Animal Aid urges malicious complaints

A new guide published by animal rights extremists Animal Aid urges members of the public to make malicious complaints to police about legitimate shooting activities.

How to Oppose Shooting, a Practical Guide [pdf] is lauded as "probably the most comprehensive practical guide to ‘gamebird’ shooting and the problems it presents to people living in the vicinity of shoots" on the group's website.

It downloads as a turgid 41-page A4 document which comprehensively describes some forms of shooting in the UK, and summarises the law surrounding them. The choice of photographs is misrepresentative and emotive - unhealthy-looking birds in cramped cages. Slipped into the innocuous descriptive passages are suggestions that people might find the shoot worrying, and should call the police - advice designed to engineer a potentially dangerous confrontation between shooters and armed police.

The 'guide' goes on to suggest that people who are anti-shooting should stir up trouble for shoots by snitching to the VAT office, regardless of whether there is any reason to suspect wrongdoing. At the end of the document are standardised letters where a troublemaker can simply fill in the name of a shoot and post it off.

Sadly for the antis, most readers will have fallen asleep with boredom by the time they reach that bit. Pretty much the sort of thing we've come to expect from Kit Davidson and his chums, then - boring, devious, ineffective and malicious in its intent.

It does, however, provide a useful insight into the way these people think, and the chinks in our armour that they think they've spotted.