Sticking to what it does best
AS an example of how to spin a bad story into a good one, the RSPCA’s latest announcement takes some beating.
The society, it has declared, is to ‘transfer the role’ of prosecuting animal cruelty cases to the Crown Prosecution Service, thus allowing it to focus its efforts on a frontline campaign against animal cruelty.
Which, strangely, is what we all thought it should have been doing all the time; indeed what most people, whenever the collection box has been proffered, have dipped their hands into their pocket in the belief they were financing.
No mention was there anywhere in this carefully constructed puff of the fact that underwriting often hopeless prosecutions in recent years has got the RSPCA into very deep trouble indeed, its funds depleted, its supporters turning their backs on it in disgust after witnessing donations they believed were helping to pay the bills for running animal sanctuaries instead being used to line lawyers’ pockets.
The RSPCA is among the biggest and was once one of the bestrespected charities in a country of animal lovers. Its work providing refuges for rescued cats, dogs and other livestock was generously and faithfully supported.
But then things started to get out of hand as it embarked on a series of high-profile and extremely costly prosecutions. Some succeeded, others failed – expensively.
Officials claim they have always applied the same yardstick as the CPS, weighing up the chances of a prosecution succeeding in court before pressing ahead with it. Let’s say it hasn’t always looked that way.
For more than five years now the society has been under pressure from MPs and others to step back from costly litigation – a habit it got into under the reign of former chief executive and seasoned self-publicist Gavin Grant.
With his background as a political speech-writer he was adept at the soundbite and at recognising opportunities to raise the RSPCA profile, notably in the courts, taking on a number of prosecutions which the CPS had determined would never succeed.
The course he set for the charity saw it heading straight for the financial rocks with an ‘ unsustainable’ £6.1 million ‘cash outflow’ in 2013 followed by a £4.5 million budget cut the following year.
Meanwhile Grant enraged farmers by refusing to support the badger cull – even though it was a measure which would ultimately have reduced suffering in both wildlife and farm animals.
Grant’s abrupt departure should have been followed by an equally abrupt policy change on the matter of running cruelty prosecutions. But it has taken the best part of seven years for that to happen.
And even now the matter is being fudged: the reason advanced for the policy shift is that proposed stiffer sentences for animal cruelty “will place a huge responsibility” on the charity’s shoulders and that it is only right in those circumstances, to hand the brief over to the state prosecutors.
Not a word, you will notice, about the RSPCA having been found guilty by its supporters of squandering their money. temperatures can damage soil structure and cause erosion.
None of which cuts much ice with the new environmentalists who have decried swaling as “outmoded and damaging” and want to see an end to a practice which has served hill farmers well for the best part of 10,000 years and has never been bettered.
This attitude has already infiltrated Natural England which tried to halt all swaling on Exmoor a few years ago, promptly taking control of all operations and restricting to tiny plots those areas of the moor which could be burned.
That led to a host of problems. Stands of gorse were soon reaching two metres tall creating areas impenetrable to livestock and presenting – as was rapidly demonstrated – a huge summer fire risk.
Farmers then had no option: the gorse could only be removed and shredded expensively (and pollutingly) using machinery – an operation which left in its wake an unsightly landscape of stumps rather than the neat, low-growing stretches of new growth that result from swaling.
(Read up on the history of farming in Brittany and you will learn that gorse was valued as a wild crop. The wood burns hot and bright and the top growth was used for animal bedding and as a base layer for hay and straw ricks to stop them rotting on wet ground. But it all involved highly labour-intensive operations which are only viable in a peasant farming economy.)
The protests about the emerging gorse forests grew, particularly when it emerged that the Natural England official dictating the policy was basing it on his studies on the Yorkshire moors where, of course, vegetation grows at only a fraction of the pace it achieves in the more benign climate of the South West.
New regulations are now being introduced which will place an embargo on swaling on peat-rich moorlands to protect their role as carbon sinks and there were fears among farmers that these could be no more than the precursor to a blanket ban on the activity – despite its proven benefits.
There have been vigorous representations from the Moorland Association which says heather-burning remains a ‘vital tool’ in land management and Defra has acknowledged there will be room for exemptions to the burning ban: licences will be issued for swaling on areas machinery can’t reach, for wildlife protection or for conservation purposes.
And now the good news for Exmoor’s farmers: since the moor contains relatively few areas of peat deposits the local swaling programme will continue as normal, the moors will be managed as they should be and visitors will still stop and stare in disbelief at the stunning landscapes that result where in high summer the coastal heaths are turned into a carpet of yellow gorse and purple heather flowers.
But there is still lingering resentment over the Government’s attempt to remove control for swaling from the people whose families have been managing the land for years and who have burned off the heather and gorse as and when it has become necessary – without having to ask for consent from civil servants.
The state of the South West’s moors is a testimony to the efficient way they have been looked after by people who are the true experts and who have absorbed their knowledge as they have grown up in the moorland farming environment that has provided their livelihoods, rather than by bureaucrats who, if they profess to have any expertise in the matter of land management, have only acquired it via a university degree.