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How much does a beaver cost? That depends on when you wanted to reintroduce them.18/06/2009 09:52:35The cost of the Scottish beaver reintroduction has now jumped to £1.8M, up from £850,000 in December 2008.
This equates to an inflation rate of 24% Compared with UK historical inflation rates over that time of between 1.2 - 2.3%. Trial failure: Imagine that, after 7 years, the trial is considered a failure. With those sorts of numbers, it is unlikely that the ‘trial' would be allowed to fail as spending £1.8m (assuming there is no more beaver inflation over the next 7 years) and then having to remove some 60 beavers (Wildlife Extra guess at potential population after 7 years) from the wild. It doesn't seem likely. Beavers reintroduced into Romania, Croatia, Belgium & Hungary If the cost was 100 Million £, that would patently be too much. If the cost was £500, that would be great value. Somewhere in the middle is a reasonable amount, and WE believes £1.8m is way too much. And I suspect that the Romanians, Belgians, Hungarians and Croatians, who have all reintroduced beavers, didn't spend £1.8M each on the reintroductions, in total. Reintroduce the beavers into Knapdale, fantastic, and perhaps go back in a few years and see how they are getting on, or perhaps just look at the beavers already in Kent, Devon & Gloucestershire and see how they are faring. But £1.8m (assuming no further cost increases)? I wish I had bought some beaver futures back in 2000.
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Read the comments about this article and leave your own comment
So, the beaver release is finally (sort of) going ahead. I must say the sheer cost of all this pussyfooting around is offensive. Piles of cash blown on committees, working groups, consultants, multitudinous stakeholders and legal-hoop-jumping just to reinstate a native herbivore- what a joke. It would have been cheaper and faster if each beaver was directly given half a million quid to buy their own estates (and the titles to go with it- standards in the House of Lords might pick up if a few landed aquatic rodents got peerages).
How the hell did this fiasco happen? Its sadly understandable how the ecologically incompetent political classes fell for it, but how did Scottish conservation science get sucked in? Why do the landed gentry have such a stranglehold over environmental science policy?. Small herbivore re-introductions should be a straightforward matter of conservation science saying yes or no. This pandering to a handful of privileged country-sports enthusiasts (people I would suggest have held rural Scotland back for much of the last 200 years) is risible. Their arguments against re-introductions remind me of the bunk talked by creationists about evolution- plausible only to a listener with the science literacy of an 11th century peasant. Their strategy is clearly to put so many hurdles and costs in the way of the laughably innocuous beaver (I mean, honestly?) that the other native bringbacks become unimaginable; Auroch, boar, bear, wolf, lynx, stork, black kite- forget it. Too awkward, too expensive.
Precedents such as the beaver fiasco just hasten the day when Scottish conservation degenerates into a combination of 'gardening' on increasingly tiny reserves while half-heartedly trying to 'manage' rampant ferals, all on a budget of buttons because the real money went on consultants & lawyers in Edinburgh and London.
The most offensive thing about it all is that beaver are 100% native. This is one fact which we have failed to get across to the public- why do we find deep time so hard to talk about? The last 50,000 years is the modern era, not the last 5. The 're-introduction' process as inflicted on the beaver project is nonsense- Imagine if the UK's garden centres had go through slomething like the beaver process for every verminous rhododendron and balsam introduction? Or if farmers had to do it for every new sterile grass breed? Or pet shops for each exotic parrot or frog? We'd have far less feral problems if they had.
Perhaps it would help if we stopped calling these 're-introductions'. There is a setup where I live now in Australia called 'Arid Zone Recovery' which have a great program to use uranium mining money to buy flogged cattle farms, fence them, exterminate the ferals and bring back the recently lost natives. I think the name 'recovery' says it all. They now have over 80km2 and are having to put in extra predators because the Bilbies are breeding too well! Look them up and send them some money!
So, 'Highlands Recovery' anyone?
Posted by: Mark | 20 Jun 2009 01:24:05
This is just a waste of money & resources, the reintroduction scheme should be left alone to mature as it would in the wild.
No need for monitoring & such amounts spent is well inflated, only landowners & researchers make money out of nature!
The public again are being fleeced by paying huge amount of taxpayers cash & then told stay away (or pay) when they try to view these schemes in the wild. This article above I agree with & its well written...LEAVE THE BEAVERS & LET NATURE TAKE ITS COARSE!
Posted by: Jim Duncan | 19 Jun 2009 17:16:21