Hark at the wailing and teeth gnashing and hand wringing as the animal welfare industry rattles its collecting tins at fluffy-minded idiots.
The proposed badger cull provides the perfect case study of how this industry operates, deploying the full range of emotional blackmail, trickery, misuse of science, fake concern and downright lying. Douglas Batchelor of the League Against Cruel Sports excels himself with a blog post that manages to combine all these, and even suggests it's a plot to boost foxhunting.
My favourite bit is the deliciously sarcastic comment at the foot by Mo Young: "As always Douglas I highly commend you on your lucidity and clarity in explaining this matter." This at the end of 1,250 rambling words with a FOG index of 15.5.
Ex Queen guitarist Brian May, who appears to be regressing back through his childhood, has written a load of soppy nonsense in the Guardian, accusing farmers and Defra officials alike of an "insatiable lust" to "take revenge" on badgers. Someone at the Guardian should be prosecuted for cruelty for allowing May to make such an arse of himself in public.
Trust a Devon farmer to come up with some good oldfashioned common sense:
"I'm writing ahead of what will be the usual barrage by the pro-badger lobby. I am a dairy farmer from Devon that operates a closed herd (that is for those that don't know - we don't introduce any animals on to the farm) We also have excellent boundary fences and high hedges which very much limits interaction between our stock and that of our neighbours.
In the past we suffered badly with TB and had multiple breakdowns over a period of time. This was during a period when MAFF were trapping and culling badgers on infected farms. 80 percent of the badgers trapped on our farm where diagnosed with TB at post mortem, once they had been removed - big surprise, so was our TB problem.
We currently have badgers on the farm and they have been there for a number of years now. I have no doubt that they are free from TB and therefore would have no plans to cull them.
Those that live and work in the countryside know that wildlife along with all the other factors has an important role to play in the spread of this terrible disease, and whilst succesive ministers have passed rules and regulations that address cattle to cattle transfer, at last we have one with the balls to address the wildlife problem. Congratulations to Jim Paice for a bit of common sense, it's a rare quality in a politician."
Hat-tip to the Bovine TB blog for that one - an excellent blog and well worth a read if you want facts not histrionics.
And if you're reading up around the subject, Geoffrey Lean posted a good summary of the situation here on his Telegraph blog.
