If you want to cultivate goodwill towards animal conservation, your best bet is to pick a creature that features in the better kinds of children’s literature, preferably The Wind in the Willows, but C S Lewis and Beatrix Potter are good, too.

The campaign to restore the habitats of watervoles (still a work in progress) owed a lot to their association with Ratty from Kenneth Grahame’s classic; our fondness for badgers is probably premised on them behaving like Badger in the same book – they don’t. The reintroduction of beavers in the last five years in England and Scotland could hardly go wrong with the middle classes, who first encountered Mr and Mrs Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe...