Congratulations to Andy Richardson and the shooting community for quickly reaching the 10,000 signatures milestone in their badly-worded and badly-argued e-petition to keep toxic lead ammunition.
That is the way to do it – it’s effective campaigning, even though for an awful cause.
My sincere congratulations to them (clearly BASC was involved and who knows what other shooting organisations played a part too) on getting out there and mobilising. Even though, I fear, Andy Richardson will be even more unbearable on Facebook now!
This might make WWT and the RSPB sit up and urge their members to support Rob Sheldon’s e-petition – but it might not.
Just a reminder – both the WWT and the RSPB have led the intellectual and technical campaign against continued use of lead ammunition – very ably.
Both have agreed policies that they want an end to the use of lead ammunition in the UK.
Both deserve considerable credit for what they have done and what they are doing on this subject – but they haven’t mobilised the public, at all. And that is a big mistake. It’s a huge mistake. And it’s a difficult-to-forgive mistake.
But it is an easily-rectified mistake.
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Let’s face it, campaigning on environmental & conservation issues is like pulling teeth. The existence of large organisations like RSPB and WWT creates the illusion of community when in fact the target audience is atomised. You almost need one-to-one communication to persuade anyone to sign. The big frustration is that we are confident the support is out there; we just struggle to make contact. I wonder how the ‘Don’t kill our bees’ petition has reached 88,871 signatures? After all there’s no RSPBee is there?
I just don’t see it that way. The public were the ones who stopped the selling off of our forests. The RSPB magazine used to have an Action Pages section in the middle. They used to encourage members to take action. Where are they now?
Well, this will be an interesting response from Government.
Will they follow up on their international commitment, in which case there will be in excess of 10,000 shooters all metaphorically hopping and staggering about having shot themselves in their foot; or
will they complete a volte face with no political gain; or
Will they dance between the two options in a diplomatic game, offering both sides something to cling on to?
Time will tell.
Congratulations to Andy Richardson indeed. Pretty impressive to get to 10,000 in such a short space of time.
When I decided to launch ‘my’ petition the aim was to reach 10,000 to ilicit a response from DEFRA, well I guess that has been achieved!! I’m very much looking forward to the DEFRA response.
On the subject of NGO support, I was never expecting centre page spreads in members’ magazines and headline stories on home pages. But are a couple of Tweets or a Facebook post really too much to ask?
Only a small percentage of the readership of Mark’s blog appear to have signed Rob’s petition which is curious since it has certainly been promoted on the blog. Curious.