This week I have been heartened and saddened in equal
measure. I always feel very
sanctimonious in coining that phrase, ‘I told you so.’
Twenty years ago I embarked on a personal campaign to rid
the ‘willy nilly’ use of rat poisons in and around my area of the
countryside. I suffered ridicule and
various other knock on persecutions. True
blue countryside does not automatically lend itself to any enlightening facts
that various practises were showing devastating consequences to wildlife. For I had noticed through the eighties and
into the nineties that I was finding more and more owl pellets coated with
residues of blood which was the tell-tale sign that these owls were suffering
internal bleeding. A sure sign they were
taking prey that had been poisoned.
I arranged a meeting with my local MP, Geoffrey Clifton
Brown who listened closely to my concerns but nothing readily appeared to be
done. Certainly no new legislation to help stem these mind numbing acts. So imagine my delight last week sitting down
to catch up with the Channel 4 news team and seeing the great Jon Snow out and
about with an owl expert in the dead of night looking for Barn owls and
bringing this particular rancid subject to the attention of a lot of sitting rooms
throughout the land. And sitting there,
listening to this expert, you could see Jon Snow’s love for these birds was
tangible. He listened with the interest
and dedication of a school boy. My only
criticism was, the film was all too short.
For Jon Snow is the type of character that possesses the charisma to be
able to keep an audience totally engaged, much in the David Attenborough
mode.
The startling and frightening statistics are that 84% of
all countryside Barn owls are carry varying amounts of rat poisons within their
systems. Hardly any wonder that owls are
just nowhere near as common as they used to be.
And to add to my delight, the following night, also with Channel
4 news, Cathy Newman speaking to Tom Clarke about last year’s pilot badger cull
in parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset.
The conclusion of which by all experts was that the badger cull was
totally ineffective, and up to 18% of all culled badgers took far longer than
five minutes to die, failing miserably the test of humaneness on all
fronts.
As I sat and listened watching the short film I was left
wondering why these superb news stations had not got far more involved with
these particular news stories from the word go.
It would have created a more balanced and even handed action rather than
the cloak and dagger secrecy that the badger cull seemed to personify.
Surely in this day and age living in arguably the world’s
greatest democracy making the public aware of this type of atrocity is a duty
to empower everyone with the knowledge, statistics and facts to enable the
public to make their own judgement, to search their own souls and see the
badger cull of 2013 for the shambolic, debacle, inhumane, nonsense that it was
always going to turn out to be. And the
fact that worries and concerns me more than any other is that the United
Kingdom’s most educated individuals who run our country were handing out misinformation
on a daily basis on how these ‘magical marksmen’ could clinically finish a
badger with one clean shot all the time, every time, when the reality of the
situation was as far from those statements as anything could possibly be.
The badgers behaviour, to anyone who has studied them,
that once startled they go immediately to ground and to drop a badger in its
tracks has got to be a heart shot. To
hit a badger in darkness is relatively easy, however, to hit a badger in the
heart in darkness is always as much luck as it is judgement.
The miserable badger cull of 2013 created a situation
where badgers were shot and going to ground taking hours to die, sometimes days
and this was allowed to happen to an animal that just doesn’t do any harm.
Let’s all hope that the badger cull never returns in any
guise or any form and that anyone creating any nuisance or any act of cruelty
to all UK badger setts is dealt with in the most stringent of ways.
The hard man of the woodlands, the badger calls for total
protection from all who wish it harm.
This is a short film of badgers being busy and making ready for their new cubs.
Busy busy busy, making the cubbing bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment