I have a problem. Here in Britain we like to call ourselves “A Nation Of Animal Lovers” you hear this phrase everywhere, and it’s a load of nonsense. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not. I suppose at a push, I’d go as far as to say we’re “A Nation Of Pet Lovers”, but even that’s a stretch. More and more idiots are “toughening” their dogs by hanging them from trees, beating them etc. More and more farmers are being caught flagrantly breaking the animal cruelty laws, and more and more people are irresponsibly breeding dogs and starving the pups when they don’t sell. Having said that, I will concede that these people are still (thankfully) the minority.
However, our attitude to our wildlife is at worst criminal, and at best negligent. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people give money every month to the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, and many others, but our responsibility doesn’t stop there. I’ll give you a few examples of what I’m talking about.
With the advent of digital cameras, and the subsequent addition of them to mobile phones, photography became accessible to pretty much everyone. Thereby hangs the problem. Before this, wildlife photographers knew what they were doing. They knew what effect their actions had on their subject and the neighbouring flora and fauna. They knew what signs of stress to look out for in their quarry. They even knew which plants you shouldn’t step on due to their scarcity. Why did they know this? Because they had to WANT to do it. You could only do it by buying the equipment, which was seldom cheap. If you’re willing to spend vast amounts of money on the equipment, you obviously care about what you’re doing, and in the case of wildlife photography that means not wanting to jeopardize the species around you. I’m not suggesting that people taking photos of wildlife on their phones want to harm animals, or even that they don’t care. I’m merely saying that the instant availability of a camera means that they don’t stop to think about what they’re doing. It’s not just amateurs either. I have seen some awful advice in wildlife photography guides too. One book stated that to get a good shot of an adder, they moved it a few hundred yards and took the picture. You absolutely CANNOT do this sort of thing. Not because you may get bitten by the snake (I should point out that if you’re stupid enough to pick up any wild animal, you deserve to get bitten), but because moving it this far would probably lead to the death of the animal for various reasons, no matter how carefully you do it.
More horrifically, I’ve also seen a book advise that one of the best ways to attract a fox in order to photograph it is to play a recording of a rabbit in pain or distress. There’s only one way to obtain that recording. I’ll give you a few minutes to let that sink in…
It’s not just Joe & Josephine Public that are the problem. A lot more people are studying Zoology, Ecology, Environmental Science, Biology etc than ever before, but most people want to work with Orang Utans or Rhinos. Nobody cares about Hen Harriers or Sand Lizards. It’s sad, but most people see working with British species as a stepping stone, as a way to get the experience needed to secure placements in Africa, Indonesia, or wherever.
Then there are the obvious people- farmers, hunts, shooting estates. The shooting community release between 20 and 35 million pheasants every year, and usually “bag” between 10 and 20 million. That means every year anything up to roughly 20 million pheasants are essentially being freed into countryside (there’s another linguistic clue- we don’t have a “wild” we have a “countryside”). In the UK, it is illegal to release any non-native species into the wild- even one single solitary individual. The Common Pheasant Phasianus colchicus is a non-native species. It was brought here in the 10th Century by the Normans (possibly earlier and by the Romans- the jury is out). I’ll let you put two and two together. You’d be surprised at the number of British species that are actually non-native, including Rabbit, Brown Rat, House Mouse, Fallow Deer, Muntjac, Canada Goose, Common Carp, and Rainbow Trout.
When the State Of Nature Report was initially released, the result of their findings was that nearly two thirds of our wildlife is in decline- both animals and plants, largely due to habitat destruction. This isn’t just expansion of towns and building new housing estates or retail parks. It’s also farms replacing native flowers with crops, or overgrazing grasslands.
Not everybody does these things, but most of us do turn a blind eye to what is happening. We love Sir David Attenborough and Chris Packham. We watch Life Of… or Seasonwatch avidly, but the moment somebody in real life starts talking about this subject, we switch off. It’s just another whining hippy. Words like “Ecology” and “Biodiversity” are now assumed to mean that this has now become another boring lecture on why I should care about trees. Why can’t they let us just look at the pretty animals? The answer is simple:
This apathy is directly responsible for us running out of pretty animals for you to look at.
So why do we behave like this? Especially when we openly support medical research. We proudly help ex-servicemen and women. We outragedly stop people beating their dogs, so what has wildlife done to be ignored like this? In truth, it hasn’t done anything except make us feel guilty. In the examples given, the big scary disease, the evil foreign dictator, or the scumbag dog-owner are all to blame- we can do our bit by simply making a donation and letting someone else do the actual work. In the case of wildlife, however, it does something to us. Something that racism, drug rehabilitation, and mental health also do to us. It makes us realize that we are to blame, that it’s partly our fault- we let it happen. In all of these issues, giving money isn’t enough. We need to change as well, we HAVE to change. We must change our attitudes, adjust how we do things, how we see things, change how we think. We must teach our children too. We must stand up for these things. It is good that you care about it, but tutting isn’t enough. We have to actually do something ourselves to help these issues, and for most people, that just gets in the way of Gogglebox.
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