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Interesting website David. Weedkilling: The last photograph is a close up which clearly shows the effect of the poisons the Woodland Trust inflict on their land. It shows the area around the tree "burned" out with the toxin and on a wider area grass replacing the former weeds. |
| Well- the photo he must have been referring to as the "last photograph" is not of course the last photograph in the weedkilling section, only the last photograph of a site recently treated with weedkiller. You will see that I followed it with further photographs of a site which had probably been similarly treated just a few years earlier, but by autumn 2002 showed no evidence of "burned" areas and had a significant variety of plants growing around the trees. The suggestion that the picture shows "grass replacing the former weeds" is wholly inaccurate- it was a grassy field with other plants in, not a field dedicated to the growing of non-grassy weeds. Try visiting the site each spring for a few years... |
| Roots-of-Blood page analysis: I am not prepared to debate this at present as I intend to publish a full account of the court action in due course. This will be on the website and distributed to the national Press. |
| I have already promised Amacmil304 that I will publish a review of his "full account" on this website when it finally appears (6 months after I first wrote this page, the "full account" still hadn't been published). |
| The Woodland Trust is inextricably linked with those who kill wildlife and game for fun. |
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Well yes, as a large-scale country landowner having to deal with many other country landowners, it would be. Amacmil304, on the other hand merely chooses to be "linked with those who kill wildlife and game for fun" as a matter of convenience. He supports (while criticising some of its less convenient aims) a pressure-group against the big conservation organisations, called "People Too" (not to be confused with the similarly-titled support group for the mentally-disabled) the founder of which, Mrs Kirsty MacLeod, in an interview for the first issue of its magazine "Fresh Air", explains her rejection of the way "conservationists" seem to think of conservation as something separate from other countryside activities: "I am not anti-conservation, but I resist discussing it in these terms. I want these people to discuss it on my terms, which is that the main tool for so-called conservation is farming, crofting, deer stalking, grouse-moor management and so on." |
| It should also be remembered that a single deer was hunted by Woodland Trust staff within an enclosure rather than opening the gates and letting it escape. Details are on the Roots-of-Blood website. |
| Yes, as noted in my analysis of a "Roots of Blood" page, the Woodland Trust occasionally has to reduce the deer population on some of its sites. I suspect that the details of the incident in question may have grown a bit in the telling, but the Woodland Trust has never denied that it kills deer (and indeed other animals such as rabbits) when they cannot be prevented from doing serious damage by non-lethal methods. |
| The picture of a rabbit with its guts ripped out is a natural event. The killing of wildlife by the Woodland Trust is not. It is born of a desire to protect their trees and ground flora. |
| Actually, the death of the rabbit in my pictures was almost certainly not natural in the sense of having no human involvement- it was by a roadside and had probably been hit by a car (hence the odd position of the legs). And as explained on my "Two woods and a wilderness" pages, there's more at stake than just "trees and ground flora" when large herbivores are left unchecked. |
| The PS about foxhunting: One needs to read the evidence in its entirety. If the Woodland Trust doesn't think it allows hunting with hounds, the hunters do, as was shown in their evidence to the Lord Burns inquiry. A hunting event for the benefit of the Inquiry was even held on Woodland Trust property. Enough said! |
| If you read my "PS about foxhunting" you'll see that I explain in some detail how some individuals within the Woodland Trust, in the summer of 2001, might have come to think that it didn't allow hunting with hounds, and that they were clearly put right within a few months. A look at the Trust's website makes it clear that the misinterpretation has been corrected. The "PS" page also suggests why the Trust, like other conservation landowners, might have arrived at this awkward compromise. |
| The comparison of the two "woodlands": Both woodlands have a different form of protection from herbivores. I am not against that. I welcome it, provided enough space and shelter is left for deer etc to survive. What I say it that the killing of deer is a cheap and nasty alternative to protecting trees and ground flora by deer fencing and individual tree protection which in evidence provided by the Woodland Trust - but ignored by the judge - stated it was costly and unsightly. |
| Amacmil304 has ignored the rest of the "Two woods and a wilderness" pages which try to explain why there are no simple answers to the problems created by large herbivores. The Woodland Trust would be right to claim that fencing and tree protectors can be both costly and unsightly- but as made clear in the same court case (and reported in my "Roots of Blood" page analysis) it still uses these methods most of the time. |
| So far the Woodland Trust has been the only so-called organisation that has taken a member of the public to court who is trying to stop it killing wildlife. Says a lot for them :-( |
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[I suspect that Amacmil304 intended to type "so-called conservation organisation"] It is probable that the Woodland Trust is the only conservation organisation which has been subject to a sustained campaign of defamation by a member of the public who wants it to:
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| But overall there is another dimension to all this. The conservation industry frequently states that it has a neutral position with regard to hunting. Here's the content of a letter I had published in the Glasgow Herald following the court case. |
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| As the subject of your article "Animal Activist's Claims Outlawed by Judge" (17 Aug.) I am not overly surprised by the verdict as the "establishment" protects its own. |
| Despite this, Amacmil has hinted (in June 2003) that he will be returning to court at some time... |
| However, I feel I should make some comments about the killing of deer by
conservation charities such as the Woodland Trust. Hunters and conservationists would have us believe that it is necessary to reduce deer numbers to an acceptable population level that doesn't cause ecological damage. When asked why the population has increased so rapidly, they tell us that deer reproduce prolifically and that there are no large predators, namely the wolf, left to control their numbers. On the face of it, that seems a reasonable explanation but it is more of a plausible excuse for hunters to enjoy their grizzly fun and conservationists to employ them to hunt in almost exactly the same way under the more respectable guise of culling. There is no doubt that wolves were predators of deer, but not for a very long time. The last wolf was killed in the UK around 1750, more than 250 years ago, and their numbers were in serious decline for many decades before that. So it is reasonable to assume that wolves have had little impact on deer for the past 300 - 350 years. With that in mind one could be excused for thinking that deer numbers would have escalated at an enormous rate over that period. But it is only in the last 50-60 years that their numbers have increased significantly, coinciding with a thriving hunting industry and reforestation that provides shelter. |
| The wolves were killed partly because they interfered with medieval sport deer-hunting. A combination of other factors caused the British wild deer population to decline dramatically in the 17th and 18th centuries, to the extent that the Victorian fashion for deer stalking required the translocation of breeding stock from parks, and even from abroad- but by the end of the 19th century, such efforts had ensured a large wild/feral population. During the 20th century, the climate started to get warmer, so more deer survived each winter; also, with the decline of country estates after the First World War, significant numbers of deer began to escape from parks. Today there are two different "deer problems", one predominantly Scottish resulting from the survival of more "game" deer than the sport shooting industry can cope with, and one predominantly English resulting from the breeding of park escapees such as Sika and Muntjacs, which until recently were not hunted for sport (and still aren't over most of their increasing range, as sport shooting is much more localised in England than in the Highlands). It is certainly true that the increasing area of woodland in Britain means more deer habitat is available: |
| So is there a connection? Of course there is! To understand the whole sorry mess, one must examine the structure and covert allegiances between hunters and conservationists who, including the Woodland Trust, form alliances within "deer management groups" that are overseen by the Deer Commission to maintain an artificially high deer population to satisfy the requirements of hunting estates. But as deer know no boundaries, the population expands to other areas unchecked, where they can damage unprotected saplings, ground flora and ground nesting habitats. |
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The bit about "covert allegiances" is another little gem- these are rather like my "covert allegiance" with the local library- not a matter of public record, but not a secret either, just part of everyday life for country landowners. The Deer Commission is a Scottish body, with no precise equivalent in England and Wales, as sport shooting of deer is much less common there. While it does indeed have the interests of the hunting estates in mind, a look at its website (unfortunately the key strategy document is a 1.4 megabyte PDF) makes it clear that it is well aware that the deer population is uncomfortably and damagingly high. |
| This is when the deceit of the conservationists comes to the fore. Having
supped with the hunters, they now tell us they need to cull deer to reduce the
increase in population that the hunters were responsible for in the first
place. The horrid cycle continues year after year. Why don't the conservationists abandon their hunting friends and join forces with the animal activists who oppose hunting? No chance - it's all about money. The government via the Deer Commission wishes to maintain the hunting industry as an economic benefit to rural areas and the conservationists depend on grants via the Forestry Authority to plant their trees. |
| More twisted language, creating conspiracy out of practicality. The statement about the Deer Commission is true; the statement about the Forestry Authority is trueish (if F.A. grants did not exist, there would almost certainly still be some conservation tree-planting, though not as much). But the linking assumption isn't true, because the population of deer which are not shot for sport is, as I noted earlier, also growing at a remarkable rate. |
| The conservationists won't bite the hand that feeds them and the deer are the losers. |
| Individual deer are the losers- but in the long term deer populations, and the populations of other animals and plants- are winners. The natural world may look pretty, but that's not what it's there for. |
| Animal rights and welfare activists, together with our MSPs, have rid this country of the scourge of hunting with dogs. The next target should be the hunting estates. |
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Early reports suggest that the ban on hunting with dogs in Scotland may (as is usually the case with bans) not be having quite the intended effect. Keep an eye on the animal welfare websites. Finally- if you can stand my response to Amacmil304's response to the above response- read on! |