The otter brigades of the Animal Uprising™ have gone on the offense in Britain. Despite the anthropomorphizing that many humans indulge in, otters are not cute and playful. They are actually stone cold assassins of the wild and they are stripping Britain of fish.
Cute furry faces, a comical natural inquisitiveness and lead roles in literature have assured the European river otter a place as one of Britain’s favourite creatures.
Having come close to disappearing from this country in the 1970s they have clawed their way back on to the riverbank, even being found recently in cities such as Leeds and London.
But now their resurgence has brought them back into conflict with man. Having seen hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of prize fish gobbled up by otters, anglers are demanding that stocks of specimen fish, the heavyweights of each sport fish species, should be protected.
Anglers can spend weeks or months staking out a lake in the hope of catching an individual fish, such as a 30lb (14kg) carp, only to find that an otter has beaten them to it.
Clubs spend years and many thousands of pounds building up stocks of fish to catch but the fisheries are proving irresistible to the otters. The Specialist Anglers’ Alliance (SAA) says that otters have destroyed entire populations of large fish in some fisheries and have devastated stocks in hundreds more.
All that furry cuteness is part of their act. The reality is that they are willing to kill other animals to move the animal's larger agenda forward. Sort of the Joseph Stalins of the animal kingdom.
