Well I am bit biased as I am a keen angler but even so, otters are set to become a real problem in the future. They kill for fun and can take very big fish. They will decimate any lake in short order, and I do mean completely annihilate, before moving onto kill and eat whatever else is available...crayfish, anurans (frogs and toads), birds, invertebrates and small mammals...basically to become a farmers nightmare if he has poultry nearby.
They grow much larger than people seem to think and to keep them out you would need serious fencing, they will also dig like rabbits to get under it, its an expensive job to say the least and usually they will find a way into the lake if they want too. An adult otter needs to eat 20 per cent of its body weight in food every day - about 2.5kg (5.5 lb's). It will kill more than that. They will travel long distances overland and from river to river, lake to lake, in search of food.
Otters breed continuously and are likely to rear eight to ten young every year. Within five years there could be up to fifty more otters locally killing and eating everything that swims.
They basically became endangered because they were such a menace to fish stocks and I am afraid that is still the case. We do not have sufficient stocks for them to exist in the Uk for an infinite amount of time. Forty years of hard work and campaigning by anglers has seen us reach a level of sparkling water quality which is enviable across Europe. The Thames is in fact the cleanest 'big river' in Europe at this time. Wild salmon and trout rivers are currently flourishing.
To have finally reached more normal fish stock levels across the UK - decades of work - releasing hundreds of our most efficient predators into it seems little short of criminal to me. Otter populations will boom until, once again, they have bred like rats and eaten everything in sight - then the pattern will be repeated and they will decline.
I love wildife and otters are beautiful animals - but so are wolves and I don't want them released to roam the Scottish Moors either! I am afraid that I am with the Angling Trust and various other bodies who are on the side of proposing a cull for otters already. One chap I know has had his entire livliehood destroyed, twenty-five years of breeding quality and highly prized specimens, destroyed by a well-meaning but utterly ignorant do-gooder. His life is pretty much over in terms of work. In Scotland, I hear, the problem is already acute in some areas.
Topic: Four acres for wildlife (Read 7306 times)
