hard to back out of that kind of confrontational mindset.
I suggest to everyone in my Canadian city who goes on about their deep guilt over First Nations that they can give their house to the local band to address the historical injustice. To my knowledge no one has followed up on that suggestion. I look forward to moving back to Scotland to receive cash and a homestead as reparations for being driven off my indigenous ancestral homeland by the evil English as per my families oral histories. I also want training in Scots Gaelic.
I have said before that when people in the USA and Canada start any meeting or presentation by saying whose land they nicked, this is just guesturing; if they really felt what was done was wrong then they should give it back. As for your personal reparations, ask the Scottish government as they have been receiving “reparations” from England via the Barnett Formula for years.
Peace loving? What a pile of delusional nonsense. One the largest genocides in history was the Iroquois extermination of the Huron in the mid 1600’s. 500,000 murdered. That just doesn’t happen out of nothing. The First Nations in Canada and the US were in a state of constant conflict when Europeans arrived.
You should see The world until yesterday by Jared Diamond. The people of New Guinea are in a state of perpetual tribal warfare. So were the cities of ancient Greece. I think it’s ubiquitous.
I guess the same with Algonquin, Wyandot etc? Certainly great pelts – waterproof and flexible – and easy to catch – so if managed properly this couls be a win-win in Scotland.
Nick Fox
6 months ago
I‘ve farmed in Wales since 1968. In the last 40 years I have managed to buy 300 acres and gradually planted about 33% of the land area into trees, or into ponds, leaving the remaining better quality land for sheep and silage production. Nine years ago I started breeding beavers on the farm and have been delighted with their ability to create small ponds and channels and massively enhance the habitats. Wales was the last stronghold for beavers because it has so many boggy little valleys full of willows and brambles, which beavers love and which farmers call ‘trash’. I believe we still have some old beaver channels on the farm dating from the 1600s.
If you have beavers on reclaimed alluvial arable Grade 1 land, such as in parts of Tayside, you will get problems. About 95% of Wales is Grade 5 or so land, in other words, marginal for farming. There is plenty of space here for beavers and they are gradually colonising it from animals in the English rivers. The Welsh government and Natural Resources Wales dither, prevaricate, and demand expensive ‘feasibility studies’. Proud but hollow words about biodiversity and environmental good…
Actually there is a very sound Beaver Management Plan in place for UK. It relies on a three stages: mitigation – unblocking culverts or protecting trees etc, translocation – moving animals from places where they are not wanted to places where they are, and killing – humanely killing unwanted or surplus animals. I fully support this management and have eaten beavers. They are edible, but nothing special unless you are a better cook than I am.
None of us farmers want beavers turned into icons like badgers, otters or peregrines. A family of otters on our lake, in the years when they take up residence, kill all the goslings, ducklings and even some beaver kits. We have them on camera dragging off adult greylags. Badgers have burgeoned hugely in my lifetime, causing unsustainable pressure on ground dwelling species and bringing turmoil to dairy farmers through bovine Tb. These species are managed, not on any sound ecological principles, but on public opinion massaged and polarised by the media. Like my sheep; once a few go, the rest follow.
My real beef with John Lewis-Strempel’s article is that, while rambling through various complaints about beavers, most of which are re-circulated alarmism, he misses the philosophical point entirely. Why always judge a species purely on the cost/benefit to our own? What kind of world will eventuate, derived from those criteria? If we think of the beaver as a ‘pest’, I wonder what the beaver thinks of us? Long before we domesticated animals we hunted them to the point that they feared us, not just by learning from experience but by gradually evolving instinctive fear. In respect specifically to us vertical bipedal humans, many species became ‘wild’. The fear, the wildness, reached their genes. What is this ‘wildness’? Where is ‘the wild’? In my view, the term ‘re-wilding’ is a misnomer in respect of a little island like Britain, heavily over-run by humans. We can never have complete fully-balanced ecosystems here as long as we humans are here, so compromise and management is the next best option. As a farmer, I believe our own British food production should balance the carrying capacity of humans here. But this will not happen. We think we are intelligent, but when it comes down to it we are heading for the ‘boom and bust’ strategy for our own population management, just as surely as the cyclical patterns of some other species. It will be painful, but I will be dead by then. Meanwhile, providing 33% of my land for nature is a tithe I am happy to pay. I know it is inadequate.
Andrew Stoll
6 months ago
Beavers just do what all rodents are famous for, multiply! And at some point, culling of excess Beavers must also be reintroduced in order to maintain a healthy balance of all animal and plant species. There is no way around that and they are probably very edible too, apart from the lovely fur..
I challenge the claim that beavers are indiscriminate lumberjacks. Everything I have read about them says that because they co evolved with those trees, the way the trees and forests grow is impacted positively by them. Indeed, many species of trees in beaver-native areas re-grow from the stumps. See this interview for example. https://spotify.link/TQz3aK3f2xb
It is not that they are indiscriminate – they have significant preferences – but that they are patchy feeders.
mike otter
6 months ago
I see on the rivers Teith, Tay and Earn they are proliferating. There are some well built lodges and i note they use a mix of naturally fallen wood as well as their own neatly felled trunks. I have seen beavers, especially sub-adult, randomly cut down trees or saplings i assume for practice and to have wood handy to drag to a dam/lodge if they find a mate. Bit like squirrels storing food on the basis they may never find their stash again but will likely find another’s. That bit of “leave it to beaver” is an unwanted side effect. Their skins are great though the meat is crap according to the Cree etc who used to eat it as last resort food. Re-wilding will never be hassle free but we can’t turn the clock back to Scotland c1500. Housing and agri-land reclaimed from valley floor flood plains would have been washed away in those days. I wonder if the Swedes recent attempt at wolf genocide caused many wolves to flee to Norway or Finland? Same may happen here when a McNepo bairn dies as their moped flips over a beaver on the A9! The March of the Beavers as they take the Aln, Tweed, Tees and finally the Humber/Trent/Derwent would be something to see LOL.
Its natural that as each generation of beaver babies grows up and needs to find its own territory,or at least some of them do,then their dreadful depredations are going to spread along the water systems and eventually somewhere they are going to come into conflict with people’s interest. The landscape they create is not attractive,it looks like a bomb hit it,but green types go on about how lovely wind turbines are. The problem with the wolf reintroduction in Sweden was that the creatures rather than staying up in the wild and lonely mountains like the wolf advocates romantically imagined the creatures very pragmatically came down to the edge of the farmed areas to hang around the edge of farmyards to opportunistically snaffle any sheep in pens etc ,like foxes re hen houses. It was very scary for Swedish farming families,mainly concern for their children,maybe wolves are harmless to humans but looking out from your farm kitchen windows at dusk and knowing that a wolf is lurking in the shadow of the trees at the edge of your farmyard you dont want to let your kids out to play. It was the reality of how real life wild creatures are pragmatic and take short cuts rather than behave in the romantic manner their idealistic champions imagine that means nature introduction schemes only work on a limited scale and require ongoing management.
David Kingsworthy
6 months ago
Ok Britain, just bring in animals that are natural predators of beavers. Problem solved!
Interesting article. Might some Environmentalists prefer to see a reduction in the living standards of some or all of the humans rather than a culling of any of the beavers? I fear the answer might be “ if the humans are rich then yes”. ( and I fear that not because I am rich but because I am human).
Having met Derek Gow, who is at the forefront of beaver reintroduction and breeds them on his farm in Devon, I can categorically state that he gave the very strong impression that he would be quite happy to see the U.K. population reduced to the numbers of Medieval England while beavers proliferate across the whole country.
There’s a not insignificant proportion of environmentalists who are either anarcho-primitivists or are highly sympathetic to many of the premises of that ideology, and such ideas do require a massive reduction in the human population to be viable.
As someone who has spent well over a decade in environmentalist circles, I can say that the fundamental issue afflicting environmentalism is a clash between the practical implications of environmentalism and the theoretical underpinnings of left leaning political perspectives.
The left has a major issue with reasoning around zero sum games, and it leads to this weird doublethink in environmentalism, whereby there’s an explicit declaration that resources are finite, yet a belief that they can somehow redistribute access to those finite resources and stretch them out so that they can create an eco utopia, do so without their lives being detrimentally affected and also simultaneously uplift the developing world. All of this is of course completely at odds with the actual scale of change required to bring about their utopia, the complexities of global economics, the practicalities of trying to wrest even a fraction of resources away from the global super rich, and doesn’t address the conundrum of how to produce the sheer volume of technology required in a self sustaining fashion without further contributing to what they see as an immediate threat of environmental apocalypse.
What this article is really addressing is just one example of where emotional investment in eco utopia fails to address the practical complexities of working with a finite amount of massively altered landmass and a pre-existing population.
There are two roots of the environment movement which they try to cover up. The back to nature environmental movement in post WW1 Germany which had it’s own party which merged with the Nazis in the 1920s. The violent Red Army Faction Communist types who joined the German Green Party in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
Both organisations lack the practical engineering skills to fix problems. By increasing the soil fertility of much low grade farmland, agricultural output would be greatly increased without the need to cut down woods. The ban on using sewage was largely due to heavy metal content. As these are no longer used, except in a very few locations, legislation should be changed so human sewage along with animal manure can be used to improved fertility and water holding capacity of soil.
In Europe farming policy is dictated by the EU and has largely been influenced of famine during and after WW2. It initially meant taking money from efficient German industry and give it to French farmers. More recently environmental policy has been dominated by charities who lack an adequate understanding of ecology, agriculture, food storage and distribution.
What should be done? Look at the food needed, the soil types, weather,topography, water supplies, soil fertility, waste and sewage management and look at increasing soil fertility, increasing biodiversity and re-using sewage manure and waste instead of importing fertilisers. Much food is sent to landfill. By focusing on particular areas and lacking the practical engineering and agricultural skills and not looking at the whole picture modern policies result in many absurdities.
Mike Robinson
6 months ago
Rewilding seems to mean different things to different people. To me, allowing small areas in public parks to return to nature viz. encouraging wild flowers &c. to encourage insects &c., is rewilding. But that cannot work alas because people would throw rubbish there, allow their dogs to do their thing &c.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
6 months ago
New Zealand has got rid of the only dangerous beaver.. its erstwhile PM…
Evil people like Clarkson have been complaining about beavers for years, the destruction to nature and undermining of roads etc are well documented but the ‘for’ camp would rather we all go back to living in mud huts and chucking sticks at each other than work with the ecosystem we have.
I feel persecuted by beavers. It’s a complex; I need to discuss this with my therapist ……
Clare Knight
6 months ago
Some of their natural predators are still around like foxes and otters but perhaps it’s time to bring back the big guns – wolves and bears to restore a balance.
Which is why THEY want it. (Not certain who THEY are but THEY are real and they’ve taken control). I’ve only recently seen how all these strategies to “save nature” from banning neonicotinoids,to creating beaver wetlands is really about reducing viable farmland and making producing crops more difficult and expensive. And actually Badgers were NEVER under threat of being eliminated. I now suspect the ban on controlling badger was partly because some people enjoyed killing badgers and anything people enjoy has to be banned. But also because having uncontrolled numbers of them as we see,makes farming in proximity with them more expensive and difficult. We seem to be set on recreating that world of the past in which the poor starved,have a look in the parish register of Meeth in North Devon circa 1812 and read the parish clerks account of life in a remote rural place when the harvest fails,it’s not nice.
Made worse when village well carried typhoid or cholera. Malnutrition makes people far more vulnerable to disease. Most books on health pre – WW2 included recipes for beef tea and similar drinks in order to strengthen people after illness. TB was made worse if patient was malnourished and drinking water contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.
The problem with beavers is that they go around building dams all over the place with no consultation with the ducks or water voles and no consideration of any environmental damage that these dams cause. Where is the environmental impact statement? Where are the mitigation measures? Why has there been no public enquiry – one that allows all water and water-bank creatures to have their say? This is unconscionable behaviour by the beavers, and all affected creatures should raise their voices and their banners in protest.
Do Mink eat Beavers?
They’d probably have a go. If they, too, are affected they should get their banners out. Although, come to think of it, they may not want to draw too much attention to themselves in front of the ducks and water voles; best they just orchestrate from behind the scenes
No but Wolves, Lynx and sometimes Bears do
Yes they do..and certainly young ones. We have both…The mink are ferocious and can go anywhere.
I think reintroducing cougars from Canada is the obvious solution here. They will keep the beaver population down – as well as pets and the occasional small child. Balance will be restored.
And bears, we can supply bears too. Also wolves. I’m a reasonable price can be negotiated !
No. They eat everything else.
too small but otters do. Got two of the beaver kits released on Loch Lomond
I’ll be joining the protest.
I’ve been tormented by beavers since i was a teenage boy.
They’re such teases.
And they need to apply for an Ordinary Watercourse Consent!
Missed that one. Just goes to show how little beavers care about the environment.
Whoops, better make sure that everyone knows what I mean – I don’t mean that little beavers care about the environment, I mean that beavers care little about the environment.
Beavers create habitat for water voles and wild fowl! I’m sure if the bank side creatures could have their say they would welcome the return of beavers.
https://youtu.be/YBmKwQ9SPt0
Bret Weinstein and three hours on why beavers are good and necessary.
https://youtu.be/YBmKwQ9SPt0
You folks should introduce bobcats. This would not only be an ecological balance for the beavers, but should elicit some hilariously entertaining Daily Mail coverage.
Unfortunately, Mr John Lewis Stempel is speaking from a position of complete ignorance about beavers. He needs to read the extensive research and studies both on the UK and overseas.
We have beavers on our land in Ontario. They’re cute. I like them being there. Sometimes they are a pain in the ass- 5 apple trees, blocking the outlet culvert on a small lake etc. Occasionally I have shot them. New ones come back. It’s all fine. But if Britain has beavers – then Britain has to reintroduce the same pragmatic willingness to cull them – shooting or trapping (preferably using the fur and meat). That means they can’t be a protected species; and there has to be a pragmatic hunter’s appreciation of the natural world. Bring back the trap-line, keep them under control and there are costs and benefits….all good. Treat them as a natural icon that can’t be touched, protected by the Islingtion luvvies in charge of Natural England, and it will be a disaster
As the Ancient Greek sage Hesiod*put it so well: “moderation in all things”.
ps. This includes Immigration!
(* circa 700 BC.)
Including moderation.
Indeed. There are always exceptions to every rule, even the rule that there are always exceptions.
Shocking 2,000 beavers are roaming the U.K. countryside! This works out at 1 per 34,000 human beings, who have had roads, railways, airports, bridges, dams, power stations, villages, towns and cities built for them. Of course beavers are the problem!
So what eats beavers? They are pretty big……50 pounds
Wolves, wild cats and lynx in Europe ….in USA coyotes and mountain lions, alligators and grizzly bears too. So how is that going to work?
I will tell you – cars will be the predator. As the beavers eat all the food because the bears, lynx, and wolves are not keeping up, then they have to keep moving about to find habitat – but it already has beavers, so they have to keep moving, and keep moving and … Splat! the British apex predator, the car, has claimed another of its prey.
hahaa, re-wilding…..
Absolutely. What most of those who love the idea of all these reintroductions don’t want to admit is that unless we literally introduce every single species that was once here en masse and in the precise proportions that they need to be to achieve a near perfect balance, that human beings, and as you say, their vehicles, have to step in and control the populace of anything we reintroduce due to the lack of other predators and the reality that the vast majority of the populace here don’t want to live alongside any animals that they fear might target them.
If you want to reproduce the fauna of the palaeolithic (cave bears; wolves; aurochs) you have to have the human population of that era.
Again, agreed. If we want our river systems to respond favourably to reintroductions like beavers, even with careful population management of the beavers, we’d also have to do something about the masses of artifical interventions we’ve made to river systems by re-routing them for the sake of human habitation and building all over flood plains.
I’ve volunteered as part of ecosystem restoration projects in the past, all of which have been very modest, and all of those projects recognise that the restoration process is intensive, invasive, and ongoing, and requires endless numbers of volunteers to maintain it as we cannot restore the self sustaining systems that used to exist, they are just too vastly complex and nuanced for us to reproduce in their entirety.
I suspect rather strongly that may be the ultimate aim.
I would be happy with that. i might be able to get a GP appointment when I need one.
Made me think about the cow-catchers on the US trains back in John Wayne’s time. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a great pressure to introduce beaver-catchers on the cars.
Well, we can eat beavers…..actual four legged ones, I mean. Obviously.
As long as its not an Aixam or ‘bike – then both the beaver and the human may well cop it – and beavers breed way quicker than people
What a miserable cynical piece. Considering it was over hunting that erradicated the beaver from Britain in the first place it only seems reasonable there should be a conservation programme to reintroduce them.
It’s the typical attitude of a farmer – anything that threatens the profit margin must be destroyed.
Since the removal of the beaver from the UK, the human population has grown tremendously. There is no room for their furry dam-building shenanigans any more. If we want wetlands, as the article suggests we can build beaver-mimic dams. And since we have nothing big enough to predate them (officially-I’ve seen evidence that we have!), we will end up having to cull them anyway.
No understanding of the scale of the problem.
So you won’t be wanting cheap food at the supermarket next week then?
It is actually possible to co-exist with nature, with a little effort. One needn’t attack it with a flame thrower, or shotgun, if it’s a bit inconvenient.
Ah yes. The argumentum ad captandum* and the argumentum ad hominem. Could you provide some actual rebuttal of Mr Lewis-Stempel’s points, please?
*Though that one won’t affect most of Unherd’s readers, who aren’t particularly sentimental.
Let’s just go with his argument for the moment, although one could make similar claims against the case for raising children – the destruction, inconvenience, cost, stress, filth and annoyance, just to scratch the surface. Yet parents love them don’t they? And it’s all worth it just to see their happy little faces. Furry in this scenario, as pointed out by Rick above.
The problem is that children grow into adults. I’ve always thought we need to cull the human herds. Overpopulation is the problem with most things.
Bring back the beaver felt top hat and the problem will solve itself. A 100% beaver felt western cowboy hat costs upward of US $1,000.
Just ask the Iroquois here in Canada how much beaver pelts are worth. Through the fur trade they grew massively wealthy and powerful trading with the Europeans for everything from manufactured goods to black powder weaponry. They even waged a massive territorial war on numerous other smaller indigenous nations, appropriately called the ‘Beaver Wars’, because they’d hunted the beaver population in their own territory to extinction. The little bastards were basically furry gold and the everyone knew it. And I don’t think anyone stopped to ask “wait, what about wetland conservation?”
So what you’re saying is that the insatiable desire for top hats in Europe caused peace loving First Nation peoples to start killing each other with weapons cynically provided by said Europeans. Another shameful episode in European colonial history..
How much do you know about First Nations history? The Iroquois were a warrior people, and about as far from ‘peace-loving’ as you could get. They routinely attacked smaller, weaker tribes for a variety of reasons, including to replenish their numbers after a loss in battle, killing the men and forcibly adopting women and children into being Iroquois in what were called ‘wars of mourning’. And they weren’t alone in such practices. The point of my comment was that the idea of North America as this untouched, Garden of Eden-like paradise before the coming of the ‘evil white man’, and of the First Nations as these saintly noble-savage types in tune with nature is a romanticized myth with little grounding in reality, much like the fantasies of ‘Rewilding Britain’.
Oh dear! irony lost here.
I’m sorry if I missed any irony amidst your condescending moral exhibitionism, but admittedly it is a little hard to hear you from way up there on your exceedingly high horse, so hopefully I can be forgiven for that failing.
“I’m sorry if I missed any irony amidst your condescending moral exhibitionism”
You’re trying to have it both ways at the same time. In fact she was not being a moral exhibitionist, she was mocking the sort of people who would really be like that. I took her at face value too. The thing with sarcasm and mockery is that you have to get as close to ‘the line’ as possible without actually being taken seriously, thus ‘mistakes’ are inevitable. No foul.
I will take your word for it. I’ve seen too many people express that exact sentiment seriously and without irony that I guess I jumped the gun.
‘Nations’ or ‘tribal lands’, what was Canada before the arrival of Europeans? I’d imagine no more than constantly shifting tribal territories.
I guess being peaceful was a fatal error for any tribe in pre-Colombian Americas? (And not much help after TBH) Does anyone on here know which tribe(s) drove the Norse out of Vinland and Markland? They never seem to get a name check but certainlt put the Norse off having another go – stone age 1, iron age 0.
Could have been the Mikmak, maybe? I know they lived in what is now Newfoundland/Labrador, at least at the time of the early British colonies, but whether or not they did at the time of Vinland I’m unsure of. None of the pre-contact cultures of North America kept written records, only the ones in central/south America tended to, and though their oral histories are astonishingly accurate for the most part, they are still prone to the pitfalls common to such kinds of unwritten record keeping. The Vikings themselves didn’t have any peaceful contact with them, probably because of an inability to communicate, and only referred to the natives as ‘skraelings’ (which apparently loosely translates to mean ‘weaklings’, most likely in reference to their shorter height and smaller build).
And to be fair, the natives didn’t wipe out the Vikings, they just made it so interminable for them that they begrudgingly admitted it wasn’t worth staying and abandoned the Vinland colony. Still credit where credit is due, standing up to those mail-clad, sword-wielding giants with nothing but stone arrows and flint tomahawks is still quite impressive, I won’t deny that.
They are called the ‘Maritime Archaic’ people by archeologists. They were different people than the Beothuk on the island when Europeans came back in the 1500’s.
I think it’s true that they were in touch with nature.
Yes, Linda, that is exactly the case. So, lace up your hair-shirt, tighten that chalise of ancestral-gotten imperial privilege, and hang your head in shame for the plight of the innocent bucolic lands of native peoples all over this world.
“For-shame…, I cry to the unmoved stars, …Oh, for the sins of my forebears – I would give up all that we have to . . . . . . . oh, hang on a minute. . . . . “
I got rid of the hair shirt, it itched too much, but head hung in perpetual shame whilst I hoard all my ill-gotten, imperial gains.
Your earlier comment seemed indistinguishable from the genuinely held, earnestly expressed beliefs of the sort of native-fetishizing, West-hating progressive utopianists that get drawn to these discussions like flies to manure. If you really are just taking the piss I suggest you work on your satirical phrasing.
You missed the joke. Getting pompous about it really doesn’t help
I still don’t see what the ‘joke’ was, and so if I came across as ‘pompous’ it was because I was responding in kind to what I was perceiving. Clearly I did misjudge the situation, though I was obviously not the only one. Internet comments are not the best medium for sarcasm or nuance. I admit I made a mistake, and if I seemed hostile it is because it’s hard to back out of that kind of confrontational mindset.
And I thought I leaned toward autism.
I suggest to everyone in my Canadian city who goes on about their deep guilt over First Nations that they can give their house to the local band to address the historical injustice. To my knowledge no one has followed up on that suggestion. I look forward to moving back to Scotland to receive cash and a homestead as reparations for being driven off my indigenous ancestral homeland by the evil English as per my families oral histories. I also want training in Scots Gaelic.
I have said before that when people in the USA and Canada start any meeting or presentation by saying whose land they nicked, this is just guesturing; if they really felt what was done was wrong then they should give it back. As for your personal reparations, ask the Scottish government as they have been receiving “reparations” from England via the Barnett Formula for years.
Peace loving? What a pile of delusional nonsense. One the largest genocides in history was the Iroquois extermination of the Huron in the mid 1600’s. 500,000 murdered. That just doesn’t happen out of nothing. The First Nations in Canada and the US were in a state of constant conflict when Europeans arrived.
You should see The world until yesterday by Jared Diamond. The people of New Guinea are in a state of perpetual tribal warfare. So were the cities of ancient Greece. I think it’s ubiquitous.
I remember beaver fur coats were popular.
I guess the same with Algonquin, Wyandot etc? Certainly great pelts – waterproof and flexible – and easy to catch – so if managed properly this couls be a win-win in Scotland.
I‘ve farmed in Wales since 1968. In the last 40 years I have managed to buy 300 acres and gradually planted about 33% of the land area into trees, or into ponds, leaving the remaining better quality land for sheep and silage production. Nine years ago I started breeding beavers on the farm and have been delighted with their ability to create small ponds and channels and massively enhance the habitats. Wales was the last stronghold for beavers because it has so many boggy little valleys full of willows and brambles, which beavers love and which farmers call ‘trash’. I believe we still have some old beaver channels on the farm dating from the 1600s.
If you have beavers on reclaimed alluvial arable Grade 1 land, such as in parts of Tayside, you will get problems. About 95% of Wales is Grade 5 or so land, in other words, marginal for farming. There is plenty of space here for beavers and they are gradually colonising it from animals in the English rivers. The Welsh government and Natural Resources Wales dither, prevaricate, and demand expensive ‘feasibility studies’. Proud but hollow words about biodiversity and environmental good…
Actually there is a very sound Beaver Management Plan in place for UK. It relies on a three stages: mitigation – unblocking culverts or protecting trees etc, translocation – moving animals from places where they are not wanted to places where they are, and killing – humanely killing unwanted or surplus animals. I fully support this management and have eaten beavers. They are edible, but nothing special unless you are a better cook than I am.
None of us farmers want beavers turned into icons like badgers, otters or peregrines. A family of otters on our lake, in the years when they take up residence, kill all the goslings, ducklings and even some beaver kits. We have them on camera dragging off adult greylags. Badgers have burgeoned hugely in my lifetime, causing unsustainable pressure on ground dwelling species and bringing turmoil to dairy farmers through bovine Tb. These species are managed, not on any sound ecological principles, but on public opinion massaged and polarised by the media. Like my sheep; once a few go, the rest follow.
My real beef with John Lewis-Strempel’s article is that, while rambling through various complaints about beavers, most of which are re-circulated alarmism, he misses the philosophical point entirely. Why always judge a species purely on the cost/benefit to our own? What kind of world will eventuate, derived from those criteria? If we think of the beaver as a ‘pest’, I wonder what the beaver thinks of us? Long before we domesticated animals we hunted them to the point that they feared us, not just by learning from experience but by gradually evolving instinctive fear. In respect specifically to us vertical bipedal humans, many species became ‘wild’. The fear, the wildness, reached their genes. What is this ‘wildness’? Where is ‘the wild’? In my view, the term ‘re-wilding’ is a misnomer in respect of a little island like Britain, heavily over-run by humans. We can never have complete fully-balanced ecosystems here as long as we humans are here, so compromise and management is the next best option. As a farmer, I believe our own British food production should balance the carrying capacity of humans here. But this will not happen. We think we are intelligent, but when it comes down to it we are heading for the ‘boom and bust’ strategy for our own population management, just as surely as the cyclical patterns of some other species. It will be painful, but I will be dead by then. Meanwhile, providing 33% of my land for nature is a tithe I am happy to pay. I know it is inadequate.
Beavers just do what all rodents are famous for, multiply! And at some point, culling of excess Beavers must also be reintroduced in order to maintain a healthy balance of all animal and plant species. There is no way around that and they are probably very edible too, apart from the lovely fur..
I’ve heard that they taste delicious. I’d eat roast beaver.
I’ve eaten beaver raw…oh, wait.
I challenge the claim that beavers are indiscriminate lumberjacks. Everything I have read about them says that because they co evolved with those trees, the way the trees and forests grow is impacted positively by them. Indeed, many species of trees in beaver-native areas re-grow from the stumps. See this interview for example. https://spotify.link/TQz3aK3f2xb
It is not that they are indiscriminate – they have significant preferences – but that they are patchy feeders.
I see on the rivers Teith, Tay and Earn they are proliferating. There are some well built lodges and i note they use a mix of naturally fallen wood as well as their own neatly felled trunks. I have seen beavers, especially sub-adult, randomly cut down trees or saplings i assume for practice and to have wood handy to drag to a dam/lodge if they find a mate. Bit like squirrels storing food on the basis they may never find their stash again but will likely find another’s. That bit of “leave it to beaver” is an unwanted side effect. Their skins are great though the meat is crap according to the Cree etc who used to eat it as last resort food. Re-wilding will never be hassle free but we can’t turn the clock back to Scotland c1500. Housing and agri-land reclaimed from valley floor flood plains would have been washed away in those days. I wonder if the Swedes recent attempt at wolf genocide caused many wolves to flee to Norway or Finland? Same may happen here when a McNepo bairn dies as their moped flips over a beaver on the A9! The March of the Beavers as they take the Aln, Tweed, Tees and finally the Humber/Trent/Derwent would be something to see LOL.
Its natural that as each generation of beaver babies grows up and needs to find its own territory,or at least some of them do,then their dreadful depredations are going to spread along the water systems and eventually somewhere they are going to come into conflict with people’s interest. The landscape they create is not attractive,it looks like a bomb hit it,but green types go on about how lovely wind turbines are. The problem with the wolf reintroduction in Sweden was that the creatures rather than staying up in the wild and lonely mountains like the wolf advocates romantically imagined the creatures very pragmatically came down to the edge of the farmed areas to hang around the edge of farmyards to opportunistically snaffle any sheep in pens etc ,like foxes re hen houses. It was very scary for Swedish farming families,mainly concern for their children,maybe wolves are harmless to humans but looking out from your farm kitchen windows at dusk and knowing that a wolf is lurking in the shadow of the trees at the edge of your farmyard you dont want to let your kids out to play. It was the reality of how real life wild creatures are pragmatic and take short cuts rather than behave in the romantic manner their idealistic champions imagine that means nature introduction schemes only work on a limited scale and require ongoing management.
Ok Britain, just bring in animals that are natural predators of beavers. Problem solved!
EXACTLY!!!!!
Interesting article. Might some Environmentalists prefer to see a reduction in the living standards of some or all of the humans rather than a culling of any of the beavers? I fear the answer might be “ if the humans are rich then yes”. ( and I fear that not because I am rich but because I am human).
Having met Derek Gow, who is at the forefront of beaver reintroduction and breeds them on his farm in Devon, I can categorically state that he gave the very strong impression that he would be quite happy to see the U.K. population reduced to the numbers of Medieval England while beavers proliferate across the whole country.
No doubt whilst supplying beavers and beaver-related impedimenta at very reasonable prices to the State.
That’s a tough choice. I’ve never met a beaver I didn’t like.
Neither have I.
There’s a not insignificant proportion of environmentalists who are either anarcho-primitivists or are highly sympathetic to many of the premises of that ideology, and such ideas do require a massive reduction in the human population to be viable.
As someone who has spent well over a decade in environmentalist circles, I can say that the fundamental issue afflicting environmentalism is a clash between the practical implications of environmentalism and the theoretical underpinnings of left leaning political perspectives.
The left has a major issue with reasoning around zero sum games, and it leads to this weird doublethink in environmentalism, whereby there’s an explicit declaration that resources are finite, yet a belief that they can somehow redistribute access to those finite resources and stretch them out so that they can create an eco utopia, do so without their lives being detrimentally affected and also simultaneously uplift the developing world. All of this is of course completely at odds with the actual scale of change required to bring about their utopia, the complexities of global economics, the practicalities of trying to wrest even a fraction of resources away from the global super rich, and doesn’t address the conundrum of how to produce the sheer volume of technology required in a self sustaining fashion without further contributing to what they see as an immediate threat of environmental apocalypse.
What this article is really addressing is just one example of where emotional investment in eco utopia fails to address the practical complexities of working with a finite amount of massively altered landmass and a pre-existing population.
Right in one about the doublethink.
There are two roots of the environment movement which they try to cover up. The back to nature environmental movement in post WW1 Germany which had it’s own party which merged with the Nazis in the 1920s. The violent Red Army Faction Communist types who joined the German Green Party in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
Both organisations lack the practical engineering skills to fix problems. By increasing the soil fertility of much low grade farmland, agricultural output would be greatly increased without the need to cut down woods. The ban on using sewage was largely due to heavy metal content. As these are no longer used, except in a very few locations, legislation should be changed so human sewage along with animal manure can be used to improved fertility and water holding capacity of soil.
They would like us to live in unheated mud huts.
For crying out loud, the best use of all this investment would be to put it into education. This country is being run by total morons.
Andrew Stoll comments that beavers know how to multiply, so perhaps education is being used after all?
That’s funny, thanks.
In Europe farming policy is dictated by the EU and has largely been influenced of famine during and after WW2. It initially meant taking money from efficient German industry and give it to French farmers. More recently environmental policy has been dominated by charities who lack an adequate understanding of ecology, agriculture, food storage and distribution.
What should be done? Look at the food needed, the soil types, weather,topography, water supplies, soil fertility, waste and sewage management and look at increasing soil fertility, increasing biodiversity and re-using sewage manure and waste instead of importing fertilisers. Much food is sent to landfill. By focusing on particular areas and lacking the practical engineering and agricultural skills and not looking at the whole picture modern policies result in many absurdities.
Rewilding seems to mean different things to different people. To me, allowing small areas in public parks to return to nature viz. encouraging wild flowers &c. to encourage insects &c., is rewilding. But that cannot work alas because people would throw rubbish there, allow their dogs to do their thing &c.
New Zealand has got rid of the only dangerous beaver.. its erstwhile PM…
They still have a with possums though.
Evil people like Clarkson have been complaining about beavers for years, the destruction to nature and undermining of roads etc are well documented but the ‘for’ camp would rather we all go back to living in mud huts and chucking sticks at each other than work with the ecosystem we have.
I think that’s badgers.
I feel persecuted by beavers. It’s a complex; I need to discuss this with my therapist ……
Some of their natural predators are still around like foxes and otters but perhaps it’s time to bring back the big guns – wolves and bears to restore a balance.
I know an old woman who swallowed a fly …..
Presumably the beaver fanatics are some of the same idiots who brought in everyone’s favourite evil vampire rat, the pine martin?
Rewilding isn’t in the national interest.
Which is why THEY want it. (Not certain who THEY are but THEY are real and they’ve taken control). I’ve only recently seen how all these strategies to “save nature” from banning neonicotinoids,to creating beaver wetlands is really about reducing viable farmland and making producing crops more difficult and expensive. And actually Badgers were NEVER under threat of being eliminated. I now suspect the ban on controlling badger was partly because some people enjoyed killing badgers and anything people enjoy has to be banned. But also because having uncontrolled numbers of them as we see,makes farming in proximity with them more expensive and difficult. We seem to be set on recreating that world of the past in which the poor starved,have a look in the parish register of Meeth in North Devon circa 1812 and read the parish clerks account of life in a remote rural place when the harvest fails,it’s not nice.
Made worse when village well carried typhoid or cholera. Malnutrition makes people far more vulnerable to disease. Most books on health pre – WW2 included recipes for beef tea and similar drinks in order to strengthen people after illness. TB was made worse if patient was malnourished and drinking water contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.