Beaver release would be risky experiment

RE the article "An array of benefits to be had from beavers" (WMN, October 20) – by whose judgment? While some environmental benefits may result from beaver activity, the risk of impact on existing habitat is too great.

Mr Gow's article obviously has a clear message beavers are good and anyone questioning this is probably ill-informed.

The reality is the proposed introduction of beaver into the Roadford Catchment is a hugely risky experiment. "Little" evidence to suggest beaver pools encourage rising populations of insect predators, "little" risk of disease transmission, "little" potential for conflict with human interests and "little" evidence to support the NFU in the issues they raise – "little" is a subjective way of stating potentially serious issues.

Who is the judge of the level of risk? Who has the right to experiment with our environment?

The suggestion beavers will be selective over the trees they cut down is misleading. Not all trees are suitable for coppicing, large trees would be replaced by low scrub. But habitat and environment would be altered, and not for the better.

Using the North American beaver experience as support for a release of European beaver in West Devon is even more irrelevant than quoting the Bavarians. Our countryside and environment are unique, the pressures on land use are different. Our population density is far greater than either of those countries. The cost of meddling with nature, both financially and environmentally, could be high.

To imply that beaver could somehow solve issues of water purity is doubtful. Proven methods of improving water quality at source are available, and they do not involve beaver, with its attendant risks.

Since beaver (may) have been wild in the West, our landscape and population have changed. There wasn't a place for them then, how can there be today?

We, as a group of local farmers and landowners, conserve and manage the countryside as a part of our every day life. I don't think it is such an awful place and this is why we oppose this absurd proposal.

Chris Durston

Chairman, Roadford Catchment Environment Association

GIARDIASIS – not the term for the compulsive desire some have to release beavers in the Westcountry, but a real disease associated with wild beavers.

It is the full name for a nasty diarrhoeal condition, caught from giardia deposited by various animals into watercourses from their faeces. Beavers are rodents – large rats by any other name – who naturally will defecate in the streams they inhabit. The lunatic idea to place these creatures into the watercourses which flow into lakes and reservoirs, such as Roadford, will put recreational users of the waters at far greater risk than the E.coli crippling farm visits right now.

Some 9,000 Canadians, in a country where the beaver is thriving, received treatment last year for giardiasis – many would have picked up the organisms from waterborne activities in a country known for supposedly healthy rivers and lakes.

As if the health risks weren't enough, there are issues of beaver dams exacerbating recent serious flooding problems – and damage to trees. Surely this is at direct odds with official policies in an area where the Government is already promoting regeneration of forests.

Beavers are great little animals, but leave them in their native habitats – please.

Jonathan Batchelor

Bude

Save the station

EVERY time I come home by train from a trip, I notice the derelict old station building at Saltash.

It is a miserable sight, and hardly in tune with the Welcome to Cornwall signs.

Surely, there must be some civic pride in Saltash, and some business pride in the various railway companies, that would enable this rare survivor of the Brunel age to be saved from falling into ruin.

It is so typically British – plenty of money for bankers and politicians, but we are too mean to preserve anything in the public realm. What on earth do foreign visitors think of us?

John Ball

Falmouth

Identity crises

MARTIN Hesp, in his article on our national identity (WMN October 29), failed to mention that the Celts, Romans, Anglos, Saxons, Jules, Vikings, Danes, Normans, Friesians, Flemings, Walloons and Hugenots who blended to make the British nation were all from the same western European stock.

People from outside of Europe who have been here a long time: the Gypsies (500 years) and the Jews (350 years) still live in closely knit unassimilated communities, which suggests all the recent non-European arrivals will do likewise, fragmenting our society further.

L J Irving

Plymouth

Moral concerns

AM I right in thinking that the moral climate of our country is the worst it has ever been.

Take just one example that seems to appear almost weekly.

The trial or report of someone being a paedophile. It is a world that I hardly ever heard mention in days gone by. Or was it thought not suitable to mention in a daily newspaper?

F Burgess

Ottery St Mary