Carrots, sticks and conservation

People who profess to be 'green' are dreadful ones for banning stuff. They see a conservation problem and they instantly want to regulate this and ban that. I suppose they mean well but, look around you, does it work?

There is another way. The World Pheasant Association is a fine example of how to get on and do some real conservation, rather than blowing your members' money on marketing hype. Their Pipar Project in the Himalayas has been running 25 years. It's a simple bribe to local people: stop killing stuff and we'll provide schools for your kids. It works.

I was shooting with the WPA on Friday, at their annual clay shoot and fundraising auction (As it happens I was on form, but that's another story). They're the sort of folks your average greenie would despise: rich, middle aged and older white men, public school educated, Tory-voting, pheasant shooting, landowning... One of the auction items was a zebra skin; another a day's trout fishing. I can just see the steam coming out of the trendy ecomentalists' ears.

And yet... they're doing seriously valuable conservation work around the world, at their own expense and for truly altruistic reasons, and not even bothering to promote it, any more than absolutely necessary to raise the funds they need.

Funny old world innit.