So, the Crufts best in show winner was a Clumber Spaniel. This is a breed very prone to a variety of health problems. These include lameness, heat sensitivity, difficulties conceiving and giving birth, ear and eye conditions, spinal disc herniation and hip dysplasia. In other words, the breed symbolises everything that is wrong with the kind of what one might call genetic engineering that Crufts encourages. It gets worse. According to the Independent and other sources, ‘owner’ Lee Cox has a conviction for animal cruelty, having been found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to a dog in 2001 following a three-day trial. A Royal (!) Kennel Club spokesperson has dismissed this as one-off incident, adding that Cox has had an unblemished record since. How do they know what has happened off the record? It might just be that he hasn’t been caught.
Yet again there has been a death at Cheltenham Festival. A horse called Hansard injured a leg and was euthanised. Commentators have described this as tragic, “a sad postscript to the race” and heart-breaking. How about entirely avoidable? Well, that’s what I first read but now there has been another death at Cheltenham, this time of HMS Seahorse, who fell at a hurdle. So that’s one a day for the first two days. Eighty horses have died at this one event, a celebration of cruelty in which horses are forced to run through pain and fear, since 2000. The RSPCA has said that this is the twentieth such death already this year – and we are only two and a half months in.
The RSPCA is constantly beset with controversy, the RSPB much less so. A good friend works for the RSPB and I am a member and supporter. They do many, many wonderful things and are a hugely important organisation. So it pains me to agree with Protect the Wild (and indeed they seem to be more disappointed than angry) that they are taking entirely the wrong line when it comes to the shooting industry. They have spoken out against raptor persecution and have not pulled their punches which is great, but why are they continuing to use the vile word “gamebird” at all? This seems to go back to their 1904 Royal Charter (“Royal” again) which sees shooting as a legitimate sport and clearly needs an major overhaul. Still they want to introduce “gamebird licensing to protect England’s wildlife” which is of course oxymoronic.
Meanwhile there has been another massive victory for campaigners against MBR Acres, the breeding facility which supplies dogs for experimentation, and for Camp Beagle, passim. It is just like the previous case. Five people rescued eighteen beagle puppies from MBR Acres and were charged with burglary. There is no suggestion that they did not break in and take the dogs. But again the jury at Peterborough Crown Court reached a not guilty verdict on the grounds that rescuing puppies from cruelty is not a crime. Especially now this has happened twice in such quick succession, the potential repercussions are huge. It also highlights the immoral and tone-deaf parliamentary ruling outlawing protest against such facilities on the absurd basis that they are a part of national infrastructure. Have the jurors broken the law? Will they really arrest Joanna Lumley (who did so much for the Gurkhas and does so much for Compassion in World Farming) and the other celebrities and for that matter MPs who have recently called for the closure of MBR Acres? That is obviously fanciful but there have already been two arrests at Camp Beagle this year.
Meg McCubbin was out following and filmng a hunt again, the Cottesmore this time, in the company of Dr Amir Khan. Just as before the hunt didn’t even bother to pretend that they were following a trail. How many more times will she and others have to do this before the government actually does something? At least no foxes were killed that day although deer and hares were terrified. Dr Khan made the excellent point that birds are also disturbed by horses and dogs rampaging en masse through the countryside, using up their precious energy resources.
The illustrations above are by my daughter Naya Rota. They served as vignettes at the head of chapters in Animal Trust.
I thought to test out the two new books about garden birds and wildlife which I acquired at the the British Trust for Ornithology conference (The British Trust for Ornithology Conference 2026. Part II – Animal Wild) to see what there was for me to learn about the first birds I saw yesterday morning. Quite a lot it turned out. Jackdaws, whom I love, were my first visitors of the day. Both books contain more or less the same information but presented sufficiently differently that I do not at all regret buying both books. I happened to have noticed the evening before half a dozen Jackdaws perching in a silver birch in three distinct pairs. Now I know that Jackdaws usually mate for life. Also that they incubate halfway through laying their clutch so that the chicks emerge asynchronously. There are thought to be 1.3 million pairs in the UK and Ireland (the earlier book, published in 2008 as opposed to 2016, gives 503,000 pairs which is quite a difference but we know that they are doing well – did the population really double in eight years?) They typically live for around five years but can live for over seventeen (or fifteen in the earlier book). It had not occurred to me that they are our smallest corvids. I knew that they were highly intelligent – they have been known to steal fish from Puffins which cannot be easy. A group of Italian thieves trained a Jackdaw to steal money withdrawn by users of cash machines. They look after their young steadfastly, as I witnessed last year with a young bird who looked as though he would not and I assume did not make it through the year. They fledge after about five weeks but another young bird was trapped in a chimney for around twelve weeks before being rescued. He or she continued to be fed by the parents the entire time.
Now that I much better informed, I will enjoy their company all the more.
I have started reading Robin Ince’s The Importance of Being Interested; adventures in scientific curiosity, Atlantic Books, 2022. I am not sure whether I will continue with it although I do feel his heart is in the right place. He is a stand-up comedian (and an atheist) amongst other things and his preface and introduction made me chuckle. There’s an excellent foreword by Professor Brian Cox. When Ince’s editor questioned the length of his interview with Jane Goodall saying, “It looks to me like you’ve just put in everything she said?”, he replied that of course had, “It’s Jane bloody Goodall.” The first chapter, all about scepticism seems to me though to be far too long and repetitive. Over 35 pages he seems to be saying pretty much the same thing over and over again, albeit a with a variety of examples. I can’t help feeling he could just have left it at the quote from Voltaire which opens the chapter: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” He is good however on faith healers and those who claim to communicate with the dead for money, conspiracy theorists and so on. One minor irritation, which will have been beyond the author’s control, is that the asterisks which send you to a footnote are minuscule. Perhaps it is just my ageing eyesight, but I can hardly see them at all, especially when they are next to quotation marks.
The AI offered by WordPress is driving me slightly crazy. I gave it the simple task of rotating one of the images above but it took ages and several attempts in spite of clear instructions and the result was not only still not right but actually distorted. I’ve managed without it for what, somewhat alarmingly, seems to be more than half a million words published on this blog, so I think I will be fine without it.
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