I’m delighted that You Forgot the Birds won the Birdwatch readers’ guano award for 2016.
I expect the Badger cull was a close second but I don’t know for sure. Although the Badger cull has a much bigger and more harmful impact on wildlife the YFTB crew seem to me to encompass an awful lot of what is rotten about environmental debate at the moment.
YFTB is funded by rich and powerful people, not to promote any reasonable viewpoint but to sling mud at others, particularly the RSPB – at least that’s how it comes across. We know that Crispin Odey (whose hedge fund bombed this year) is one of the main funders of YFTB, (sir) Ian Botham is its rather hopeless spokesperson and Ian Gregory is the so-called mind behind its attacks (see George Monbiot and John Vidal). ABZED, a PR firm, uses its campaign against the RSPB on its own website as a piece of advertising – it’s a remarkably honest and rather nasty explanation of what it gets up to.
YFTB represents to me a nasty potential future for environmental debate and they deserve to have a pile of bird shit dumped on their heads, at least metaphorically.
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In reality too Mark!
Reminds me of bodyline – if you can’t win the game with your skill/argument, play the man instead. Sir Ian will be well versed in those tactics, which, as he was really quite good at cricket, were probably used against him quite frequently. Why being good at cricket should make him an expert on birds is beyond me – it is the lunacy of celebrity culture – and, of course, he came unstuck under questioning.
My New Year wish is that anybody who resigned from RSPB over their admittedly weak position in the middle of 2016 rejoins immediately – could there be better proof that they are worrying the grouse shooters, or of which side is which ? Added to which their position is hardening almost daily under the onslaught of raptor persecution.