UPDATED: Second Danish zoo giraffe in a week may be euthanised

This story that we first posted yesterday has been updated. Whilst we abhor the euthanising of animals for any non-medical reason, we also dislike poor journalism being twisted for political ends.

  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/giraffe-euthanised.html#cr

Giraffes in European zoos do not have the diverse genes of their wild relations

February 2014: The Born Free Foundation has expressed dismay at reports that, following on from the killing on February 9 of a healthy 18-month-old giraffe in Copenhagen Zoo, another male giraffe in Jyllands Park Zoo in Denmark is on ‘death row’.  Both giraffes were considered to be unsuitable for breeding because their genes are what is said to be ‘over-represented’ in European zoos.

According to the Foundation, slaughtering healthy zoo animals for convenience is irresponsible and indefensible and it is calling on the European Zoo community to take responsibility for ensuring that no animal is unnecessarily killed. It is also urging European politicians to address euthanasia in zoos, which are legally required to protect the animals in their care. According to the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, zoos kill healthy animals to make way for more desired animals in their collections.

The Copenhagen Zoo authorities said that captive animals are being bred from too narrow a gene pool, leading to bone and joint weakness, susceptibility to disease and mental problems. Daniel Turner, captivity spokesperson for Born Free said, “The Zoo Community shamelessly ask the public to accept their alleged conservation and animal protection agenda, yet they continue to breed animals irresponsibly and now seem to kill them without exhausting all placement options.  Unfortunately, the killing of giraffe in zoos in Denmark is only the tip of the iceberg, as zoos in the UK and elsewhere also use euthanasia to manage their animal collections.”

POSTSCRIPT

Lars Thomas points out that this story is very misleading: "Before anybody gets too excited - this giraffe is NOT going to be put down. It was an answer to a hypotetical question that a reporter ran with, without actually stopping to think for a second. What the zoo actually said was, that IF they were to receive a female giraffe (they only have males at the moment), then they would have had to put one of their males down, if they couldn't find anywhere to put it."

MEET THE NEW BOSS, THE SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

It appears from the news stories that, despite hopes to the contrary US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has announced that he will not rescind a “special rule” created by the Bush administration that sharply limits protections for the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.

"For Salazar to adopt Bush's polar bear extinction plan is confirming the worst fears of his tenure as Secretary of the Interior," said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Secretary Salazar would apparently prefer to please Sarah Palin than to protect polar bears."

Unless I am being really dense this is a cynical act by someone who has only one motive: to protect the status quo, and to preserve the capitalist hegemony at all costs.

I have been accused over the past few months of overly attacking American Republican Politicians. I hope that this post clatifies that. It is not Republican politicians that I despise, but all politicians who put financial considerations ahead of moral ones.

And people wonder why I am an anarchist!

GUEST BLOGGER GEORGINA EDWARDS: Fox = bad, badger = good?

It is always a pleasure to welcome a new guest blogger, but this is a special pleasure, because it is the first time that we have had two generations of guest bloggers in the same family. Georgina, who was pivotally involved in the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau during the glory years, is also the mother of bloggo regular Fleur Fulcher.....

Foxes are classified as vermin, they can be legally shot. They steal and eat poultry on a comparatively small scale and occasionally take a weak new born lamb. The cost of their actions to the national economy is negligible.They keep down the rabbit, rat and mouse population and by and large do not seem to upset the natural order.

Badgers are protected, they cannot be interfered with in any way without a permit. They transmit bovine tb. The estimated cost of bovine tb to the economy in the year 2003/04 was £89 million, in compensation to farmers, research etc. Not all of this cost can be laid at the door of the national badger set, but a great deal can . The last official badger population survey was in 1997, when it was estimated that badgers had increased by 77% in the previous decade. Current evidence suggests that this increase has continued. There doesn't seem to be an agreed position as to why this should be, although a farmer friend of mine thinks it is partly due to the increased planting of maize. These tall crops allow badgers to travel along new corridors and also give them an additional food supply well into the autumn.

I live in Mid-Devon, I have a large garden and live across the road from farm and woodland. I could take you out almost any night of the year apart from deepest winter and find you a badger, most nights they go through my garden. Several times a year I have to ring the council to get them to take away a dead badger from the road outside.

I suspect that a great many supposed fox predations of poultry are actually down to badgers, although Mr. Reynard is of course the main offender Until I moved here I had no idea that badgers took as many if not more chickens in some areas, than foxes. Unlike foxes, badgers will tear their way into timber chicken houses and if cornered they can be very unpleasant. My nextdoor neighbour, who incidentally happens to be a local Lib-Dem councillor cornered one in his dressing gown at 3am, (the badger of course being in the garden not in the dressing gown).

Now I come to my real gripe. I have lived in Surrey, Hampshire, Somerset, and Dorset . In all these places I have been visited in my garden by my favourite animal the hedgehog and also sadly seen many of them dead on the road. I moved to Mid- Devon nineteen years ago, during that period I have never seen a live hedgehog. I have see a couple dead on the road and saddest of all found one that had been predated by a badger in my garden .

Having done a bit of research before writing this to ensure that I had my facts correct, I am horrified to learn that badgers are not only wiping out the hedgehogs, but are endangering bumblebees and ground nesting birds.

Now I would hate to live in this country without badgers, but would someone explain to me why badgers are protected and foxes considered vermin.

FLEUR FULCHER: Who loves the Beetles

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....

Whilst I was a bit disgusted by articles (both recent and from a few years back) about Japanese boys making male Stag Beetles fight each other, I wasn’t very surprised. Little boys of all cultures will enjoy fighting and many also enjoy making other creatures fight each other. This doesn’t mean that they will turn into serial killers or even that they perceive it as cruelty. My brother and I (when aged maybe 4 and 5) used to pull centipedes apart and feed ants to fish and so on, but we both love and respect nature now. children are, after all, far closer to being animals than we would like to think.. (and that isn’t a slight on children!)

But some types of stag beetle are getting rarer and the thought that instead of getting a chance to mate they are being made to fight each other in Japanese school cafeterias is a bit of a downer.

However there is a slight positive to this story, apparently many of the boys (and girls?) who own the fighters rear them themselves and enjoy studying them as well as the more brutal side to it. Many of them will doubtless stop the fighting and through their pets come to love the natural world and the fascinating side to many invertibrates.

Leaving Japan alone for now, what about the Stag beetles of the UK? The one that we here refer to as the stag beetle is in fact only one of about 1200 species in the family Lucanidae. Our largest beetle the Lucanus cervus is a charming and intriguing creature, even when I was a squeamish teenager I loved these particular bugs. Living in Epsom there were many of them, you’d find them pootling down the paths in the park, lurking on your (somewhat rotten) doorstep and particularly on Epsom Downs where they have an excellent stag beetle conservation scheme.
But if you happen to live anywhere in their habitat there are things you can do to help these personable little chaps.

On this website you can learn how to make a home for stag beetle larvae - http://ptes.org/index.php?page=211

And if you are lucky enough to own or look after any woodland then you can do your bit by ensuring that some fallen trees remain on the ground to rot and provide the ideal habitat, also compost heaps, wood sheds and wood piles are favourites.

If you know that you do have stag beetles in your garden then you can also help them by keeping your cat indoors during breeding season as cats, magpies and badgers are the main predators of the beetle.

So in conclusion, we all like Stag Beetles, even those Japanese schoolchildren who hopefully will learn from their small charges that it is better to watch them in the wild than to make them fight.

TIM MATTHEWS: Environmental Concerns

Tim Matthews is one of my best friends, and also - coincidentally - one of the most controversial figures in contemporary forteana. He has been involved with the CFZ for nearly a decade now, raising eyebrows wherever he goes.

Everybody's bothered about the environment, right? You sit there in a massive queue of holiday traffic bemoaning car drivers and how there are too many of them (wrong type of drivers in the wrong type of cars) and then you visit some rare, ancient or historical site and further damage it for years to come. We want clean water but shove tonnes of pollutants down our sinks not to mention using a host of cleaning products that certainly damage our planet over a period of years.

Harsh? I should say so and we're all guilty of it.

Sometimes, to ease our consciences, we join one of the "make you feel better about it" organisations like Greenpeace or the WWF. And, sometimes, these organsations actually do some good. For example, as I write, pressure from the WWF and allied conservation groups has managed to get Russian oil and gas engineers to stop seismic testing underwater as it affects the gray whale, a critically endangered species.

The Sakhalin Energy company, backed by Shell and Gazprom, has agreed to stop working for a brief time, to give the remaining 35 females a chance to breed, in an area just off the Sakhalin shelf by Piltun bay. Mind you, BP and Exxon still want their workers to operate in the area and they have not agreed any deal with environmentalists yet.

Recently, I was in a bookshop with a friend of mine and she said, "I love looking in old natural history books but the shame of it is when you look at the listing they're often full of animals that are extinct or serious danger."

We often sit idly by, wondering what we can do. Surely we can do more than send twenty quid to some campaigning group? Wouldn't we prefer to do something by ourselves? Imagine all the energy and effort required to make a small impact on big business. The first thing surely must be to get our children and immediate families a little more interested in natural history. What is happening in their own gardens, what can be done to encourage insects and other animals into them, what easy steps can be taken to limit their own impact on the world around them. Some of it is easy and can be done today in the house you live and some of it is down to politicians and big companies in whom we can only have marginal trust.

It is up to you to decide what to do but the best ever slogan, and call to action, must surely be, think globally, act locally. How the CFZ fits into this remains to be seen but I suspect that we all know what we should do.

THESE PEOPLE ARE SCUM, BUT IT IS PROBABLY CONSIDERED RACIST TO SAY SO

http://www.japanesebugfights.com/

Just when I think that I cannot despise the human race any more, something turns up to make me change my mind. OK I know that Richard said that on another topic the other day, but one has to agree with him. The messageboard on the site includes messages like "Hahahahaha no law in killing insects so screw you PETA!", and to my horror there is now an American version of the site. If anyone starts a British version, be warned, I will personally have you dealt with! However, this is not the main crux of why I am writing this.

The most telling point about the whole disgusting affair is not that adolescent boys like to watch things killing each other and animals in pain. That is a done deal. It is one of the more unpleasant facets of our particularly unpleasant species that along with chimpanzees and possibly domestic cats, we are the only species that kills for fun. No, it is the jeering anti-PETA remark that is the most telling thing.

As we reported a few weeks ago, PETA are complete nutcases, but I think that this shows that their insane view of animal rights is actually providing a negative stereotype for people. The very kids that PETA are aiming their programmes at are not only rejecting the increasingly facile message, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When the main crux of the high profile animal rights campaigns are facile and idiotic, it is no wonder that animal abuse flourishes,

POOR LITTLE SODS

The saga of the CFZ ramerizi trundles on. As I write there are three left, and although they still look OK, I would not be at all surprised to find one or more dead in the bottom of the tank tomorrow morning when I come down to the office. We have been doing our research (which we should have done earlier), and it seems that we managed to screw up the pH which on this occasion was pretty much our fault.

However, the entire species in aquaculture seems to be pretty much sinned against, which is something that I never realised. Mary Bailey (the doyenne of the British Cichlid scene) wrote to me yesterday explaining the unpleasant facts of ramerizi life:

"Most Rams are mass produced with no quality control, shipped to the UK in little plastic envelopes with virtually no water, and then decanted into asuccession of different water types in the importer-wholesaler-retailerchain. By the time the aquarist buys them they are ready to pop their poorlittle clogs, and it's a miracle they last that long. A lot don't. I can't keep these mass-produced rams alive myself. They're usually all males anyway, as they keep the females for broodstock, or ship different sexes to different countries to prevent aquarists breeding them and spoiling the market".

I don't know about you guys, but I think that this is absolutely bloody shameful. As I get older I get more to the way of thinking that although they have the answers wrong the animal rights brigade really do have a point.

If we want to be able to continue to have exotic pets and zoos, then we - as a community - are damn well going to have to start policing ourselves, and moreover, we are going to have to start doing it properly before it is too late.

NUDE ACTRESSES, ANIMAL RIGHTS, AND THE PET SHOP BOYS

I am trying to adapt the old adage about the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, as quoted by Tom Waits on Singapore. But I am finding it increaingly difficult. How does: "In the land of the mad, the bipolar bloke who only hallucinates some of the time, seems relatively sane"? No, it doesn't grab you by the short and curlies does it?

I have never made any secret of the fact that I have mental health problems. Like a large proportion of the human race, especially in the increasingly complicated and stressful society of the Western World, my faculties ain't what they should be. No, let's stop pussyfooting around. Some of the time I am as mad as a bagful of cheese, and I am sure that my leadership of the CFZ has reflected that sad fact on occasions through the years.

However, at least as far as our activities with animal welfare are concerned, we behaving reasonably normally. Reasonably normally, that is, compared to PETA.

What the hell is happening to animnal welfare organisations? As shown in these pages, the RSPCA has mutated from a benign organisation that gave out information leaflets about tortoises with shell rot, and helped old ladies who could not afford to spay their pussy. But PETA, these days at least, are just barnpots.

They were formed in 1980, and combated the fur trade, vivisection and cruel sports by litigation and high profile demonstrations, which often involved a pretty female celebrity taking her clothes off. Woo Hoo!!! There should be more public nudity in animal rights. But recently, like so many other organisations, they have started to become victims of their own dogma and have started making such ridiculous public statements that it is hard to take them seriously.

In october last year they started a campaign to rename all members of the petromyzontidae, chondrichthyes, or the superclass osteichthyes as "sea-kittens" rather than "fish". Hmmmmmm.
"If everyone started calling fish 'sea kittens,' they'd be a lot less likely to violently kill them for food, painfully hook them for 'sport,' or cruelly confine them to aquariums," a spokeswoman said.

Christ on a Bike!!!

(By the way, at the point may I digress? The last time my brother heard me come out with that expression, he solemnly pointed out that there was no tradition of two wheeled transport in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago. He should know; being a vicar he is an expert. However, if there is any archaeological evidence to the contrary please let me know).

But back to PETA. Their latest idiocy is even more of an own-goal. It has been 25 years since a synthesiser pop duo consiting of a dour northerner who had once edited the Captain Britain comics, and a bloke wearing shades who always stood still, first hit the public consciousness. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Pet Shop Boys hit the British consciousness. Since it has been proved that the band are NOT named after an unpleasant activity involving gerbils and vaseline, what have they got to do with animal rights? Neil Tennant is after all a national treasure.

Well not to PETA. BBC news this morning reads:

Pop group Pet Shop Boys have revealed they have turned down a request by animal rights group Peta to rename themselves the Rescue Shelter Boys. "Peta Europe has written to Pet Shop Boys with a request they are unable to agree to," reads a post on the band's official website. But the band admits the request "raises an issue worth thinking about".

Peta's letter requests the name change due to the cruelty which they allege takes place in the pet trade. If the band were to agree to the name change, it continues, it would "encourage your millions of fans to consider giving a home to an abandoned or unwanted animal from an animal shelter".

PETA have done one of two things here. They are either bonkers, or they have been very subtle, and by making a deliberately stupid request, got publicity from all sorts of people (like me, for example) who would not normally have covered their campaign.

Now that is clever.

PS The Pet Shop Boys 10th studio album Yes has just been released, and it certainly has its moments

SYD HENLEY vs THE RSPCA

Why does this seemingly NEW !!! attitude by the RSPCA come as no real surprise to me. Their general approach to wild life stinks and has done for a long time. Pretty much the same as their approach to domesticated critters - 'lets put it down rather than let it go to a good home'.

Well over ten years ago we found an injured swallow in the road outside my home, It had hit a phone cable and damaged its leg and torn its breast. The RSPCA told my mother they could not do anything and we should put it out of its misery. We then found a local animal charity AARU - (Animal Accident Rescue Unit) who got it collected within half an hour and treated by a bird expert. When it was recovered fully they contacted us to see if we would like to release it which we did with pleasure.

Around six years ago at 3 am one morning I found a very badly injured fox, (it had been hit by a vehicle and suffered a serious back injury & had no use of its back legs). I took time out from my job as a taxi driver to catch it and make it as comfortable as possible in my car then rang the RSPCA. They flatly refused to come out or do anything about it saying "We don't deal with foxes and other pests". Their only advice was to leave it where it was to die.

Naturally this made me rather angry and after pointing out exactly what I thought of her and the RSPCA, I then got the number for the AARU and within ten minutes, arrangements had been made for me to take the animal direct to a local vet (who happened to be my own vet). I was advised a couple of days later that following an x-ray the fox had been put down as its spine was broken.

I have no doubt that many of the RSPCAs workers are genuine, dedicated animal lovers, but the folks at the top who make decisions, only consider their inflated salaries and do not give a damn about animal welfare.

Some if not all of the CFZ animal lovers may be interested in the links on THIS SITE

RSPCA: TIME TO GET MILITANT?

This following item has been posted across the internet. I do not know whether it is true or not, but if it is true it is disgusting:


"I have received some very alarming news regarding the RSPCA’s decision NOT to treat any wildlife, Hedgehogs included

The RSPCA's new policy ( because of lack of funds due to the credit crunch) is to euthanise ( KILL!!!) all wildlife taken to them or picked up by them

They will not pay for any wildlife to be taken to a vet or wildlife rescue centre and inspectors & ACO ( Animal Collection Officers) have been told to kill all wildlife they get instead. The Inspector or ACO has to get specific permission from the duty Chief Inspector for the region/group BEFORE considering any treatment or rescue/rehabilitation of any wildlife. This is all to do with saving money. The Chief Inspectors are instructing euthanasia for almost everything.

I am really worried that RSPCA staff are being told to kill sick, injured, orphaned hedgehogs and all other wildlife. If they become ill, no matter how minor or easily treatable the illness or injury is, they will be automatically killed regardless, without even being fully or properly assessed. Even if just cold, hungry and underweight. What about those just waking up from hibernation? They are all just thin and weak, nothing else wrong with them.

The big worry that I have, is that a member of public rings the RSPCA control centre. The call centre staff don't know that a different policy is now in place. They take the call, pass it to an ACO or inspector. The inspector or ACO report back to the Control Centre saying the call has been dealt with. The public won't know that "dealt with" means euthanised, instead of taking the animal to a vet or wildlife hospital for care and attention.

I can understand that the RSPCA has financial problems. It is totally unacceptable to use Euthanasia because of a decrease in their funds.

We must all protest about this decision by the RSPCA.

It is now even more important to tell as many people as you can to feed and look after hedgehogs in their garden. We need to keep them healthy. Once they become ill, that is the end of it. They will not be treated or saved any more.

Please spread the word, ask all your friends and family to support their local wildlife hospital and local carers.

Please do NOT ring RSPCA for wildlife. Contact your local carer or wildlife centre"

We have since received the following comment from a RSPCA volunteer:

"No of course its not true. Where do they get these stories. For a start members of the BVA and some other vets do not charge to see wildlife during working hours and we have 3/4 HQ run wildlife units who take wildlife along with many branch homes and volunteers and fosterers. Go put them straight for me please if you get the chance"

Now, we cannot leave a rumour like this. In recent years the RSPCA have done a lot of things which do not overly impress me, and their attitude towards captive exotic animals does, in our opinion, leave a lot to be desired. But I cannot bring myself to believe that the above statement can possibly be true.

I would like as many readers of this blog as possible to telephone 0300 1230721 and ask for the Wildlife Centre Administrator, or telephone the advice line: 0300 1234 555. Politely ask them for a comment on the above allegations. Then tell us what happened.

If it is true then the result of enough people telephoning them on the same day to ask about this policy, will give them a `shot across the bows` that such a policy is unacceptable from an animal welfare organisation, in which the British people have put their trust. If not true, then it will alert the RSPCA to the fact that their current PR is not working, and that in the public eye they have changed from a relatively benign organisation, into a rather sinsister Kafkaesque one that - on the whole - people no longer trust.

TIM MATTHEWS: Animal Rights and Wrongs

Tim Matthews is one of my best friends, and also - coincidentally - one of the most controversial figures in contemporary forteana. He has been involved with the CFZ for nearly a decade now, raising eyebrows wherever he goes. This article on the Animal Rights Movement looks likely to be one of his most controversial postings yet.

I was talking to an animal rights activist at an event in Manchester many years ago. It was supposed to be a protest against some supposed “Animal Auschwitz” as the organisers termed it but it ended up in a riot as the local police got stuck in to the front of the march after the militant types at the front tried to deviate from the planned route. As people were running in all directions it occurred to me that this was not getting anybody anywhere and the debate about so-called “animal rights” had turned into someone’s war against the establishment, the Police and society in general.

“We want a world where animals are able to roam free, where they have total liberty,” said the man in question, his snarling face and overall demenour suggesting that his claimed love for animals had been overtaken by a hatred for humankind. “Animal abusers” came in all shapes and sizes from, at the extreme end of the movement, “evil people” keeping pets, “scum” who ran zoos “for profit at the expense of animals” through to “animal abusers and modern day Nazi scientists” who did “Frankenstein type experiments on helpless animals so that rich women can look nice in their make up”. This sort of language was not, and is not, uncommon within the animal rights movement.

So why am I even writing about all this? Well, for several reasons the first of which is our love for animals. We understand their, and our, part in the overall scheme of things and we seek to balance the needs of people with animals with nature. As amateur naturalists we seek to protect and preserve not only rare species, but endangered species and also those whose habitat is threatened by climate change, the “need” to build new housing estates on green and brownfield sites and by the short-sightedness of industry and business that seeks profit at any cost.

There is clearly a balance to be worked out, between caring for animals and giving them respect within the natural order of things but not being blind to the fact that, since humans were primitive hunter gatherers, we have used and needed animals for food, for clothing and for survival. It is as natural for people to hunt animals as it is for them to care for and protect them. Yes, it is a conundrum and we certainly deal in shades of grey when it comes to our fractious relationship with the animal kingdom.

The problem with animal rights is that, one might argue, they have no rights at all. You might come to this conclusion based on your theory of their place in the world but you can get in serious trouble is you keep pets and fail to look after them properly. Many animals do, therefore, have legal protection and calls for their protection from abuse, ill treatment and also as experimental subjects date back until the mid 1800s at least. Indeed, the British Union Against Vivisection is at least 100 years old and has been at the forefront of campaigns against animals being used in experiments.

Back in the late 1970s my friends and I were walking around town one Saturday afternoon and came across an unusual stall featuring some awful pictures of animals in cages with their hair shaved off and all manner of similarly horrible graphic media. We’d never seen anything like it; an animal rights stall in the centre of a small, middle class, English market town! Radical stuff for sure but many of us signed the nice ladies petition against the evildoers back at the lab who were, they said, using animals to test make up, cigarettes and other products. A few weeks later, I remember receiving a letter from the company against whom we had made our collective complaint. Obviously they had taken the protest to heart, put the names and addresses of their petitioners on a database and sent them personalised letters. Obviously, even then, companies were very aware of the negative publicity directed towards them by the animal rights movement, then in its infancy.

It all seemed to obvious. Scientists were out of control, government regulation was failing and inadequate and, to cap it all we learned, posh people in traditional outfits were riding about the nearby countryside hunting down poor innocent foxes. You see, it was black and white. “We”, whomever we were, we right and they were wrong.

Things were not that simple and for many years, whilst occasionally reading an article about some action undertaken by animal rights militants, a protest against fox hunting or some news about the latest outrage involving animal experimentation, I took little interest and no part in any of it. It just wasn’t me and I’d rather have a fight at the football on a Saturday afternoon in any case!! That was my way of rebelling. Other young people were into the Punk/Crass and Animal Rights movement. They had their subculture and we had ours. Theirs was political, ours was subcultural!

Meanwhile, the militants got more militant and, throughout the 1980s, very few people within the scientific community were prepared, or able, to defend their work in terms of animal experiments. The arguments in favour of animal experiments and animal testing were lost, largely because most people believed that these experiments were to do with make-up and cigarettes, not with curing illness and similar research…

It got the stage where anyone involved in such research, no matter how marginally, could not be entirely sure of their personal safety, as a young generation of rebels (using animal rights as their platform to kick back against society in general encouraged by Anarcho-Punk propagandists and animal rights fanatics) became DIY terrorists and started to burn laboratories down, “rescue” animals and invade farms in “daylight inspection raids” where up to 200 militants would arrive at a premises break in, damage as much as they could and release animals in some cases into the wild!

This last type of action tended to suggest little knowledge of, and less care for, animals. Most of those animals released and, in their mind, “rescued from evil”, died in captivity as they simply couldn’t cope in the wild. Others, rescued and transported to networks of supporters ready to take in animals used in labs, would struggle with the moral burden of taking more and more animals and yet not being able to cope with them for reasons of time, space and cost.

One obvious example of the stupidity shown by members of the Animal Liberation Front was a raid on a mink farm in the 1990s where many mink wer set free, only to die a horrible death in the wild. (You might I suppose believe that this was better than ending up as an item of clothing, but that’s the whole point of introducing this subject.)

So, the ideology went, it was OK to “save” animals at the expense of humans and the DIY terrorists would happily cause millions of pounds of damage through improvised incendiary devices and small-scale bombs. The fact that, in nearly every case, people weren’t killed was more the result of luck than design and the intent to maim was clear despite propaganda to the contrary.

And what if the experiments will save your relative or friend? I suggest that this is perfectly moral. After all, the argument goes, animals are really here to serve us rather than the other way around…Many of us have personal experience of this debate. It’s therefore real, not theoretical. There is clear evidence that some animal testing has resulted in medicines that can help people cope and/or recover from serious and long term illness and disease:

A Royal Society report stated in 2006 that: “We have all benefited immensely from scientific research involving animals. From antibiotics and insulin to blood transfusions and treatments for cancer or HIV, virtually every medical achievement in the past century has depended directly or indirectly on research on animals.” (1)

I was surprised to discover, through a little research, that a number of high profile diseases had been cured or combated through animal testing and these include Penicillin, TB, Meningitis, Asthma Inhalers (that my daughter Freya uses), the Polio vaccine, Insulin for diabetes and many more.

The debate has now shifted; a group called Pro Test, created to speak out in favour of the Oxford Biomedical Facility, a new animal research unit, campaigned for the lab, for animal testing and, in its words, “the irrational arguments of anti Vivisectionists“. The bullying tactics of the animal rights extremists, carried on from experiences gained at high-profile protests against the Huntingdon Life Sciences Laboratory (and which had met with only mixed and occasionally effective Police/State action until a number of major enquiries and arrests several years ago) were seen to fail as thousands of highly intelligent students met the animal rights mafia head on - on the streets and in debate. The momentum has now shifted and a number of high profile scientists have put their weight behind Pro Test campaigning and these include Professor Robert Winston and The Royal College of Physicians.

I am tempted to suggest that the Countryside Alliance, that did so much to campaign against the current government’s outlawing of hunting with dogs, is but one part of a wider concern for the countryside, for tradition and for ecological balance. This is our constituency, just as those concerned about animal welfare should find a natural home with the Amateur Naturalists of the CFZ. So too should students at University likely to offer support to groups like Pro Test. These are all our people and we should try and get them on board because we are traditional, zoological and ecological.

In terms of foxes, yes they do attack farms and livestock and we cannot expect farmers to sit idly by whilst this happens. Do we need hunts? Well, even if you dislike the idea of the hunt, of the traditional English scene of the huntsman with his pack, you may rest assured that fox numbers are not affected by hunting because hunts are largely ineffective at catching them (!), that fox numbers will naturally replenish in short order and that, in any case, you are more likely to come across foxes in an urban environment than in the country, if recent evidence is anything to go by. (Every night you can see urban foxes here in Manchester. True scavengers, they operate with stealth and are a wonderful sight to see. They live locally and cause little if no harm to us..apart from the occasional ripped open binbag!!)

Animal rights extremism is the voice of yesterday’s failed militant but the moderate, thoughtful, considered and moderate Centre for Fortean Zoology, and the CFZ Alliance would seem to be the ideal vehicle for the concerned animal lover…..


(1) See, http://www.pro-test.org.uk/MAAR.pdf