DEAR OH DEAR

You can't say that I didn't try. Yesterday I wrote:

"We have 25-30 of these hairs, and will make them available to anyone who has the resources and expertise to test them, including - if they wish to participate - the Big Cats in Britain research group, who have made no secret of their animosity towards us".

Mark Fraser of Big Cats in Britain has totally twisted what I said and wrote:

"Why we want to get involved in your research is beyond me, you need to pay for this yourself not get others to pay for it" and later "I will ask you again, why would we want to test hairs that the CFZ found? Get them tested yourselves, but for any credibility get them tested from a source completely independent of the CFZ".

That, my dear fellow, is exactly what we have already said that we are doing.

I did BCIB the courtesy of treating them like a bona fide research group who might be interested in trying to verify our claims, but they seem to have interpreted this as me trying to get them to pay for our research. They even perceived my headline as an attack on them.

Within minutes of me replying to their blog posting, (coincidence, or what?) our old friend Highland Tiger weighed in with another bit of bile, writing:

"Yet here we are, the CFZ boasting they've found evidence, at great pains to ensure that everyone knows that it was CFZ members who found these hairs. Does it really matter who found these hairs. What matters is not the CFZ asking other organisations to do dna sampling for them, but for them to get independent laboratories, (ones without CFZ allegencies),organised and the testing done post haste."

Again, this is exactly what we are trying to do. Like the "revelations" elsewhere in his posting that the WW had less people this year (there is a recession on) and that some speakers pulled out at the last minute (there has been a serious illness, a bereavement and a couple who missed their flight because of the Coventry railway vandalism incident) he - like Mark Fraser - seems to be telling us to do exactly what we are going to do; get independent verification of Lars Thomas's findings.

He also writes: "Yet here we are, the CFZ boasting they've found evidence, at great pains to ensure that everyone knows that it was CFZ members who found these hairs. Does it really matter who found these hairs."

Well, yes actually. For months he and his idiot cronies have been accusing us of stealing other people's work and claiming it as our own. You can't have it both ways guys. Either we are responsible for something or we are not. And as far as asking other independent organisations to verify our findings with independent tests, this is standard scientific practise, and for the record one major university has already asked for samples.

It appears that HT and to a lesser extent MF will always do their best to misinterpret anything that I or a select band of other folk write. And I thought that I was the one with a cognitive disorder.