The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ today. The destruction of a habitat that slowly marginalises the indigenous species. Some will survive this change, others will become extinct. A few will become mortal enemies of man; unwelcome at best, feared at worst. The history of medieval times tells us that the otter fell into the ‘unwelcome’ category, labelled as the ‘fish-killer’, stealing food from the rivers that ‘rightfully’ belonged to the more ‘deserving’ mankind. It is a tag that remains today, but the persecution dates back many centuries.

      The more you look back, the more astonishing it is that otters have avoided extinction in the British Isles. We might think of the eradication of a species as a rather modern manifestation of human behaviour, but otters have been on the hit list for over a thousand years. Way back in the twelfth century society went to war with the otters and lutracide was born. Henry II appointed the wonderfully titled King’s Otterer, who was charged with the extermination of the species. It was no passing fad; this was serious business. With the title came a manor house, land and an annual stipend all bundled up in legislation to create the Otterer’s Fee. The first Otterer, a man called Roger Follo, from his ‘Fee’ in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, went about his task with a new form of otter control, namely an otter-hound pack.

      However innovative and hard-working the Honourable Follo might have been, any success must have been transitory, for by the fifteenth century Henry VI was back at it again with the creation of the Valet of our Otter-Hounds. But otters continued on their merry way until 1566, when, frustrated by their continued existence, Parliament passed the Acte for the Preservation of Grayne, which classified otters, along with badgers, foxes, hedgehogs¹ and others, as vermin, allowing parish councils to offer bounties for their capture. Sixpence, the reward for a dead otter in the early 1600s, strikes me as a lot of money and gives some indication of how otters had become a significant public enemy.

      It is interesting to ask why otters were elevated to this status. I think we can say with some degree of certainty that their fate as public mammal enemy number one was cast for the next three centuries in 1653 when Izaak Walton wrote about them in The Compleat Angler – a huge bestseller when it was first published and subsequently one of the most reprinted books of all time. He declared,

      ‘I am, Sir, a Brother of the Angle, and therefore an enemy of the Otter; for I hate them perfectly, because they love fish so well.’

      This is pretty stern stuff for an animal that carried no disease, kept clear of people and posed no physical danger. But the fact is that otters were eating the fish owned by those who held the reins of power: the monarchy, noblemen, the church and the educated. These were singularly bad groups to antagonise. Noblemen owned the rights to fish rivers, which was an important source of income and food. Fishing grounds were jealously guarded – not just physically but in law, for they were specifically mentioned in the Magna Carta. The draconian law that went as far as capital punishment was enough to keep the commoners at bay, but otters required something else. Monasteries and the palaces of bishops had for centuries reared fish in ponds, but they were difficult to protect and made tempting pickings for a hungry otter in the depths of winter. Then people such as Walton discovered the joys of angling as a pastime, which pretty well sealed the public perception of the otter. Whether they truly posed a threat to fish stocks is debatable, but the fact remained that otters had got on the wrong side of the wrong people.

      So the notion of the otter as a quarry became entrenched in the psyche of the nation; along with foxes and deer, the hunting of these animals with hounds was an accepted pastime. It was both part of the social fabric of the British Isles and a requirement for the management of the countryside, albeit the latter of dubious value. You’d have thought that as feudalism gave way to industrialisation society would lose interest in the otter, but not a bit of it. In the Victorian era, otter hunting became quite the fashionable pursuit, reaching its zenith in the years between the two World Wars. However, for all its barbarism, twentieth-century hunting barely put a dent in the otter population. Ironically, it was the hunts, with fewer otters to hunt, who first alerted a wider public to the decline in their numbers across post-war Britain, as over two decades – the 1950s and 60s – otters all but vanished from the countryside. Hovering on the brink of extinction, the search was on for the otters’ insidious foe before it was too late.

      What has changed over the past half century in our country is the otter population. Wind back the clock eighty years ago or more and it is a fair bet that Kuschta would have faced fierce competition along the Wallop Brook, with probably just two or three miles to call her own compared to the nine miles over which she ranges today. The truth is that otters are just clawing their way back from the edge of extinction.

      It really was a mighty achievement of twentieth-century man to bring otters to this sorry point in time, where their very existence was threatened. After all, we have succeeded where centuries of persecution have failed, but we did it entirely by accident, and then in recognising the ongoing damage we failed over successive decades to put it right. It will be of no comfort to know that we were not alone in this. Across Europe – in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Sweden – and in fact in just about every mainland country, we have seen a catastrophic decline in the population of otters in the post-war era. A culture of persecution continued to play a part; in Switzerland there were 40–60 otters left when given protection in 1952. By 1960 they were all gone. To give you some idea of the level of hatred, three captive otters in Zurich Zoo were killed by visitors. But ultimately it was a poison, spread in the name of progress, that took otters to the brink.

      Seven decades on from the end of the Second World War, it is hard fully to understand the mind-set of a Britain traumatised by a conflict that had kept the nation on the brink of imminent starvation. What we would now call food security, the ability to feed the population with crops grown on home soil, was the mantra of all governments of all hues in the years immediately after the war right through to the 1970s. As the Minister for Agriculture, you would have been one of the top five men in the cabinet; today you would be an also ran. The National Farmers Union held sway at every level of decision making in the drive to boost food production. The BBC joined in, The Archers a handy propaganda tool for agricultural lobbying. What was good for farming was good for the nation. Where nature stood in the way of progress, science was enlisted, the upsides lauded and the downsides ignored. Intensive agriculture, the please-all, cure-all of the time, required chemical intervention, and so it arrived in 1955.

      It was the simplest of desires that caused the first problems; the wish to protect newly sown corn from pests for better germination rates. Coated with an organochlorine pesticide, the effects were almost instant – wheat and barley thrived, bringing marginal arable land into production and boosting yields. The trouble is, fields don’t exist in a vacuum. Wood pigeons and songbirds eagerly scratch out the newly planted seed from the ground, consuming it in quantity. They were the first to die, killed by direct ingestion. Next up were the species that died from eating the dead. Foxes and barn owls were hit hard, but it was the dramatic decline of the peregrine population that sounded alarm bells in 1956. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) started to investigate the avian deaths, fingers were pointed but there was unstoppable momentum behind the use of organochlorines.

      They were used in a multiplicity of ways that spread them into nature’s food chain: sheep dips, bulb dressing, orchard sprays, timber preservative, moth-proofing fabrics and carpet-making, to pick a few. It might seem a long step from those processes to killing a top predator like an otter, but when you consider, for instance, that great rug weavers like Wilton built their factories by rivers for water and for waste disposal in an era when environmental legislation was all but non-existent, then the connection comes into focus. So, as the invisible fingers of pollution touched just about every river (sheep dips were particularly pernicious in this respect), the problem turned into the unknown crisis, with nobody really noticing through a combination of bad luck, the secret nature of the otter life, the delayed effect of the poison and inaction. The bad luck came in the form of a report published in 1957 but based on data from 1952. Why there was a five-year delay I have no idea (though conspiracy theorists might), but it concluded СКАЧАТЬ