I heard from Paul Ramsay of Scotland last week that three Tay beavers were killed, two shot and one caught by ‘accident’ in a snare. I told him to push for press coverage and to try and point out that Scottish National Heritage set the stage for this by drawing attention to these ‘bad beavers’ with their beaver ethic cleansing campaign. Today this article was printed in the Herald.
The impassioned battle over the future of beavers in Scotland has turned nasty. Three have allegedly been killed, angry accusations are flying, and a formal complaint has been lodged with the European Commission. But campaigners now fear that other landowners or farmers may be taking the law into their own hands and killing the beavers. According to unconfirmed reports, two have been shot and one caught in a snare on Dean Water, upstream of the village of Meigle near Blairgowrie in Perthshire.
A big shout-out to our friends at SNH who are all sitting on the edge of their seats just HOPING that farmers take up their beaver-killing hue and cry! They are apparently 300 percent better at it government officials, and at this rate it will only take 16 farmers to finish the job. Assuming it IS farmers and not impatient SNH officials who got sick of all the paperwork and protests. Come to think of it, if I worked for SNH I’d be spending a very long time investigating this just to be able to prove to the press it wasn’t me.
Unusually, the campaign is being led by local landowners, Paul and Louise Ramsay, whose family has owned the 13,000-acre Bamff estate near Alyth in East Perthshire since 1232. They keep beavers in an enclosure on their estate and helped set up the Scottish Wild Beaver Group to oppose SNH’s plans. Paul Ramsay accused SNH of bowing to pressure from the landowning and farming lobby to get rid of the beavers. “They are so blinkered, so desperately narrow minded, I feel that we must fight against them very hard,” he told the Sunday Herald.
He said that he had been told on good authority about the three wild beaver deaths, though he admitted that they couldn’t be proved. The killings were “common knowledge” locally, he claimed. Ramsay argued that the killing or trapping of the Tay beavers was illegal. He has filed a formal complaint to the European Commission in Brussels arguing that they are protected under the Habitats Directive.
Go Paul! Your American cousins support you! It’s funny how the farming lobby wants exactly the same thing as SNH does…quite a coincidence. Your implying that one panic inflamed the other, but if I were you I’d start from the other end. One problem can be fixed with education, and the other will need to be fixed with therapy. The good news is ‘Narcissistic personality disorder’ will no longer be a diagnosis in the upcoming DSM-V.
Ramsay also accused SNH of encouraging landowners to get rid of the animals. “It is really wrong of SNH to apparently give tacit approval to landowners to kill beavers when it is against European law,” he said.
There you go Paul. That’s laying it on the line. How will SNH wriggle out of this one?
But SNH described his allegation as “appalling”, and insisted that the Tay beavers had no legal protection. “If the owners of private beaver collections had kept their beavers in captivity in the first place we would not be in this unfortunate situation,” claimed an SNH spokesman.
Did you catch that? “It’s atrocious that Mr. Ramsay would accuse us of encouraging land-owners to kill beavers! We are deeply, personally offended by the scandalous accusation. And anyway even if we DID it’s perfectly legal because the beavers have no protected status whatsoever.”
I didn’t do it. He had it comin’ indeed….
