Rob Edwards highlights the cruelty involved in the killing of beavers in the Tayside area (Beavers and young suffering slow painful deaths in landowner shooting cull, News, January 31).
As these beavers are feral (having escaped from captivity or been clandestinely liberated and not introduced with permission) they have no legal protection.
However many native wild animals in Scotland also have little or no legal protection. Indeed the Scottish Government removed the one sliver of protection afforded seals under the Conservation of Seals Act 1970, which stopped angling bodies shooting seals in the breeding season. Now anyone with a Government licence can shoot seals all year round leaving pups to starve to death when lactating mother seals are killed. Grey squirrels and other animals and birds can also be legally killed during their breeding seasons causing cruel deaths for dependant young.
If the small population of Tayside beavers are not protected they may well be cruelly wiped out before we know if they are having a positive or negative impact on our river systems. The Scottish Government should take immediate action on this and bring in laws to protect other creatures from a slow, painful death caused by year round culling.
John F Robins,
Animal Concern
Farmers and landowning groups have defended the supposed need to kill beavers, but say it should be done humanely while Andrew Bauer, the deputy director of the NFU, claims that it is only a minority of beavers who may not have been killed humanely – "a sad outcome that no farmer would wish for". Are we really expected to take such nonsense seriously?
There is no "need" to kill beavers and none are killed humanely. As for the farmers' supposed concern that any beavers might suffer, is this the same "concern" that they show towards the animals who are treated as meat and milk machines to provide food that people don't need?
Animals who they send off to the slaughterhouse, knowing the hell that awaits them there, where animals are routinely beaten, kicked and punched. This is how animals are treated in even the so-called best, most humane slaughterhouses, described as "top notch". The farmers who send them there are complicit in this cruel treatment, just as are all those who choose to consume the meat and dairy products that are supplied via animal suffering.
Given the cruel business that animal farmers have chosen, we can take their supposed concern for inhumane treatment of beavers with a very large dose of salt.
Sandra Busell
Edinburgh
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