‘Kool-Aid conservationists’ are on the rise, and they’re part of the reason why Britain is still covered in water. So says Melissa Kite in this week’s Spectator, as she highlights all of the weird and wonderful creatures whose existence prevented the Environment Agency from improving flood defences. As Melissa puts it:
‘The river Thames was left undredged to prevent the disturbance of a rare mollusc called the depressed river mussel. Seriously, this is not funny. It would only be funny if it were not happening. But it is. The species known as the depressed taxpayer doesn’t seem to be on any priority list.’
And it’s not just the depressed river mussel. The EA, she discovers, are still planning on go ahead with a wild trout project in Chertsey, which will ‘dam up the water… and cause even more flooding’, while we’ve all heard about the ‘super’ habitat for birds that they funded. As local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger told the BBC:
‘What galls my constituents… is they found £31 million to build a bird sanctuary at the mouth of the Parrett river, yet they cannot and will not find £5 million to dredge this river.’
But what happens when you take this attitude to the extreme? Well, it turns out that Holland has the answer, with their rewilding project in Oostvaardersplassen. Ecologist and government scientist Frans Vera had the idea of turning a drained inland lake into a nature reserve, populated with horses, deer and cattle. The problem was there were no predators, meaning that the area quickly became overpopulated and the animals began dying of starvation and disease. Intervention by the Dutch government has forced the Dutch Forestry Commission to introduce ‘reactive culling’ of animals that appear unwell. But many argue that animals should be culled before they’re suffering, not once the suffering has begun. Even this culling hasn’t really helped; in the winter of 2012/2013, 1,684 animals died, of which 88 percent were shot. But the project described as ‘our national shame’ by one vet still rolls on.
This was an extreme experiment, even by the standards of some of the most devoted proponents of the rewilding concept, and perhaps it will make others think twice before copying the idea. We humans have already taken control of wild animal populations by killing off most other predators. And when predators are removed from the balance, we can’t expect life to just roll on as it did before.
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