The case for killing swans

The snuffling and chirruping of Bill Oddie on Britain Goes Wild makes Tom Fort want to reach for his gun

Television viewers with a soft spot for our feathered and furry friends are being treated nightly to the BBC's authorised version of what goes on in our woods and meadows, up and down our rivers and around our coasts. In Britain Goes Wild — a classic BBC jolly, jokey title —a pretty young woman with unruly blond hair and an extremely ready smile cosies up to the former comedian Bill Oddie. and together they drop in to see what their assorted cast of badgers, barn owls, blue tits, jackdaws, kingfishers, roe deer and other photogenic dumb chums are up to.

Occasionally the armchair nature-lover is whisked off to a more distant location to get a bird's-eye view of a species not to be encountered near the Oddie burrow in deepest Devon. On the first night — which was as much as [could stand — Simon, a strapping fellow in a woollen hat, was filmed lying on a carpet of gannet excrement on a rock somewhere off the east coast of Scotland, rhapsodising excitably about how wonderful it was to have 80,000 of these noisy birds for company.

Oddie himself, who long ago made a wise career move by forsaking comedy to take on the role of the Corporation's cheeky chappie of the outdoors, dominates the proceedings. With his whiskers, frequent scratching and high-pitched bursts of chirruping and snuffling, his television manner is that of some furry hedge-dweller togged up in anorak and binoculars. It's an image entirely in keeping with the relentless anthropomorphism of the programmes.

In Oddieland, there is no concept of the countryside as a venue for a grim, amoral struggle to survive. The creatures are characters, endowed with a full range of human emotions and responses. Most — badgers, foxes, tits, otters, fieldmice, etc. — are lovable. Sometimes they are a bit dodgy — grey squirrels, for instance, which are bushy-tailed and bright-eyed but unkind to red squirrels; or greater spotted woodpeckers, which are handsome and make interesting noises, but have a bad habit of trying to eat nestlings. Then there is the occasional out-and-out bad hat, such as the rat.

In its resolute avoidance of anything vaguely unsavoury, contentious or messy — apart from the hilarious possibility of hunky Simon getting gannet poo on his hat

— Britain Goes Wild places itself firmly in a direct line from Wind in the Willows; except that instead of sculling on the river the characters prefer to watch TV, this being the whimsical explanation offered by Oddie for the failure of the badgers to emerge from their hole for a dusk frolic in front of the cameras.

It's all pretty innocuous, I suppose, and at least may deter people from causing a disturbance by tramping around what's left of the countryside in the forlorn hope of seeing some of the beasts for themselves. But the programmes do illustrate neatly how shallow, selective and twee is the national obsession with the natural world and the ideological stranglehold exercised by the RSPB and the RSPCA on behalf of the feathered and furry communities.

My own softest spot is for our finny friends. The only fish to secure a starring role in Oddieland is the basking shark, which is rare and enormous, and therefore to be cherished, if not loved. Otherwise fish only figure when they disappear headfirst down the throat of a colourful kingfisher, or are munched alive by an agile, furry and intensely lovable otter. Apart from the Atlantic salmon, fish lack charisma as well as being tricky to film, and therefore do not count.

In Slovenia, an enlightened country where wildlife abounds, a bounty is paid for the shooting of cormorants, which come inland from the sea to prey on the wild trout and grayling of the mountain streams. As a result, there are very few cormorants on the rivers, and the fishing is extremely good. In Britain, it is a criminal offence to shoot a cormorant without a licence from the Environment Agency, which you are most unlikely to be granted. Cormorant numbers here are soaring, and many inland fisheries have suffered grievously from their predations.

If you suggest to the RSPB that there might be a case for controlling cormorants, they become very stern and invariably cite the Bavarian case. Some years ago the state government in Bavaria authorised a cull of cormorants. Six thousand were shot, and were promptly replaced by 6,000 from somewhere else — proof positive, says the RSPB, that culls don't work. The answer to that is: well, maybe they do if the shooting goes on; and even if they don't, at least those who've had one of these dark fishslayers in their sights and pulled the trigger feel rather better for it.

The mute swan has done even better here than the cormorant. The population has risen by three quarters since the 1970s — when a ban was imposed on the use by anglers of the lead shot which used to polish many of them off — and now stands at 30,000. Swans do not eat fish. But their favourite food is the emerald-green ranunculus weed which waves over the golden gravel beds of many of our loveliest chalk streams, such as the Test and the Itchen in Hampshire, the Avon and the Wylye in Wiltshire, and the upper Kennet in Berkshire, and nourishes the vast diversity of insects and crustacea on which their vitality depends.

An adult swan eats two kilos of the stuff a day. Where they are numerous, they will strip long stretches of river bare, degrading them utterly. The disgrace is that the owners of rivers cursed in this fashion are powerless to do anything about it. Forget about shooting a swan. All swans belong to the Queen. You are not even allowed to enforce humane birth control by pricking or greasing the eggs to prevent them hatching. Banging a pair of dustbin lids together is about as extreme a measure as the allpowerful RSPB will countenance.

Why these two species of bird, so abundant and so destructive, should be allowed to enjoy such rigid protection is beyond me. After all, the owner of a garden or smallholding invaded by pests can resort to a range of counter-measures. He can gas moles or stab them with a fork. He can blast grey squirrels as they steal nuts from his bird table. He can snare or shoot foxes and badgers with evil designs on his chickens. The minister for furry creatures, Ben Bradshaw, has even proclaimed that it is our patriotic duty to eat more venison to save our woodlands from being overrun by a plague of deer.

As the single commandment ordained by the pigs at the end of Animal Farm stated, 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.'

Tom Fort's The Book of Eels is published by HarperCollins (£7.99).