In part at least. I thought I would follow Protect the Wild’s lead – they have just made a video recording some of the happier recent stories. It’s a reminder not to feel completely helpless and even desperate. I repeat the stories here.
Snares are finally properly illegal in Scotland. I do wonder about enforcement and whether landowners will be held responsible, vicariously or otherwise.
A new group of saboteurs, the Welsh Border Wildlife Protectors, has benefited from a donation from PTW to the tune of £500 to enable them to purchase a drone. They have already been able to record illegal activity and save foxes’ lives.
Fox hunting is still legal in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Hunters here travel over for fox hunting holidays. It must be very strange to be so driven to engage in such a deplorable pursuit which most people find wildly anachronistic and repulsive. But there are fresh attempts to ban it in Northern Ireland at least.
Twenty acres of chalk grassland in Kent around Dover Castle and the Western Heights will be restored.
The report ends with some viral footage of foxes playing in the snow at Oxford University. Yes, they play, of course they do, and they have families. It’s important to remember sometimes from videos like this what it is we are fighting for. Even if you don’t believe in animal rights (which I very strongly do), we surely have a duty not to cruelly persecute them.
In other news, a firm called Drax (which already sounds rather sinister) has agreed to help produce ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel from wooden biomass pellets. It already generates 7% of the UK’s power, allegedly from sawdust, other residue and branches, claiming that the carbon emissions from the burning is offset by new trees being planted. Some, like Greenpeace, are unconvinced. It does sound rather like the claims made by the disastrous HS2 project, where they either didn’t understand or pretended not to understand that felling ancient woods and planting saplings nearby (and failing to look after them) did not create a happy equilibrium.
I was horrified to learn about Gadhimai, the quinquennial Hindu festival in Nepal (bearing in mind that Hinduism is a very broad church) – thousands upon thousands of animals (an estimated half a million in 2009 and 250,000 in 2019) are transported to the temple and sacrificed or slaughtered for no reason to put it another way. Rats, pigeons, goas and water buffaloes are amongst the creatures ritualistically beheaded. How can this be in the 21st century?
Back in the UK, fox hunting rampages on. And so does deer hunting, with dogs. Protect the Wild explains that this happens in the southwest of England and that whilst stags are the victims between August and October, hinds are included in November. They get away with the cruelty by using loopholes in the Hunting Act (sound familiar?) All too often footage has been recorded of hunts chasing stags for hours – and that definitely is not legal. They may say they only use two dogs, but in fact different pairs of dogs may be employed in relay over the course of a hunt. They never play fair, do they? Any suggestion that the end purpose is research and observation is obviously complete BS. Since the females of most deer species do not grow antlers, which part of hinds are mounted as trophies? Their feet, or “slots”. How utterly disgusting.
Newbuild housing companies have been routinely ignoring the provisions for wildlife which they have promised and are legally bound to install, such as trees, bird, bug and bat boxes, ponds, hedgerows. In fact they have been delivering a mere 53%. And that’s before Starmer and Co. relax the rules even further. As I have said so often and as Chris Packham has said again: “…there are far more empty homes and properties in the UK than the Government claims it needs to build.” It is all a huge con.
I find myself on the mailing list for Ark Wildlife (not for long though). They have sent an email advertising feeders which only smaller birds can access, suggesting that pigeons, Magpies, Starlings and Crows “hog the feeders” and “raid them”. They also offer a range of three feeders called “Squirrel Busters”. In my garden at least, they all seem to co-exist just fine and get plenty to eat, just not all at the same time. Of course larger birds will eat more, but why are the smaller ones somehow more special?
The Guardian reveals that Coca-Cola is the worst offender for extracting freshwater from aquifers in the UK, they and others to the tune of billions of litres a year. In Spain and Latin America during times of drought, people have had to buy bottled water from foreign companies who have extracted it (some might say looted, they surely do not own it) from their own national territories.
Well, I didn’t say it was all going to be good news. BirdGuides reports the arrest in Essex of a man caught in possession of wild birds’ eggs. Wait for it, 56,000 of them. HART Wildlife Rescue takes in between 3,500 and 4,000 animals per year, but by no means all of those are birds. It doesn’t lessen the impact of what we do, but the destroyers need to be stopped. Conversely, Lucy McRobert writes enthusiastically about collecting again, whether it be wildlife art, books or simply lists of birds seen. I certainly collect the first two and am also proud of my collection of elephants made from a variety of materials, various kinds of wood, silver (including a small one always around my neck) and even lapis lazuli. My one criterion apart from that they obviously cannot be made of ivory is that they must bear no trappings or howdahs or other sign of subjugation by humans.
Finally, PETA has ramped up its campaign to ban the import and sale of foie gras in the UK and elsewhere. It is no longer legal to produce it here which tells us something about the suffering involved. My mother knew that from a very early age I would not eat foie gras or veal, but she continued to serve me the latter. A generational thing perhaps. I was and still am a terribly picky eater (possibly in some ways almost foodphobic, a word I heard from the first time from a former sufferer on Masterchef recently) and I am sure she simply thought that I couldn’t really be serious in my young concerns for animal suffering. She once forced me onto a horse drawn carriage in New York even though I was in tears at the way in which they were treated. Just different perceptions and priorities I suppose.
This won’t be my last post before Christmas, but I thought the head illustration should be seasonal.
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