PETA, I was pleased to see, made their presence known and felt at Crufts, and I saw an image on Facebook of a protestor holding up an Animal Aid banner about the use of the whip in horse racing: “Whipping doesn’t hurt? Come and try it.” Beside him is a dominatrix appropriately clad, in red latex, and holding a horse whip. Chris Packham has been as busy as ever, and turned up in person to support the Hunt Saboteurs who were targeting the Mendip Farmers Hunt. He reports “… let’s be clear – they were hunting foxes and as far as I could make out they weren’t even bothering with the ‘smokescreen’ ”, other than “dragging an old sock 100m across a field …” He continues, “… a pervasive scent of the inevitable collapse of their nasty hobby fills the air” and writes of “total anarchy” towards the end of the day, the pack of hounds scattered, some ending up on a busy main road and one apparently hit by a car. A picture of Chris at the brunt of a verbal attack shows him looking completely unfazed: “What remains is a dreary shambles, a tiny bunch of foul-mouthed and violent people moping about in their shrinking anachronistic bubble … Oh dear, what a shame.”
There has also been fierce opposition (again) to the planned opening of the world’s first octopus farm in the Canary Islands. The aim would be to raise a million octopuses a year for food using cruel and intensive methods. They are of course highly and particularly intelligent and sensitive creatures, facts which are denied by the company involved. The ensuing waste water, which would be pumped back into the sea does not bear thinking about.
Meanwhile coral reef die-offs threaten to push wild octopuses, sea turtles and other forms of marine life closer to extinction. Hearteningly however, in a plea for funding for the women, the American campaigning group Ekō (“22,838,273 people stopping big corporations from behaving badly”) writes of “A fearless team of Kenyan fisherwomen … doing everything they can to stop this: they’re up at the crack of dawn every day to patrol their marine conservation, removing fishing nets, restoring coral reefs and mangroves, and keeping octopus nesting sites intact.” www.eko.org
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