Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Fed up with misguided attacks on rural ways
Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger has had it with the levels of ignorance displayed by anti-farmer campaigners, he tells Farming Minister Robert Goodwill
DEAR Robert I often wonder what the reaction would be if farmers and landowners suddenly took it into their heads to start objecting to the way other sections of society ran their affairs.
Telling schools they were doing it all wrong and stuffing children’s heads up with information they didn’t need, for instance. Or informing car manufacturers that there were far better ways to build vehicles. Or demonstrating outside churches because they didn’t like the sound of hymn-singing.
All quite unthinkable and pointless of course. But conversely every two-bit bunch of malcontents seems to think it has a perfect right to criticise the aforementioned farmers and landowners for the way they run the countryside simply because what they see happening doesn’t necessarily accord with their own opinions.
The rural classes are, in other words, seen as fair game – and game
is what I am currently on about, particularly the latest display of arrogance by Packham’s Wild Justice rabble in challenging Defra over the environmental impact of putting down game birds for shooting.
It’s easy to see where this comes from, of course: it’s the proletariat taking on the privileged and grabbing a few brief headlines in the hope of swinging the majority of the population round to their distorted way of thinking.
But then, like so many of the antifarmer and landowner ‘campaigns’ that have been launched in recent years, it is fundamentally flawed, based as it is on a knowledge vacuum of galactic proportions as to how the countryside is managed.
We’ve seen it so many times before: activists attempting to foist their own blinkered views on others, frequently by direct action, and in almost every case shooting themselves in the foot.
Remember the ‘free the mink’ fiasco? All those poor mink being farmed for their fur. Uncage them! Give them their freedom! And allow a totally alien species (and a particularly vicious one) to invade the countryside to compete aggressively with indigenous fauna and either drive it out or eat it. Hence the catastrophic decline in water voles which only now, after costly conservation programmes, is being reversed.
Then the disruption of the badger culls, the only result of which was to ensure that more badgers died painful, lingering and distinctly unpleasant deaths.
And what about the current fashion for releasing pheasant chicks? What do they think is going to become of them? Well I can tell them. They will either starve, be eaten by foxes or be run over. Was that the intended outcome? Of course not. But as long as the big gesture is made in the name of animal freedom, we can conveniently overlook the outcome.
Packham and his lot would do well to read up on the studies – and there are a number – that have been carried out into the beneficial effects of keepering and predator control. They show that areas managed for game shooting have higher populations of endangered species than elsewhere precisely because they benefit from keeper protection. Equally they assert that if such safeguarding was removed declines – and possible local extinctions – of a range of ground-nesting bird species would almost inevitably follow.
But by the time that happened Wild Justice would be heading off on yet another misguided mission to make the countryside a better place. Based, of course, on the profound reserves of knowledge its members have acquired as a result of decades of practical experience. Yours ever, Ian