In The Sunday Times today there is a brilliant article by Rod Liddle; the journalist who comments on the news in an unfiltered and very personal way. And what he says about British wildlife conservation very much chimes with my thoughts except for his view on cats 😊, which I mention at the end of the article.
Essentially he says that the British can’t lecture Africans on wildlife conservation on the African continent because “we can’t even be bothered to save hedgehogs”.
He says that the British are interested in wildlife conservation if it was convenient to do so. When it isn’t convenient we cull wildlife. We kill the animals because they get in the way. Conservation certainly is a matter of convenience for the British and I suspect that applies to any country on this planet. When you think about it, it is a terrible indictment of humankind and it signals a continuing deterioration in wildlife for the indefinite future thanks to human activities. I think we have to foresee wildlife being reduced to existing in smallish reserves in the future. I mean across the entire planet.
Liddle starts his article by telling us about a journey he made in a Mercedes 4×4 owned and operated by the UN. He was crossing Uganda with Boris Johnson. The trip had been arranged to show them what a great job the UN was doing in Uganda, a country addicted to foreign aid. He criticises the UN for foisting their progressive values upon Uganda. He doesn’t like the UN!
And as they bump along in this very expensive SUV which must have cost the earth he noticed when looking out of the window during the long journey that there was no wildlife out there. He couldn’t see any animals. And we know that Africa is meant to be known for its wildlife and iconic species. But he says there was none!
He writes “I don’t think I’ve seen even seen one for four hours”. He mentioned that to the Ugandan UN employee in the front of the vehicle who responded by saying: “. Terribly sorry. I’m rather afraid we’ve eaten them all.”
Bush meat as it’s called is a major issue in terms of conservation in Africa. Yes, the Africans eat wild animals because they feel they have to, to survive. And this goes to another point that Rod Liddle makes namely that, “The more primitive and poor a society, the less it is inclined to offer succour to the animal kingdom, which it sees as rivals, pests or food.”
And therefore we should expect that in the more enlightened and richer countries that we have better wildlife conservation but as mentioned above, in Britain, we don’t because he says that, “And yet our own wildlife is disappearing from the planet even more quickly than Africa’s.”
He cites some examples such as the tree sparrow which in population numbers is down 93% over the past 50 years. The same figure applies to the corn bunting, gray partridge, turtle dove and capercaillie. “And about 40% of bird species have shown a marked decline between 2015 and 2020 in Britain.”
All of us know that the Scottish wildcat is extinct because the individuals that exist in the wild are hybrids having mated with feral cats and therefore they are not genetically impure and therefore can’t be described as Scottish wildcat’s.
The hedgehog is rated as “Near Threatened” according to the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
He says that there were 60 million hedgehogs in the UK when he was a child and now there are 1 million left. And there’s no genuine reason for this. The reason appears to be a lack of commitment to protecting hedgehogs. He compares the farmers in northern Bangladesh defending themselves against tigers which you can argue is reasonable but there’s no threat from the hedgehog and we still can’t save the animal which is indicative of the true attitude of the British, a supposed animal loving nation.
When it is convenient, we are animal lovers but when wild animals are inconvenient we kill them such as the fox and badger. We kill them because “As soon as a creature causes as even the slightest inconvenience, the pretence [of a commitment to conservation] is dropped.”
And when an animal does rather well off their own bat against the odds such as the urban fox and the badger, “Immediately the cry goes up: cull them!”
In addition to the urban foxes which many people hate but which I love (there are other fox lovers) we have pigeons of course and seagulls. There are many people who hate seagulls because the sometimes teyrrorise people by nicking their chips. But they are only nicking chips out of the the hands of tourists by the seaside because there is little to eat in the seas because good old humankind has eaten nearly all the marine wildlife leaving nothing left for the seagull.
We know there’s a massive cull of badgers in the UK in order to protect cattle from bovine TB but there’s no strong science on my understanding that badgers transmit bovine TB to cattle. I written about that in another article which you might like to read by clicking on this link.
Ron Liddle says that we are not remotely serious about wildlife conservation. We could show our commitment to it by restoring the hedgehog to previous population numbers. We could start doing that by not paving over our front gardens for the car and stop putting slug pellets “around your vanity-project cabbages”. Hedgehogs like slugs. We can stop growing cabbages and buy them in Morrisons instead he says.
And we can ensure that there are pathways between back gardens by opening up a small part of a fence to allow hedgehogs to pass through and by for instance building a small log pile for a den.
Personally, I allow the passage of foxes from behind my house through to the front by creating a small underpass under the fence. Actually, the underpass was originally built by a badger. Nature at work.
The bottom line according to Rod Liddle is that we can make “tiny adjustments” which he describes as “mild inconveniences” in order to do our bit for wildlife conservation. But he ends by saying “can we be bothered?”.
The final point he makes is that we should get rid of our cats because cats are top class predators. In his words, “And get rid of your pet cat – it despises you anyway, so it’s no great loss.”
Well, he likes to be amusing and he is amusing. He is wrong here because cats don’t despise us. He’s just reciting a stereotypical attitude towards the domestic cat by people who don’t like cats. Cats love us as much as dogs love us. And the relationship between cats and people is just as strong as between dogs and people.
But there is indeed a problem with domestic cats allowed outside unsupervised, as mine is. They are predators and as humans are very much engaged in worldwide speciesism i.e. the valuation of some animals over other animals, we don’t like cats attacking birds but of course we don’t mind them attacking mice or rats. Another example of how human attitudes are dictated to by convenience.
If cat owners keep their cats inside all the time it is not to protect wildlife but to protect their cats. And they want to protect their cats for their peace of mind.
But in Australia they would like to get rid of all domestic cats and of course feral cats. The authorities on that continent are very concerned about protecting their native species and have been for years. They’re engaged in the mass extermination of feral cats but despite being very cruel they won’t succeed in getting rid of them. They like to kill foxes as well and they’ve shot millions of kangaroos. All of Australia’s wildlife conservation problems are human made either directly or indirectly.
That’s the nub of it. Wildlife conservation comes down to human attitudes and behaviour. We are also in the survival game. If wildlife gets in the way of our survival it has to go. That applies to individual people and big businesses. To big business, wildlife is often an inconvenience as well unless of course the big business is trading wildlife which is worth £18 billion annually worldwide.
John Lewis-Stempel is an English farmer, writer, and Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling author. He lives in France for most of the year because it reminds him of the UK from 30-40 years ago before the ‘chemical deluge’ in British farming which is so damaging to wildlife including pollinators such as bees.
Mike look up what the DEC did to poor Peanut the squirrel
Yeh, I read about that. A horror story and entirely unnecessary. A cruel and mindless attitude by the authorities applying rules too strictly.