The Mink Menace: The Politics of Vertebrate Pest Control

Abstract

The paper relates the impact of the North American mink (Mustela vison), during the first half-century of its introduction, to the wider governance of the British countryside and, more particularly the agriculture departments, the Nature Conservancy, and their respective interest-groups. Even when evidence emerged of the mink's ability to breed in the wild, the departments strove both to avoid any impairment of the fur-breeding industry and to minimise their own responsibility for controlling the feral population. Such hesitancy and delay made it even less likely that the eventual campaign to eradicate the species in the 1960s would succeed. In pursuit of greater self-reliance of industry in raising agricultural productivity, the Conservative Government of the early 1970s relinquished even the desire to use the powers and resources uniquely available to government to coordinate and effect some measure of control, for example in safeguarding ‘the unique ecology’ of the Western Isles. The paper assesses the respective roles of ministers and officials, and their ‘expert’ advisers in permitting that failure in management to occur at a time when farming took such pride in its new-found ability to effect major improvements to ‘the rural workshop’.