The latest BBC outrage.

[ester]

'Relatively recent' being the operative words. Has the previous protocol, established over centuries and given to modest tweaks, really been so wrong? It is after all, how we've arrived where we are. Im tempted to suggest that modern think would have us dispensing with the baby, as we do the bath water.

Alec.

Well of course, if we are talking maintaining species we have to talk on evolutionary time scales, the few hundred years since we started getting involved is nothing on that basis- which is why an awful lot of things wouldn't really mind if we disappeared. And yes plenty of people would consider it pretty wrong and certainly not necessarily advantageous for anything but humans.

 

[photo_jo]

The vast majority of moorland in Britain was created by humans in the first place. We chopped down all the trees, there was nothing to hold the nutrients in the soil and so the soil leeched and the plants that survived were the hardier moorland plants. Dartmoor is a perfect example of this.

So managing moorland is managing a manmade environment anyway.

Absolutely right, another example is the South Downs, the result of Neolithic and Bronze Age clearing of the woodland and grazing sheep

 

[Orangehorse]

BASC and shooting interests frequently commission surveys from universities, etc. to compare diverse wildlife populations on land managed for shooting and that not and the shooting land always comes out on top.

Ironic I know. My family aren't the slightest bit interested in shooting, and our farm is almost a desert for wildlife apart from crows, pigeons, rabbits. I did see a hare yesterday and the hares seem to like the farm. On the other hand there is another family I know who are mad keen shooters and their farm is much nicer than ours - ponds, field margins planted with game cover and much, much more birdlife and interesting animals, apart from the pheasants and partridges and ducks for the pot.

 

[Alec Swan]

It makes me smile when people write things which suggest that somehow the countryside can't manage without man's intervention.

'Man' is an integral part of the countryside. How would you suggest that our rural existence or the countryside would manage, without 'intervention' in the form of management? I'll be interested to hear.

Alec.

 

[ester]

BASC and shooting interests frequently commission surveys from universities, etc. to compare diverse wildlife populations on land managed for shooting and that not and the shooting land always comes out on top.

I don't think anyone would find that suprising, although it does of course depend what you are comparing the shooting land to.
As said several times earlier on this thread there is little question that managing land (not for crops) usually increases diversity, and increases species numbers. BUT it might not always be the correct assumption that 'more is better', though it is something we are somewhat hardwired to think probably.

 

[fburton]

What's all this about then?

Chris Packham defiant after activists leave dead crows at his home

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-packhams-home-in-row-over-killing-pest-birds

 

[ester]

A general licence was removed, it is all Chris Packham's fault apparently.

 

[Fellewell]

The entertainment programme Packham presents relies almost entirely on the predation of songbirds by corvids, so controlling their numbers would remove all the drama for him. Strange that he has such a problem with foxhunting, must be a class thing. On the subject of management; today I passed three dead badgers on a one hundred metre stretch of road, it's a shame the countryside isn't left to those who actually understand it.

 

[hopscotch bandit]

Examples? Brian May leads a campaign to, as he and his followers see it, 'save' the badger. Where badgers are in unacceptable numbers, they are the principle carriers of BTb. The argument proffered by the protectionists is that 'we' who disagree with them want to see badgers eradicated. 'We', those who would see the numbers managed and controlled and at sensible levels, would be horrified at the thought of extinction.
Alec.

The way I see it the general public remember the dreadfully sad images of the gassing of badgers in their minds eye whenever the word controlled comes into play. Many of us remember how the gassing of these lovely creatures in the 70's was carried out and it was deplorable and inhumane. I don't know what other alternatives there are but it just seems so sad. But then so is losing a herd of cows I know - the cycle of reinfection. But this is how the public see things. It doesn't make them ignorant or anything else.