Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 80

Though beavers have been introduced, from 1924 onwards, to
twenty-four other European countries without mishap, 16 and though
they live among greater concentrations of salmon and other fish in
Canada and Norway than we are blessed with in Britain, the land-
owners argued that they would stop the salmon migrating up the
rivers, destroy their spawning beds and spread disease. At last, when
every possible objection had been addressed from every possible
angle, in 2009 eleven beavers were experimentally released into the
Knapdale Forest in Argyll. The place into which they were reintro-
duced is unusual for its absence of salmon rivers - and, for that matter,
of ideal beaver habitat.
By then, however, a number of beavers had 'escaped' from a wildlife
park in Perthshire (it is widely believed that someone assisted their
departure) and various other places, and had established themselves
in the catchment of the River Tay, a famous and very expensive sal-
mon river. As I write, the beavers (unlike those in the Knapdale Forest)
are thriving and breeding freely, and the police and conservation
authorities (the same conservation authorities who oversaw their
release at Knapdale) are trying to catch them. 'They are being recap-
tured because their presence in the wild is illegal and because their
welfare may be at risk,' Scottish Natural Heritage explains. 17 The
illegal animals do not appear to have caused any harm, or any conflict
with fishing interests, however. The accidental release could be seen as
a more germane experiment than the official one.
The Scottish experience appears to have done nothing to reassure
landowners in Wales. The Farmers' Union of Wales angrily denounced
the work at Blaeneinion. It described the beavers as a 'non-native spe-
cies', compared them to grey squirrels and claimed that they will
spread diseases to their livestock. 18
There is no intention to release these animals. Both are female, so
there is no danger of proliferation. The point of the experiment is to
establish, for the 162nd time in Europe,* that beavers are not the
animals mentioned in the Topic of Revelations, breathing ire and
brimstone and slaying the third part of men. Their impacts on the
plant and animal life in the enclosure will be studied, and the results
* Since 1924, there have been 161 reintroductions of beavers in Europe. 19