The Secret Angler

Poor old Simon Cooper. He’s despairing again . Some months ago it was rewilding; now it’s beavers. He has a beaver in his bonnet (geddit). I wonder whether Si was subject to the malign influences of a cult in his youth because he tends to talk about cults and fads. He’s not alone of course. Plenty of ‘conservation-minded’ fishermen are against the reappearance of any animal that was persecuted to extinction many years ago (about 500 years in the case of beavers), hence the brouhaha over otters and cormorants.

As with his earlier comments on stocking and rewilding, Cooper is poorly informed. He believes the beavers reintroduced are an alien species, same as signal crayfish, coypu and grey squirrels. The introductions are of the Eurasian beaver, the same species once widespread in Britain. His rainbow trout comparison is therefore incorrect. Cooper goes on to wildly exaggerate the benefits claimed for beaver introductions. Perhaps he thinks this makes for a good T&S article — it doesn’t — but in this age of misinformation he has a duty to check his facts first.

An open population of beavers has only been introduced in one location in England, the River Otter in Devon (others are caged). There are two in Scotland. The Otter trial lasted five years; in 2020 it was announced the beavers could stay. Potential benefits of beavers are the recreation of wetland habitats and natural flood defences. A lengthy literature review of the current state of understanding can be found here . To be fair to Cooper, knowledge of the impact of beaver introductions is limited. The report’s author, Prof Cowx, recommends a moratorium on further introductions until impacts are better understood. Beavers are herbivores and are known for felling trees, although apparently they only construct dams when the water is shallow. Inevitably they can affect the balance of fisheries in which native species have dwindled to a few wild trout and some waterfowl.

But I doubt Simon Cooper has much to worry about. I think it unlikely beavers will make a reappearance on chalk streams in the foreseeable future. His business interests are safe, his main concern I believe. Incidentally, in my last post on his polemics, I speculated that he drives a polluting four-wheel drive truck. And so he does, Toyota Hilux, 23 mpg:

I can’t really see him driving round fence stakes and heavy gear from his posh pad in Nether Wallop. If he doesn’t need such heavy wheels, how about swapping for something less polluting. It may be less Hampshire but he’d be doing his bit for the environment, on which his livelihood depends. Or does that sound like madness too?

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Picture the following scenes. You are just below a lovely stone bridge on a sunny morning, the slow water at the edge of the pool has trout cruising around picking off insects that drop from the overhanging tree, and you are making ready to cast. Then across the bridge comes a man yapping into his mobile phone with three dogs doing their own yapping. Still gabbing on the phone the man and the dogs go to the water where he throws a ball from one of those throwing sticks into the river. Fortunately all this commotion happens above the bridge but it breaks the peace of a morning’s fly fishing.

In the second scene our fly angler is keeping low on the bank and casting to trout rising in the slick water at the tail of a pool. A sudden racket from behind turns out to be a pooch leaping into the river. The last gloomy example of idyll-breaking is the fisherman tackling down, a fly at the end of the line waving in the wind, when along comes a man and his dog which spontaneously decides to jump up a wader and risk getting a hook in its stupid head. The angler guides the dog away with his foot and the owner complains about his pet being kicked. ‘You’ll make it nervous.’

Well, dear reader, you will have guessed these incidents all happened to me, along with a great many others involving ‘man’s best friend.’ It seems to be a common hazard that all anglers face when out fishing, even where there is no public access. The great dog-loving British public are happy to take any opportunity to encourage their mutts into rivers, shit all over the bank and generally harass those of us who would prefer to go about their business without such interruptions.

Dog owners often like to call their pets intelligent: ‘Fido’s awfully intelligent you know.’ I’m inclined to think this a form of self-flattery. They, being aware that humans are regarded as a form of life higher up the evolutionary scale than a dog, must believe that their own intelligence is therefore exceptional. When you watch a dog walker chucking rocks in the river while their hapless pooches stand in the water looking completely bemused you have to wonder about this.

Dogs and fishing rarely mix but this doesn’t stop some anglers taking their own dogs along to the riverbank. There is even an article about the best fishing dogs, though the conclusion seems to be there is no such thing. I remember a river keeper lamenting the number of dogs taken to the stretch he cared for, where they crapped liberally in the long grass. Come time to strim the footpaths the consequent shower was unwelcome. Well trained dogs are rarer than the Mongolian Noshit breed. Mention training to dog fanciers and they think you’re referring to public transport.

Numbers of dogs are on the rise. In 2019 there were just under ten million. Now that figure has gone up by over a million; 29% of the population have one or more. Aside from the shocking attacks on people, thankfully rare, these animals do a lot of environmental damage. Their excretions enrich areas of grassland to the detriment of wild flowers. In the river they damage spawning areas, wear down banks and even introduce highly poisonous pesticides after flea treatment. The river keeper at the Wilton Club on the River Wylye has had some success in persuading dog walkers to keep them on dry land. And you will still find dog shit on the pavements, though campaigns to stop that have had some success. Years ago I used to visit Brighton where the pavements were paved not with gold but brown. Better nowadays.

Is there anything good to say for dogs? Well, there are some very useful ones, not for angling but shooting. You can’t spend all day looking for the pheasants you’ve bagged so a retriever is a handy thing, provided the fleabag doesn’t start eating the bird. More valuable are guide dogs for those with impaired sight, invariably delightful animals with peaceful temperaments. You’ll never get one of those barking in your face and leaping up at you. And lonely old people find their pets a solace, an indictment of society more than a vote for canine company in my view. Something that surprised me is that, according to an Environment Agency officer, many pollution reports come from dog walkers, not just anglers.

So maybe we can grudgingly put up with them, especially if owners keep the damn things out of the water where I’m fishing. One might wonder how dogs came to be domesticated in the first place. Did ancient man need something to pat on the head beside the fire of an evening? According to the latest thinking, dogs domesticated themselves. They recognised a free meal ticket when they saw it. Perhaps they really are more intelligent than their owners.

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