Otters were nearly driven to extinction in the last 100 years from hunting, habitat loss and pollution. Since then, nature conservation has enjoyed a great wave of public support and laws to outlaw toxic pollutants and to protect endangered species like otters soon followed. This included a ban on hunting otters or disturbing them in any way (as in the UK example). Slowly we've seen these measures succeeding and otters have returned to many regions they had once been driven out from. Based on all this, I'm wondering what the long term goal of otter conservation should be. When otters were still common, they used to be persecuted and everyone used to hate them because they competed with fisheries. Do we just want to go back to that status quo before we nearly drove them to extinction – including returning to hunting and trapping like before?
Will we continue in some kind of legislatively self-controlled state of reduced human activity around otter habitats?
Conservation is pretty much...
