We here at Worth A Dam we aren’t just focused on our own selfish needs for local beavers, what about other lands? Don’t all free peoples have the right to enjoy beavers? Not according to the Scottish National Heritage which is still dead set (and I mean that literally) on their plan to put the free beavers of the river Tay in zoos, and spend millions of dollars on the fancy radio-tracked beavers. The Tay beaver travesty is getting greater and greater attention. Paul Ramsay and his wife had a meeting with the Minister for Finance who was a little more thoughtful than the confounding Minister of the Environment in this case. They also had a meeting on Tuesday of interested folks, and I asked Paul if he wanted to give me a rundown.
Thank you for your email. Here are Minutes of 1st meeting-1. The meeting went well, I think.
(His wife too the minutes and wrote “Paul summarised the recent history of beavers in Scotland and drew our attention to the fact that the SG is going against its own legal advice of September 2005 when they stated that “the release of European beaver in Scotland would grant the species full legal protection under the Wildlife and Countryside act. 1981” He summarised the success of this campaign so far in attracting support, journalistic articles, web presence, letters to SNH and to politicians etc etc.”)
We were lucky to have three members of the North Tayside badger group with us. These folk have a lot of experience of checking on badgers and their dens to see that they are not being persecuted, which is just the sort of skill that we need to develop, along with the organisation.
We agreed to form a company limited by guarantee to give us an organisation through which we could, if necessary, initiate litigation against the Scottish Government in the fullness of time. There was a bit of sucking of teeth when I described this, but we gained the general agreement of the meeting.
I forgot to take a photograph of those present.…Aaaaargh!
Louise and I met John Swinney, our Member of the Scottish Parliament, this afternoon. He confessed himself bemused by the action of the minister for the environment, Roseanna Cunningham. John is Minister for Finance in the Scottish Parliament and thus second only to the First Minister. His advice to us was to press on with our campaign.
As you will see from the attached minutes we are to meet again on 8th February, just after I return from the beaver conference in Oregon.
With best wishes,Paul
If you read the notes you see that they decided to take some brilliant advice and get the children of Perth involved, adopting Eric the beaver at the zoo. You can also see the support given by the ‘badger folk’ which made me smile since Susan Kirks has been such a dynamic friend. You will discover what I believe might be my favorite sentence ever, “ES said it worked for the hedgehogs.” Which is such a profound nonsequitur that I might just start using it in daily conversation. Certainly it sounds like the title of a play EVERY one could enjoy at next years fringe festival! There was some disagreement about whether to pursue legal means or just to threaten the pursuit and a second meeting date was set for after the conference. When you read the notes I think anyone should be forgiven for being reminded of this of this famous civics passage:
Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat upon it.) `I’m glad I’ve seen that done,’ thought Alice. `I’ve so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, “There was some attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,” and I never understood what it meant till now.’
Since Paul couldn’t provide photos of the meeting, I thought I’d add some of the beavers themselves. These were mostly taken by Ray Scott who forwarded them to our wikipedia editor in hopes of getting a great Tay article. This is Castor Fiber. They don’t look all that different do they? They have more chromosomes than our beavers so the two can’t reproduce, but they are equally skilled at causing panic and forcing politicians to do stupid things apparently.
Aren’t those nice? Are you ready for the ‘wow that’s a weird coincidence’ punchline? When Paul told me about meeting with the Financial Minister I remembered that I had met an Environmental Minster, Paul McLellan of East Lothian. He came to California for a vacation and wanted to visit the Muir site and strengthen the bond between us and Muir’s birthplace in Dunbar. I mentioned this contact to Paul thinking maybe he would know someone with some pull in Perth, and he wrote back very surprised saying he hadn’t realized John Muir lived in Martinez and he was actually ON the Muir Trust!
Of course he is. It’s a small beaver world.
