Tag: Hunt sabotage and protest
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A Deer Sanctuary, Geezer Butler and the Ridglan Beagles, the Badger Cull, Fire Kites
I posted this in December last year: Finally news from my favourite animal rescue, Hillside Animal Sanctuary in Norfolk (passim). Ten acres of unprotected woodland were up for sale by auction nearby and could have been purchased by developers. Hillside drew deeply on their reserve funds and stepped in. The land will be fenced to…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Birdwatch, BBOWT, BTO and RSPB magazines, Camp Beagle and a little bit of wonderful news
Beginning with the good news, two Dorset hunts, following convictions for illegal activities, have been asked not to to attend an agricultural show. I have only ever been to one and absolutely hated it. This might seem a small victory but it seems significant to me. They parade their appallingly abused hounds at these events,…
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Protect the Wild
This post is just a brief message of congratulations to this wonderful organisation which has now existed for a decade. Founder Rob Pownall has written a book giving a short history: Protect the Wild, a Decade Fighting for Wildlife, available from the website and benefitting the charity. I have supported them since their early tentative…
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Wild Boar – Groundbreakers
Lyons (Chantal). Groundbreakers, the Return of Britain’s Wild Boar. Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2024. Book review. Truly wild boar were hunted to extinction in the UK in the thirteenth century, but now, through a long history of releases and escapes, they’re back. And Chantal Lyons really loves them. A lot of delightful new words for me in…
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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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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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Bird Table – the BTO magazine for Garden Birdwatchers, BTO News & more
I picked up a year’s worth (2024) of the British Trust for Ornithology’s quarterly, generously illustrated magazine at the recent BTO conference in Manchester. As I said in my report on the conference, they will presumably be changing the name in short order since we are all now being discouraged from using bird tables at…
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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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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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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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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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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 few more fungi, local poaching, Thames Water and the budget
We are fortunate to have another natural archway very close by. This leads to Barton Court, formerly the home of Sir Terence Conran, now of Pippa Middleton and her family. It was a favourite walk or cycle with the children and we knew it as the conker way (as opposed to the donkey way, or…
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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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The legacy of colonialism (and feudal entitlement)
Three articles in last week’s Sunday Times I found very thought-provoking. The first is about the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. I visited some years ago and it is certainly a gruesomely intriguing display of the results of colonial theft. The shrunken heads are no longer exhibited however. I feel for the director, Dr Laura van…
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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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Sir Brian May, badgers, farmers and the Countryside Alliance
Sir Brian’s long-awaited programme about the badger cull will be available on the BBC on Friday. For our badger group, campaigners and anyone else who has bothered actually to ensure they are informed before voicing their opinions, I doubt it will contain anything we don’t already know but I think it will be a huge…
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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…
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Protect the Wild and the Hunt Saboteurs
Monday was a big day for both. Protect the Wild launched bloodbusiness.info – “A searchable database to help us all make informed choices about our spending” which I have been excited about for a while. It is in its infancy but will grow I am sure and I hope they will include a suggestion of…
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HOWL, the Magazine of the Hunt Saboteurs Association
Summer 2024 In a nice nod to the film Apocalypse Now, the Chair’s introduction begins, “I love the smell of citronella in the morning; it smells like victory.” Chris Packham is pictured in conversation with a sab on the front cover and the editor refers to him as “the real leader of the opposition, the…
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For fox sake
I have become really tired of writing about fox hunting. I see so many awful reports of extreme cruelty every week but I cannot keep saying the same thing over and over again. Not only has nothing changed, it seems things are getting worse. I quote directly from Protect the Wild who have reported “the…
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The RSPCA and a king
The tireless Protect the Wild has deplored the appointment (perhaps I should say anointment, the royals seem to like a bit of anointing) of a king, Charles Windsor (i.e. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) as its new patron, describing him as an animal abuser. It is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, so I can…
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Pubs, foxes, Jamaica and James Bond, Haile Selassie and C.L.R. James
There’s reason to celebrate – the Fox Inn in Stourton has cancelled a Woodland Hunt’s end of season supper. The owners wouldn’t comment but it is not the first pub to disassociate itself from such organised crime groups. The Anchor in Exebridge no longer hosts the Quantock Staghounds, the Raven Inn in Powys decided not…
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Badgers, hedgehogs and developers
Returning to the discussion as to whether badger predation is the major cause of hedgehog decline as suggested by a friend of one of the HART volunteers, see earlier post, this seems to be a case of someone deciding what was true before even being in possession of the facts, let alone giving them due…
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“All wild animals have to be culled”
This is from a man who seems to be right up there with a couple of the villains in Animal Wild, Lord Seacroft and Lord Sudeley. Feudalism not only lives, it never went away. Reginald Plunkett, 1880-1967, was an Anglo-Irish naval admiral and the younger son of the 17th Baron of Dunsany. His brother Edward…
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Garden birds and others, March 2024
Just a couple so far this month, one of the Dunnocks again and a not brilliant but not too shabby picture of a Jackdaw – they are usually are far too smart to allow themselves to be photographed easily. This one was at least eighty feet away, so not bad without a tripod. RSPB Digital…
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Animal Queens
A spectacular new wildlife series on Disney Plus, Queens is narrated by Angela Bassett. The angle is matriarchs. “There’s a reason she’s called Mother Nature.” There is no flinching from showing nature at its harshest, its reddest in tooth and claw – and frankly shocking family betrayals. The first episode is set in the Ngorongoro…
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Dark Skies
March 2024 See Animal Wild for an account of the wonderful Dark Skies area around Elan Valley in Wales, but I am pleased to see the beginnings of a gentle local campaign which has featured in our parish newsletter, beautifully illustrated by local artist David Thomas. I am hoping to ask him for permission to…
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Protest news in brief March 2024
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…
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Fox hunting – a secret deal with the police
This made Channel 4 news on March 4th 2024. It is actually fairly old news (but all credit to C4 for running it) and is extensively covered in Animal Wild, but this is the story of the Warwickshire Hunt who appealed against a Community Protection Notice, a court order, issued in an attempt to mitigate…
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Animal factories
March 2024 Pig factory I have forced myself to watch a fair number of programmes about the horrors of factory farming. This one was Hogwood, on Netflix and elsewhere, the name of a pig ‘farm’ in Warwickshire. Multiple fearless investigations were undertaken by the vegan charity Viva! exposing, as they described it, a vision of…
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Books Old & New: The Elephant Whisperer
I am occasionally asked (or just tell people if I’m not) which is my favourite book about wildlife. It is hands down, without any shadow of a doubt The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony. I wrote this about it in Animal Trust: “Shortly after Lawrence Anthony’s sudden death from a heart attack, two separate groups…
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Screwed by the government again
HMRC and in particular their VAT division are notorious for the invasive powers they have and because of understaffing, appalling customer service – and we are, after all, customers, and we pay their wages as they should never forget. But it turns out they have found a new way to screw money out of us.…
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BirdGuides newsletter round-up March 2024
I have chosen one issue more or less randomly – there is so much information to try to take in. Raptor on raptor – a Goshawk is recorded, for the first time, predating Gyr Falcon chicks in Norway. Wonderful plans / hopes for a nature reserve in Rutland, including the reintroduction of brown bears, lynxes…
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Hunt Saboteurs Association. Howl!
Another spring newsletter, from the HSA, Howl. The content just keeps on getting better and better. There are reports on hare hunts, badger cull sabotage and stag hunts, the demise of the Oakley Hunt, a review of what sounds like a terrible pro-hunting book, the usual pages and pages of news from the many individual…
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The most dangerous phrase in the language?
I stayed overnight at Moor Hall in Cookham, where I used to live, home of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and conference centre. A strange venue for me but it suited the purposes of a friend and me who were attending the slightly odd occasion of a combined birthday party and wake. After breakfast I…
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Otters and ducks
In an earlier post I wrote that “there seem to be have been very few ducks for some time on the Kennet & Avon Canal which runs through our village. An impromptu conversation with a barge resident in the village shop told me something I didn’t know – otters eat ducks, and perhaps they are…
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Books Old & New: Dr Dolittle
These are two extracts from Animal Trust. “Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle books were important. I have a lovely set of first English editions in delightful, colourful dust-wrappers. It was only on re-reading them decades later that I realised what a profound impact they had had. It wasn’t the good doctor’s ability to talk to animals…
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Elephant attack, the Cheltenham Festival and cyanide bombs
March 2024 Elephant attack At Amer Fort near Jaipur in India, a tourist is attacked by one of the elephants used to ferry visitors up and down. Chained, beaten and abused, it is hardly surprising that they can become aggressive. The tourist’s injuries were quite serious, but this particular elephant had attacked before. One can…