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 that the otter population was doing fine. With the birds to worry about, nobody gave much more thought to otters and, being such secret animals, few had any real idea what was happening to the population as the insidious chemicals did their worst. This is how it happened.
Being top of the food chain is all very well, but the implication is that you prey upon everything below you. That’s fine just so long as your favourite foods – eels and fish, in the case of otters – are good to eat. By the early 1960s this was far from being the case. Eels, which live for 10–20 years in ponds, were absorbing the organochlorines into their bodies at a rate of knots from a diet of similarly affected grubs, earthworms and insects. The same thing was happening with fish from their diet of invertebrates: nymphs, snails and all those other bugs you find in a river. But the chemical pass-the-parcel wasn’t killing outright the otters or the things they ate. There were no corpses littering the river bank – if there were, things might have turned out differently. No, otters were hit hard because, with little body fat to act as a buffer like, say, in the eels, the sub-lethal poisoning went straight to the reproduction organs, slowly rendering the population infertile. Otters were not dying, they were dying out.
It is a hard case to make from an emotional standpoint, but it was otter hunts that were the greatest guardians of Lutra lutra during this time. They had a vested interest, that was true, but nobody was closer to the lives of the otter. It is counter-intuitive, I know, but when it came to habitat protection and preventing uncontrolled extermination, the hunts were the otters’ best friend. One hunt in Dumfriesshire even went to the lengths of importing otters from Norway for reintroduction into the wild after a localised population crash. By the early 1960s the declining population was more than just a local occurrence; packs up and down the country were reporting fewer and fewer otters. Some packs closed down. Others hunted mink instead. The remainder changed their method of hunting, reducing the kills from 50 per cent of all otters chased to 15 per cent, limiting, as far as it was possible, those kills to old or sick otters. By the time otter hunting was finally banned as part of an Act of Parliament that gave the animals protected status in 1978, the fifteen otter packs that remained were killing just 150 otters a year between them.
The threat of extinction was never just from hunting, but as the news of the otter decline filtered through to the wider population during the 60s and early 70s this was what took the brunt of the blame, as the anti-hunting lobby gained a voice. Other voices called for investigations, and reports were duly produced. Water quality, habitat destruction, disturbance through human activity and even the lowly mink were the four reasons generally cited for the decline of otters, but rarely was the systemic poisoning given the prominence we now know it deserved.
However much it was wrong, it was hardly surprising that mink took part of the rap; a non-native species first imported in the 1920s, it had adapted to life in Britain pretty well, the population gradually expanding over time, with regular boosts from escapees from mink farms. The European mink, Mustela lutreola, are, as the second half of their Latin name suggests, related to otters, part of the mustelid family. They are more gregarious than their larger cousin (they are about one-third of the size), and you are far more likely to see a mink than an otter as they are less wary of people, preferring to be out and about during the day. The mink were blamed because nature abhors a vacuum. As the otters disappeared, the mink expanded into the vacant space, people assuming that