Well you read wrong! Never heard of them being far from water, and its animals like our water voles that are suffering a massive decline because of the mink.. Like Ideation said above, they get hunted, trapped, shot, etc.. Some people think the return of the otter is keeping them in check too..
I shot one a few years ago on my dads small holding, it was sat on a log in the fishing pond eating one of his tench , that's about a mile from the nearest water not a great distance but it had to cross some open land to get to where it was