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Let England's wild beavers be!

Tickell, Oliver
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2460535/let_englands_wild_beavers_be.html

Publisher:  Ecologist, United Kingdom
Date Written:  01/07/2014
Year Published:  2014  
Resource Type:  Article

A family of wild of beavers has established on an English river for the first time since Henry VIII. But now the Government has decided to trap them and consign them to captivity in a zoo or wildlife centre. Defenders of wilderness are now demanding: keep our wild beavers free!

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

We all know how willing politicians can be to cave into commercial and recreational interests, and that Britain's 'Greenest Government ever' has turned out to be almost uniquely abysmal on a wide spread of environment issues. But could there be something else at work?

My own suspicion is that there lurks, in the hearts of Environment Secretary Owen Paterson and his political and landowning friends and colleagues, a deep and visceral fear of wilderness - and a sense that nature must be shot, killed, exterminated, controlled and subjected to the authority of the landowner and the state.

Fish are there to be caught, foxes to be hunted, pheasants and partridges to be shot, badgers to be culled, and any remaining shreds of wilderness in our over-developed land should be grazed to extinction, sprayed with herbicide, ploughed up for GM crops, or concreted over with roads, airports, shopping centres and housing estates.

And the unscheduled appearance of a family of wild-living beavers, returning to our green and pleasant land for the first time since the 16th century, is an intolerable affront to that world view.

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