Tag: Animal rights
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Oilseed Rape, RPSB, Golden Eagles, Sam West birdwatching, Pied Wagtails, Protect the Wild Swifts, Trail Hunting and Glue Traps, Madagascar – Chameleons and Lemurs, Star Trek, Dad’s Army, The Assembly and Starmer
Oilseed Rape I wondeređ what this plant was when it appeared growing from the foot of a nearby wall. I have noticed it growing on local road verges too. It is Oilseed Rape and is rather pretty. I assume these appearances derive from an arable farm not far away. It may be pretty but it…
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Hedgehogs, Wolves, Dogs, Foxes and Bruce Springsteen
Wolves Firstly, a couple of follow-ups. I wrote recently about the wolves at Wildwood: Still on the subject of canines, the five wolves kept at Wildwood Discovery Park in Kent have been killed since they had begun to attack and wound each other. I expect they were driven mad by their captivity. The first two…
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Mink, dogs, wolves and birds
Lovely to see the Marsh Marigolds, above, making their annual appearance. Mink The Hunt Saboteurs remind us that the mink hunting season is about to begin: Mink Hunting season due to begin. If the population does need controlling in some form, which is arguable, it should not be done like this – with dogs, drainage…
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A Chaffinch, planning this year’s bike trip and animal rescue
A Chaffinch was the first bird of today. Like Dunnocks, they are ground feeders. Their nests are described as neat, deep cups. Numbers here are more or less doubled by migrants in winter. When they are a part of a mixed flock with Bramblings there is no competition for food since Bramblings can take larger…
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British Wildlife magazine part I; lawyers for animals and the environment
The latest British Wildlife magazine has come through the letterbox too, Volume 27, Number 4, February 2026. By coincidence in terms of the content of much of the rest of this post, it opens with Alexa Culver’s ‘A confluence of crises in English nature laws’. The Bio Diversity Net Gain legislation of 2024 was far…
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Great Tits, Birdwatch Magazine, Tree Sparrows, Global Justice Now, Greyhound Racing and … Spring at last
After Wood Pigeons and Jackdaws, the first bird I saw today was a Great Tit. New to me from the garden bird books was the fact that the black chest stripe tapers off in the females but continues downwards and broadens in the males, for whom the width is a status symbol which attracts females…
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Cognitive dissonance (Cheltenham again), the guga hunt and Gordon Ramsay, ‘magic numbers’, the nature of time, Keith Mann and Alexandra Paul, scones, the Royal Mint, Animal Rahat and more
Cognitive dissonance and Clare Balding Cognitive dissonance is something I am as guilty of as anyone when it comes to consuming chicken, fish and dairy. I don’t know how people achieve it when the animal abuse is going on right in front of them. Clare Balding, for example, attended the Cheltenham Festival this year and…
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Raising Hare; Starmer etc. Crufts; Protists; Asimov; Rewilding; EIA – whaling and porpoises
I was recommended Raising Hare, the heart warming true story of an unlikely friendship, by Chloe Dalton, Canongate, 2025, by a friend’s mother. I was worried that it would be a story of a well-meaning amateur doing more harm than good but that was entirely a false assumption. Dalton is always respectful, mindful, thoughtful and…
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Snowdrops, Squirrels, Beavers, Tice’s Meadow and McDonald’s, a monkey lab is to close, and Tony Blair seems to be up to no good again
Lunch at the nearby Elcot Retreat yesterday which was a bit of a curate’s egg but it gave me time and space to read two of my daughter’s excellent degree essays, ‘The Experiences of Women of Colour in Midwifery Services’ and ‘Political economies of unfree labour through a gendered global capitalist lens: Sex work in…
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Chris Packham and the North Dorset Hunt Sabs, Protect the Wild on the right to protest, Las Vegas, Mandelson and Starmer
The image above is from: Thorburn (Archibald). British Mammals. Two volumes. Longmans, Green & Co., 1920-1921. Chris Packham and his step-daughter Megan McCubbin spent five hours out with the North Dorset Hunt Sabs on a rather grey and wet day following and monitoring the notorious Blackmore and Sparkvale Hunt (BSV). They and the sabs refused…
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Crosswords, Rupert Brooke and Jeffrey Archer, AI, zoos in trouble, the Environmental Investigation on Whaling, news from the Hare Preservation Trust and Mark Kermode on ‘Melania’ the movie
Images in this post are from: Thorburn (Archibald). British Mammals. Two volumes. Longmans, Green & Co., 1920-1921. I have now finished Pretty girl in crimson rose (8), a memoir of love, exile and crosswords by Sandy Balfour and it has been a delight throughout. The last few chapters include examples of what might be called…
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Elephant rescues, fox hunting, trees, Peter Mandelson, and Kuala Lumpur house keys
Elephants Two more Thai elephant rescues to bring tears to your eyes. We first see all three elephants in chains, two of them repeatedly swaying their heads in stereotypical behaviour indicating depression and despair caused by their confinement and cruel mistreatment. That behaviour continues but dwindles during the long journeys to the wonderful Lek Chailert’s…
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Pheasant shooting – the insanity
The image above is from Gould (John). The Birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873. A lively debate in the pub last night on a subject I often try to avoid or change because I tend to get overheated to say the least. Of the four people involved two were completely against me, one didn’t say much,…
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Dogs, manuscripts and ephemera
I’ve realised I can set my watch by the Great Spotted Woodpecker. She arrives each morning between 10.20 and 10.25 and feeds for about five minutes. Mostly, the smaller birds hang back but not one brave Great Tit who joined the GSW at the feeder this morning. The photo shows her with her tail curved…
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MBR Acres acquittal, Brian May & Glastonbury, Cobalt, Orca dialects, Carden International Circus
Food elsewhere is no doubt scarce as the cold weather continues to bite, so there is as much varied bird life in the garden as there ever is. In just the last ten minutes I have seen no fewer than six Jackdaws, a pair of Greenfinches (not seen for a while), a Chaffinch, Robins, Blackbirds,…
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Birdwatch, Thylacine extinction, Penguins in prison, HS2, Pheasants and Woodcock, Ticks
Above, a little celebration of snow in the garden. The other photos in this post are from a folder on my PC which I had forgotten and were taken in 2018. I used a trailcam a lot then and seem mostly to have recorded squirrels, but I had not remembered the visits of a Jay.…
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Hercules the Bear
My only new year resolution is to get a new prescription for my glasses, long overdue. It is such an expense though (with a spare pair plus sunglasses) that I have been deferring it for over a year. The mornings of the second and third days of the year were spent unblocking a drain and…
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Annunciation
Annunziata Rees-Mogg, brother of Jacob, has made an announcement. Her name is Italian for annunciation, usually taken to refer to the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. As if that family did not already have enough of a sense of its own importance. People who want to see an end to trail…
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British Wildlife Magazine November 2025 and Labour’s animal welfare proposals
Volume 37 number 2 Cath Jeffs opens this issue asking whether European Wildcats might return to south-west England. They were declared functionally extinct in the UK in 2019 but there are ongoing efforts to restore a population in Scotland. They are a different species from Domestic Cats. They are larger, have thicker fur, a banded,…
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Empathy and gratitude; foxes, raptors, swans, cows, deer, legal matters and more
The Kennet & Avon Canal played a large role in my year and my enjoyment of the summer in particular. The photo above and two of those below were taken in the cold winter of 2010 when the canal partly froze over. Wildlife rescue in the face of wildlife persecution A World We No Longer…
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Thames Water, Open Cages, Foxhunting, Rachel Reeves, and more Wildlife
The image above and those that follow are from the beautiful setting for food and drink after a funeral we attended last week for the father of a friend, The Old Mill just outside Aldermaston. It was a powerfully moving Catholic service and although I am not religious I do rather like the High Church…
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Sarcastic Fringehead
This crazy name came up in a short multiple choice quiz set by the £1m winner of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It is, it turns out, a fish, so named for its highly aggressive, territorial behaviour. I suppose sarcasm can be a relatively gentle form of aggression but I still don’t really get…
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Bulls, foxes, auks
There is no particular reason for the bird pictures in this post other than as decoration but it was good to see the stunning Nuthatch and two Blue Tits on a feeder at the same time. The Sparrowhawk is still around – as usual I only saw her from the corner of my eye but…
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Ivy flowers, WordPress nags, a canal journalist, chuckwallahs, Wild Justice, planning, autumn leaves, penguins in prison, a butterfly healer, Hamza Yassin, Hitchens and Fry on the Catholic church, and first fungi of the year
I have often read that ivy is a superb food source for pollinators late in the year but never really witnessed it. But the ivy in the garden this year is absolutely bursting with flowers and literally abuzz with insect life. I think these are mostly hoverflies. There was a white-tailed bee too. I haven’t…
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British Wildlife Magazine August 2025
Volume 36 number 8 It seems quite brave to put a ‘humble’, unglamorous fern on the cover, but I love ferns so it works for me. Specifically it’s a Rustyback Fern, Asplenium ceterach. This issue opens with the last of the Wilding for Conservation series, 26 articles, a reflective piece by Rob Fuller and Guy…
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Phoenix Trail, a double rainbow, a Sparrowhawk in the garden and a bird murder raffle
The Phoenix Trail I parked just outside Princes Risborough and easily picked up the Phoenix Trail which runs on variably surfaced paths to Thame, about a fifteen mile round trip. It was very peaceful and runs through wooded sections and arable fields, with great views of the Chiltern Hills. It’s also a sculpture trail with…
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Do Giraffes Grieve? The Inner Life of Animals.
WILD LIONS of Tanzania HUNT GIANTS | Full Wildlife Documentary Do giraffes grieve? Yes, with not a scintilla of doubt in my mind having watched this beautiful if sometimes harrowing documentary – nature red in tooth and claw. We see lionesses hunting and killing a giraffe – almost nothing goes to waste, other predators and…
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They steal baby Gannets and eat them, don’t they?
I photographed this Gannet, collecting seaweed for the nest, off the coast of Alderney earlier this year. The headline above is shameless in two ways. It’s a steal from the novel and film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and I usually try to be less emotive, but this has got me really angry. We harvest…
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Infiltrada. Undercover. Inside the bunker.
This is Camp Beagle which I have written about before. Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part I – Animal Wild “There was somewhere I wanted to visit on my way up to King’s Lynn, Camp Beagle, on the outskirts of Huntingdon, which I wrote about here: Your Neighbour Kills Puppies; Inside the Animal Liberation Movement…
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The Birmingham Bull
The safe capture of a bull on the loose in Birmingham has received a lot of media coverage. The Express newspaper is predictably, reliably hysterical in its tabloid reporting, talking of “carnage” and the bull’s “rampaging” through either a suburb or Birmingham city centre depending on which part of the report you believe. No carnage,…
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King Charles is displeased, pheasants, licences to kill, badgers, camels, plastic, water and animal sentience.
Pheasants I don’t read Hello! magazine, but someone at Protect the Wild does and has reported with great wit on a piece which records that Charles (king) is “devastated” and “livid”. I am stealing from the PtW writer’s style, but about what could it be? The rise of the Far Right in Europe, the war…
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Garden trees, shrubs & flowers, Magpies, Taxonomy, The Urban Birder, Ruddy Ducks and Temple Elephants
Garden trees, shrubs and flowers I have spent the morning going down rabbit-holes. Not literally of course. It began with a few photographs of trees and plants in the garden. I had been in a terrible muddle about the former and remembered the lesson never to assume anything, to question everything even when you are…
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Sparrow with attitude
I do think this female House Sparrow seems to have attitude, as in “What do you think you’re looking at?” BirdWatch magazine Bird Watch magazine is here again, issue 394, April 2025. I think I am coming to an end with it. It seems increasingly to be almost all about twitching rarities. That’s not really…
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Guy Shrubsole. The Lie of the Land. Book review. Part II
The Lie of the Land. Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins, 2024. I had thought to use these evening sky pictures purely as decoration for this post, then I thought they were inappropriate since land and sky are in a sense opposites of each other. But then I had the idea or even revelation…
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British Wildlife magazine February 2025: the rest of the issue
Volume 36, Number 4 Tim Birkhead contributes “A portrait of the Great Auk”, only ever seen by just one or two scholars and ornithologists. It was driven to extinction in 1844 by dealers and museums and it is far from clear what it actually looked like. There seem to be just two images drawn from…
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Magpies in colour, Polar Bears, Komodo Dragons, Songbirds and Wood Pigeons, and Spring
Magpies I cannot quite believe I had never noticed before that Magpies are far from being black and white. It was only yesterday with the sunlight at just the right angle that I saw the marvellous iridescent blue on the wings and green and blue on the tail. The photo at the head of this…
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Falcons and falconry
This image of the Peregrine Falcon (Falco pergerinus), famously the fastest animal on the planet, is taken from John Gould’s magnificent The Birds of Great Britain, published in twenty-five parts, usually sumptuously bound in five folio volumes, between 1862 and 1873. Copies on the market today are priced between £60,000 and over £200,000. The copy…
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New Scientist magazine, pointless animal experiments, tractor protest and through the microscope at HART Wildlife Rescue
Returning briefly to Bill Bailey’s book, My Animals and Other Animals, I was shocked to see what he said about Whale Sharks (and therefore all animals, or just fish?). Is our imagining that they live lonely existences just a projection, since they do not have “the faculty of self-awareness”? That is one hell of an…
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Vulpines, vicars and vets, Bill Bailey’s latest book, raptor decoys, zonkeys and Brocken spectres
Vulpines, vicars and vets Vulpes vulpes, the Red Fox, whose clownish-looking but sadistic persecutors continue to hunt them at will (although with a little less impunity than in the past) is getting no help from certain members of the clergy and the veterinary profession. Protect the Wild quite rightly wonders why clergymen continue to bless…
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Behind closed doors
Doesn’t this crude mock-up of the Downing Street door look sinister? I have already expressed my disgust at the words of Rachel Reeves here: The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB – Animal Wild “I have no words to express my contempt for dangerous tax liar Rachel Reeves who has said that we need to learn…
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The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB. Update
Another e-mail in from the RSPCA inviting people to join the “Big Conversation” about animals. By no means a terrible idea. I signed in to leave a comment and made my feelings about the Assured labelling scheme known in the appropriate section, “Farmed animals and food”. I do not envy the RSPCA Ambassador her job.…
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The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. From ‘The Second Coming’, W.B. Yeats. I am not sure I can continue to read…
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Grouse shooting: yet another Labour betrayal, and the strange story of the released lynx
It is enough to make me weep in anger, frustration and sorrow. Wild Justice, who did campaign for licensing as the RSPB still does, have seen that that will never be enough and petition for a complete ban. As did 47,000 other people. Having promised change, the government now seems happy to trot out all…
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The return of a Chaffinch
I worry about my garden birds. I quietly apologise to them if I am late filling the feeders in the mornings. Where have the Greenfinches and Chaffinches been since the Spring? There was a rare day recently when I saw not a single Great Tit but happily they are all now back. I had just…
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Birdwatch, HART Wildlife Rescue and other wildlife notes and news
At HART yesterday morning I was once again in the Isolation Room (is someone trying to tell me something?) then washing up in utility – a process also governed by strict protocols. I have been watching Joanna Page’s series about her experiences volunteering at Wildlife Aid and finding it quite relaxing. Her reactions to various…
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Betrayal of badgers and voters by the Labour government yet again
A short and very angry post. I can scarcely find the words and had to make myself watch Rob Pownall of Protect the Wild’s video about this. Another member of our badger group has said that it made her feel physically sick. Disgusting, craven, spineless … As Rob says, politicians just can’t admit that they…
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Farmoor Reservoir
This was a recommendation from another volunteer at HART Wildlife Rescue. At HART a female Mallard has been taken in having been found impaled and immobilised by two fishing hooks (one with three prongs), the line wrapped around or somehow attached to a tree. Some anglers think nothing of abandoning their gear like this, used…
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A Kinkajou and mostly good news for wildlife
The illustration above is from Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle by Alcide d’Orbigny, first published in 1849 and which runs to sixteen volumes. D’Orbigny travelled extensively in South America and was a correspondent with Darwin. Not for the first time, messages from my friend volunteering at an animal rescue in Costa Rica have sparked my interest. He sent…
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A Christmas wildlife miscellany
The picture above was taken in in January 2010 when the Kennet & Avon canal which runs through our village was partly iced over. No decent snow this year though. Newsletter 139 from the Binfield Badger Group is an excellent issue, not just because they have partly reproduced my account of our last survey, for…
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Good news for wildlife
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…
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British Wildlife magazine October 2024, tigers, and foxes in Scotland
A necessary use of the Oxford comma in the title there – there are no tigers in Scotland as far as I know. British Wildlife, Volume 36, Number 1 I have been blessed by visits from a Great Spotted Woodpecker this year, on a daily basis for quite some time, two of them at one…
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A White-crowned Parrot and other wildlife
A close friend is in the enviable position, in spite of weeks of constant torrential rain, of volunteering at a wildlife rescue in Costa Rica. He has also passed a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course with flying colours. Enchanted by this bird’s visit, he sent me this picture. He noticed that when it…
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A Swan, a Badger, a Gyrfalcon, a Fox, and Squirrel and Songbird theatre
A first for me at HART Wildlife Rescue this week. Whilst others worked inside with the hedgehogs, I was assigned the Collared and Stock Doves and Feral Pigeons outside, which I am used to, and a Mute Swan, which I am not. The columbines flapped about a fair bit in the aviary but soon calmed…
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Wildlife crime and protest
Illustrated, for no particular reason, with photos from a recent short walk along the canal at Hungerford, showing a few common hybrid Mallards and a Moorhen. A new report from the RSPB on the illegal killing of birds of prey, protected by law under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, uses data collected over…
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World Horse Welfare
The autumn/winter 2024 newsletter is here. I visited briefly once and was impressed. They do a huge amount of good work and campaigning especially regarding live exports for slaughter, now at last illegal in Britain. And they are responsible for many, many rescues and rehomings. But I cannot put my heart into it since they…
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HARDtalk with Ingrid Newkirk
Interviewed by the always incisive Stephen Sackur on the BBC’s HARDtalk, the PETA president was magnificent. She was, as ever, calm, assured, and totally unflappable. She gave her answers politely but was never mealy-mouthed. Quietly forceful, never strident. “Animals are not like us,” she said, “they are us.” Her interviewer provocatively suggested that animals do…
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Starmer, farmers, foxes, badgers, salmon and more
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…
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Sir Brian May, badgers & farmers: thoughts after the BBC programme
As previously discussed, Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance made a complete fool of himself by trying to stop the BBC from broadcasting the programme on the grounds that it was biased, before he had even seen it. Since I hadn’t seen it either, I made no claim that it wasn’t biased, but now that…
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Wildlife rescue and protest round-up
At HART Wildlife Rescue the busy season has just peaked. Monday was a relatively easy morning with eight volunteers in (six is really the minimum needed, sometimes there are only two) and most of the ducks and geese released or about to be. There are still plenty of hedgehogs though, foxes, fledglings and nestlings and…
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Wasp stings man
Headlines from yesterday’s The Times: Wasp stings man Prickly plants could be over, sharpish Girl hurt in gull attack Trail hunt defence (letters page) I have made up only one of these. It is of course the first one. But the others seem no less ludicrous. “The days of prickly plants being a thorn in…