Sounding and feeling a little like a Roman Catholic penitent at confession, it has been two weeks since my last post. It has been a busy time – my son turned 18 and so there was much celebration, I travelled to the hugely disappointing Spurn Migration Festival near Hull, of which more in a separate post, and to be honest I have otherwise not quite been in the mood, or my Muse has not been present. Blogging is a fairly strange thing to do (one never knows, really, who if anyone is actually reading it) but in any case I think if you don’t enjoy writing it at a particular time, it is best left until you are doing. Writing my second book, at one point I realised I was actually managing to bore myself. That was definitely a moment to stop and start again another day. There is also my least favourite turning of the seasons – the end of a wet and miserable summer. The prospect of a warm and reasonably dry summer is what gets me through the cold months. On top of that, a general election result which filled absolutely no one with a sense of optimism and a new government with a large majority but a pretty small proportion of the actual votes across the country, who surely can’t be worse than the last lot but have not started well.
I find all religions weird, tending towards the Richard Dawkins view of the God delusion (or, to put it another way, it is mostly a load of superstitious, wildly anachronistic and deeply harmful nonsense), but the Catholic church is perhaps the strangest of them all. The practice of confession is very odd, as are the other main differences with the Church of England: no divorce, you can never renounce Catholicism, you can only be ‘lapsed’, the celibacy of the priesthood (combined with the notion of nuns becoming “brides of Christ”), reverence of the virgin Mary, the properly strange belief in transubstantiation and the infallibility of the pope*. The Catholic church has a terrible, dark history of anti-Semitism and collaboration with the Nazis of course and like Anglicanism, has had a very long-lasting tradition of child abuse – and covering it up. There is also the matter of the Catholic church’s preaching in Africa that condoms cause AIDS, which led to countless deaths.
*I have written before about using capital case for the names of bird species and I have decided now that the same logic should apply to other animals too, but I am increasingly refusing to capitalise the titles of people for whom I have no respect. So, queen Camilla (a picture of whom, incidentally, the Saturday Times featured on its front page with the caption “A powerful gust of wind played havoc with [her] hairdo”), king Charles, archbishop Carey, the pope (who has yet to respond to appeals from PETA to help end bullfighting, with a powerful image of Christ in the ring, holding up his hand towards a matador with the wounded bull behind him) and so on. Slightly tricky sometimes since I would be happy with President Obama, but it will always be president Trump. A Catholic friend once said to me that with the pope it is all about the office itself, not the individual. That is not a mental leap I can make. I suppose the Rolling Stones and the beatles would be going too far.
This is all utterly beside the point. So, sir Keir Starmer, how he is doing on the environmental and animal welfare fronts? Not great, I would suggest. Like his predecessor (I mean Tony Bliar), he has reneged on one of his main manifesto pledges already, namely the ending of the badger cull.
I can scarcely believe I am writing about foxes and badgers yet again, but the same things are continuing to happen and I feel an obligation to register some protest.
Even since I wrote about this at the end of August following Brian May’s programme, the deadline for ending the cull has been extended again in an act of craven appeasement of the National Farmers Union, from 2026 to 2029. And who is to say it will not simply then be extended even further?
Friends wrote to their MP about it and received a reply from an underling which in 216 words managed to say absolutely nothing at all. Since it defies all logic, I have really been struggling to get my head around it. This is my conclusion, as posted to our badger Whatsapp group:
Politicians/government(s) and the NFU will not admit they were ever wrong. Fear of public protest. Government deference to and appeasement of the NFU. What to do? Do exactly what the last govt did. Publish headline statements that the cull will end, then simply … not end it. Many people said to me last time around, “But they’ve stopped that, haven’t they?” Because that’s what they were told by the media. The new proposals are weak, wrong-headed and open-ended in reality – they can just extend again come 2029. They have already lied to us, they will do it again. It’s a continuation of the war on wildlife, which the feudalistic upper echelons of society hate because they cannot control it in the same way they control and abuse their dogs and horses and farmed animals. The existence of wildlife is an affront to them. Wildlife gets in the way of maximising profit, whether in agriculture, the building industry or transport infrastructure (think HS2). Meanwhile five new seabird species red-listed, nearly a third of all UK bird species now in danger of local extinction.
The government really needs to get cracking on the tightening of the law regarding foxhunting, or else that will just continue too, as it is at the moment – we are in cubbing season right now. There is one piece of good news – the Ministry of Defence, finally, will not be licensing hunts on its land for 2024-2025. Protect the Wild has recently issued its report on the season as it did last year. These are the headline statistics:
During the 19th season since the Hunting Act came into force, hunts persecuted a total of 581 foxes, hares and deer:
- Foxes chased – 335
- Foxes killed – 29
- Hares chased – 40
- Hares killed – 1
- Deer chased – 150
- Deer killed – 26
- The research for A Case for a Proper Ban on Hunting examined 2312 reports, which means that, when averaged, one in four meets resulted in hunts chasing or killing wildlife. These are not the numbers of a respectable industry that claims it is doing everything it can to avoid harming wildlife.
- Also, 124 instances of hunts interfering with badger setts were publicly reported. A separate law protects setts, the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, highlighting how hunting contravenes multiple laws to function.
- There was a total of 239 incidents of minor attacks, which included everything from targeted slurs (racism, transphobia, etc) through to pushing and shoving. A further 16 incidents were considered major attacks. These included causing serious injuries to activists or members of the public, attacking activists with weapons, and destroying sab or monitor group vehicles.
Chris Packham comments, after the release of yet more appalling footage of hunt cruelty including digging up a badger sett and setting a terrier on a fox cowering inside, which was hauled out and brutally thrown into the air by a terrierman: “You think you’ve seen depravity and cruelty? Then watch these vile inhuman wretches at their evil. Every one of them is breaking the law with their degenerate savagery. This must stop. The government must act now to end hunting with dogs – no excuses, no loopholes, no more wildlife wasted for their sick pleasure. Damn them!”
PETA reminds us of the anomaly that whilst fur farms are banned in the UK, we still import fur from abroad. And also that in America: “The most recent independent study shows that about 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans. “We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans.” — Dr. Richard Klausner, former director, National Cancer Institute.
“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has noted that 95% of all new drugs that test safe and effective in animal tests fail in human trials, largely because they’re dangerous or ineffective in humans. Yet that agency still squanders 47% of its grant budget—$23 billion in 2023 alone—on worthless experiments on animals.”
And that in the UK, “the Home Office revealed a staggering statistic: in 2023, 2,681,686 procedures were carried out on animals in British laboratories.” Let us pray that Starmer fulfils his pledges on this at least as Bliar spectacularly failed to do.
The RSPCA has sent an e-mail asking for an end to the farming of caged animals altogether, but their case is too easily dismissed by those who would wish to do so, until they heed the words of their own president, Chris Packham again, who has outspokenly criticised the approvals they give to farms where conditions for and treatment of animals are worse than atrocious.
Salmon farming needs dealing with too. There is nothing new in recent reports of the suffering of the fish and the damage to the environment, but the supplier whose produce was served at prince William’s wedding has withdrawn from that RSPCA certification scheme altogether. Chris Packham has called for a total boycott of farmed salmon, in particular following the release of undercover footage in which his stepdaughter took part.
As for the water companies, there has been some tightening up of the rules, but I doubt it will go anywhere near far enough. What we need is proper enforcement of the existing rules (the Environment Agency is nigh on penniless, under-resourced and toothless) and, in my view, renationalisation is the only solution, which Steve Reed has ruled out. Our water, our seas and rivers, are too precious to be entrusted to the forces of capitalism and corporate depravity. At the end of August, raw sewage was spilling into Lake Windermere from two overflows for more than a week.
The proposals to redesignate certain green belt land as “grey belt” – and build on it – raise complex issues on which I don’t feel qualified to comment at any length. But I don’t like the sound of it. But this makes a lot of sense:
Our planning system is changing. Here’s how we want to shape it – CPRE
The scandal of Geronimo the alpaca, sentenced to death for carrying bTB, which he almost certainly didn’t (the results of tests were “inconclusive”), remains unresolved after seven years. Which brings us full circle. This has a been a dense and gloomy post, so thank you if have borne with me to the end. I have illustrated it with photos of cows which I took on Hungerford Common this morning. My point is, of course, ironic. The one thing the badger cull is categorically not about is the well-being of those gentle creatures.
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