Could the Queen Spell Doom for the British Beavers, Pine Martens & Red Squirrels?

The Great Betrayal: How New Laws Threaten to Crush Britain's Wild Return

In what can only be described as a profoundly lacklustre Queen’s Speech, the Establishment recently spelt out some delightful news for the landed gentry and property developers. The government has effectively cleared the way for these groups to reap enormous profits from the granting of planning permissions and the sale of publicly owned land. We are witnessing a mechanism where billions of pounds in land value increases will be siphoned off, tax-free, into the offshore accounts of some of the UK’s wealthiest individuals.

The inequity is stark. The top 0.1%, who already own the vast majority of land in the UK, are about to see their wealth and income artificially inflated with zero effort required on their part. Simultaneously, the system is doubling down on archaic subsidies for landowners—boosting agricultural grants and tax breaks—at the precise moment we are slashing support for the most vulnerable in society and gutting funding for wildlife protection. It is the classic British irony: rigorous capitalism for the poor, and state-controlled socialism for the rich.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Species Control Orders

However, hidden within the dry legislation of the Queen’s Speech was a sneaky and potentially devastating announcement: ‘Species Control Orders’. While framed as a bureaucratic tidy-up, this could well be the legal instrument used to kill off the wild beavers of the UK.

Ostensibly, these new orders are designed to force the eradication of invasive non-native plants or animals—species not "ordinarily present" in Great Britain or those listed as non-native in Schedule 9 to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. The logic seems sound when applied to genuine pests like Japanese Knotweed. However, DEFRA’s legal eagles have defined "not ordinarily present" in a way that leaves our reintroduced natives dangerously exposed.

For the formally native beaver, this definition is a trap. There are now moves afoot to add beavers, otters, and pine martens—alongside wild boar—to Schedule 9. This classification treats returning natives with the same disdain as destructive foreign invasives.

Currently, a landowner can refuse access to DEFRA officials looking to cull animals on their private estate. Under the new regime, refusing access to breach a Species Control Order would become a criminal offence. The rights of the landowner to protect wildlife on their own ground are being stripped away to facilitate a government cull.

What’s the Solution to Invasive Species?

The Hypocrisy of "Invasive" Species Management

I, for one, support the control of genuinely destructive alien species such as Japanese Knotweed, Signal Crayfish, the Ruddy Duck, Parakeets, and Zebra Mussels—many of which were introduced by the very gardeners and landowners who now claim to be custodians of the countryside.

However, I vehemently oppose hijacking this legislation to ensure we cannot restore the wildlife we previously drove to extinction. This policy enforces a vision of the British countryside as a sterile monoculture: a factory floor for industrial farming and a private shooting ground for the rich, all subsidised by the taxpayer at the expense of the poor and the natural world.

The reason so many non-native species thrive in the UK is not just because we imported them, but because we have degraded our landscape to suit them. We have straightened rivers and stripped woodlands, creating habitats where robust invaders flourish. Ironically, these invaders are mostly thriving in the exact riverbank and wetland habitats that would benefit most from the beaver’s return. Restoring the beaver would restore the complex, messy, natural wetlands that generally favour native species over the invaders.

Current control orders are akin to a doctor treating a symptom while ignoring the disease. We need to treat the root cause: let the beaver work its magic on the riverbanks and wetlands of Britain, healing the ecosystem from the bottom up.

Trophic Cascades: Nature’s Own Balancing Act

We need to stop micromanaging nature and allow "trophic cascades" to restore balance. This is evident in the relationship between our squirrels and the pine marten.

Pine Marten, Red & Grey Squirrels

Our native red squirrels have been pushed to the margins by the North American grey squirrel, a species introduced at the whim of aristocrats who thought they looked "cute" on their grounds. However, naturalists have observed a fascinating trend: where pine martens return, red squirrels recover.

Pine martens were wiped out in England by gamekeepers protecting shooting estates, allowing the landowning elite to rear millions of pheasants (another non-native species) for sport. But the pine marten is a natural predator of the squirrel. It turns out the invasive grey squirrel is heavier and slower than our native red, making it an easy snack for a pine marten. In central Ireland, the return of the pine marten has spelt doom for the grey squirrel and sparked a population boom for the red. We must allow our ecology to rebalance itself rather than relying on endless human intervention.

Otter, Mink & Water Voles (& Beaver)

A similar story plays out in our rivers. The American mink, an escapee from fur farms, decimated our native water voles, exploiting destroyed riverbanks to hunt them to near extinction. For years, the mink faced no competition because we had hunted and poisoned our native otters.

Now that we have cleaned up our rivers and protected the otter, they are reoccupying England. Just like the pine marten, the otter quickly dispatches the smaller American mink. The otter does not predate heavily on water voles, meaning that as otters return, the alien mink disappears, and the water vole is safe once again. Furthermore, returning beavers create the complex wetland architectures where water voles thrive, offering them protection even if mink are present.

Wild Boar and Oak Trees

The other animal at risk from our government’s murderous legislation is the wild boar. Escaped from farms over the last 40 years, boar now occupy many woodlands in the south of England.

Our government views them as pests, yet the wild boar has evolved over millions of years in a mutualistic, symbiotic relationship with our woodlands. They are vital for spreading the genetic diversity of trees like oaks; without boar to bury acorns, oak forests suffer from genetic impoverishment. Their rooting behaviour—turning over the soil—creates micro-habitats for a vast range of woodland plants and allows mycorrhizal fungal spores to spread, which are essential for tree health.

It is a depressing fact that after centuries of biodiversity loss, some humans cannot tolerate the return of a species that makes our woodlands come alive. Government and private interests seem determined to eradicate them, preferring a sanitised, silent forest to a living, breathing ecosystem.

Why the beaver must be saved

The beaver is the most important formally native animal to Britain that could create landscapes that protects out native plants and animals (and save us a fortune in water treatment and flood management costs). Yet the very legislation aimed at protecting us from alien invaders looks certain be used by a corrupt political and land management system to destroy the very animals that could help us.

Officials at DEFRA have stated this may not be the case, and I have huge sympathy to the our wildlife public servants, but these new draconian laws are dangerous and easily subverted by those eager to rid the countryside of wildlife and bend it to their own warped will as a playground for their historical fantasies of lethal subjugation of their ‘dominion’.

The Economic Solution: A Land Value Tax

To permanently restore British wildlife, we must change the economic incentives. We need a system where protecting nature is in a landowner's best financial interest.
This is best achieved through a radical tax shift: Land Value Tax (LVT).
We must stop taxing hard work and trade, and start taxing the monopoly of land. A tax on land values, alongside taxes on natural resource usage and environmental damage, would force efficiency. It would make it incredibly expensive to hoard land for unproductive uses like pheasant shooting or tax-efficient land banking.
Such a shift would not only cut unemployment and reduce poverty by unburdening the working class, but it would also turn even the most ardent wildlife-hater into a conservationist. It would become financially prudent to be a wise guardian of the wild and a knowledgeable steward of the land, rather than a mere extractor of rents.
Under our current legal and economic system, landowners have no choice but to maintain their stranglehold on land monopolies and influence government policy to their benefit. They will fight the return of the beaver, for the beaver represents a loss of their total control—a rewilding of the landscape that they cannot manicure.
Beavers need friends, and they need them quickly. If we do not act, they will be snuffed out by this new legislation before they have had a chance to give our children a wetland system worth having.

Save the Free Beaver of England

Join the fight by keeping in touch with the Save the Free Beaver of England Campaign’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/307063082782582/
Twitter Account: @CastorAnglicus https://twitter.com/CastorAnglicus

Peter Smith