Lengthy article on rewilding in various countries:
Rewilding has become a popular activity among Britain’s landed elite.
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[An environmentalist] jokingly described an emerging black market for wildlife trade unfolding in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair. “You’ve literally got conversations happening over the lunch tables of White’s where one landowner is passing beavers to another,” he said. “You know: ‘I’ve got beavers on my farm in Perthshire, old buddy old pal. I could bring a few to you in Herefordshire.’”
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He procured almost all the beavers from ... a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.”
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In Tayside, Scotland, where beavers were illegally introduced around 2006, farmers shot the animals on sight. There was no law to stop the farmers from doing so because, although the beavers were endangered, they also weren’t officially there.
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It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests.
Related:
🇭🇰🐗
— Aaron Busch (@tripperhead) July 28, 2023
Video of the boar attacks at Fotan MTR on Friday have appeared online.
The boar took the escalator!!! https://t.co/swzQ23iYmR pic.twitter.com/gv1qoxU3ir