Good to see that the RSPB has had a response to Max Hastings’s article of last week published in the Financial Times, a rather moderately worded response given the poor nature of the original article. It is always a bit of a lottery whether newspapers publish responses or not.
It’s frustrating if errors go unchallenged but even when a response is published it’s very difficult to respond in the space that a paper will allow. If I say to you that ‘You are a liar’ you can reply ‘No I am not’ in the same number of words but it’ll take you quite a bit more space to explain why you are wronged.
But there is also another letter published referring to the same offending article. A Neil Stratton (the name sounds familiar but I can’t place it) from Oxford points out that Sir Mad Max Hastings’s response to a sparrowhawk at his bird table. Well done, Neil Stratton whoever you are.
The more people who challenge some of the rubbish written about nature in the newspapers the better. Why don’t you make it your hobby? Short letters, making good points in an amusing way (cf Mr Stratton) are quite likely to be published.
Maybe there should be a prize for the best non-NGO nature letter published in the newspapers each year – hmmm, there’s an idea. And because the newspapers reject lots of good letters – they’ve rejected lots of brilliant letters from me in the past – maybe a prize for the best unpublished letter submitted to a newspaper too.
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No prizes for proof-reading Mark!
What was Mad Max in, and just what did Neil Stratton point out?
Charles – welcome and thanks! Let down by small brain and technology – a dangerous combination. Cannot promise that it won’t happen again.
Our local Cumbrian paper just wrote a response about a TB outbreak in the winter. The highly paid scientist claimed that ‘wild animals’ will have wanted to enter buildings looking for food due to the continuous frost and snow. And of course she was trying to refer to badgers. Like the ‘raptor’ haters one of their problems is that they have no knowledge of how these species live and of course for badger they would have been tooked up in bed sleeping off the worse of the weather. She has now asked for knowledge of where all the badger setts are around the area of the out brake not knowing it could 100% not be due to badgers. What effect do you think that is having on the local farmers thoughts on badgers!!