Threat to UK’s wildlife and environment

I AM a keen fan of the Newbury Weekly News, but am increasingly exasperated by the space afforded to a journalist who seems essentially to act as a spokesperson for the shooting and farming industries.

Your other Country Matters journalist Nicola Chester writes beautifully about nature, but I do wonder if there should not be equal space afforded to a columnist who would write about the terrible, ongoing destruction of the UK’s wildlife and environment.

The UK is one of the most depleted countries in the world in terms of nature and biodiversity.

It is estimated that between 10 and 15 per cent of our wildlife species are in danger of disappearing altogether and that we have only 50 per cent of our natural biodiversity remaining.

Those are truly horrifying figures. Incredibly, the intensive snaring

(up to 1.7 million animals each year) and shooting (some 6,000 tonnes of lead per year, polluting our wildlife habitats on land and in water) of species believed to threaten country ‘sports’ remain completely legal and if illegal poisoning and those assaults were not enough, we learn that the cruel and pointless badger cull is not to be abandoned at last, as was reported by the national press in their headlines at least, but in fact massively expanded – and it is happening right now, right here in Berkshire.

It is heart-breaking.

Cull licences last for four years, and so we will see mass badger slaughter in Berkshire until at least 2024. Current licences allow for 75,930 badgers to be shot (either by free-shooting, condemned as inhumane by the British Veterinary Association, or when trapped in cages).

Some 143,000 badgers have already been killed since the cull began in 2013 – we are swiftly heading towards the obliteration of half the entire estimated population.

The scientific evidence points to many other causes of bovine

TB, principally cattle to cattle transmission and poor bio-security. Furthermore, as highlighted by the recent case of Geronimo the alpaca, the Government-approved tests for bTB are completely unreliable and not fit for purpose.

If the cull actually worked, surely we would have seen some positive results for farmers by now.

Although it was eventually deemed unnecessary, it is astonishing too that the National Farmers’ Union this year lobbied the Government, clandestinely but successfully, for permission to use neonicitinoids on certain crops again, toxic chemicals which have a devastating impact on an already severely threatened bee population and which filter down through the entire ecosystem.

No one can fail to be aware of the many huge environmental challenges facing us and the threats to the well-being of the planet (and therefore ourselves).

It is clearly a time when we should be doing absolutely everything in our power to reverse the decline.

I tell myself and have to believe it is not inevitable, but if we not only cannot protect but continue to persecute our own wildlife, in many cases to the point of extinction, a feeling of despair can become overwhelming.

I hope that NWN at least will be able to afford space to a more balanced discussion of these issues.

JULIAN ROTA

High Street

Kintbury