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"Ratty" Gets Full Protection In Britain |
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| UK: February 27, 2008 | ||
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LONDON - Forget Badger and Mole, a century after Kenneth Graham's lyrical Wind in the Willows, Ratty has found friends in high places.
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As of April 6 the country's water voles, whose numbers have tumbled by 90 percent since the 1990s due to attacks by alien species and habitat loss, will be a protected species under new rules announced on Tuesday by the Department of the Environment. Voles are frequently mistaken for rats, and Graham's fearless rodent hero "Ratty" was in fact a water vole. Not only will it be illegal to kill, injure or take from the wild any water vole, it will also be illegal to own or sell one. "This excellent news will undoubtedly help our efforts to bring the water vole back from the brink," said Stephanie Hilborne of The Wildlife Trusts. "Full legal protection should ensure remaining water vole populations are not compromised during development works and that incidents of trapping and persecution do not go unpunished." In 1990 it was estimated there were 7.0 million water voles in Britain. But by 1998 this figure had crashed to one million and it has continued to fall since, the Wildlife Trust said. (Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Kate Kelland)
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REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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