Telegraph gets ‘exclusive’ by reading month-old blog

Mark 8 Comments

The Daily Telegraph today.

Findlay Wilde’s blog of 4 December.

 

Well done Findlay! You have made it to ‘activist’ in the national press – only a couple of steps to go to get to ‘eco-zealot’.

An unnamed MP – what odds would you give that it was Simon Hart (ex chief exec and well-paid consultant of the Countryside Alliance?) – seems to think that ‘…hundreds of thousands of rural people involved in game shooting will be surprised that there are ‘concerns’ about the industry at the centre of Government’.  Well, if they are surprised it’s only because they’ve had their heads stuck somewhere where they cannot either see or hear for the last decade!

The dinosaurs who turned up in the Westminster Hall debate on grouse shooting will be worried that Michael Gove’s Defra is positioning the Conservative Party away from being the wildlife-killing party in a sensible move to close off some electoral haemorrhaging.  You wait – grouse shooting may play a part in the next general election.

And to make sure that it does,  please sign Gavin Gamble’s e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting.

 

 

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8 Replies to “Telegraph gets ‘exclusive’ by reading month-old blog”

  2. So hang on, according to the Telegraph pheasants are imported from the EU to sustain jobs here (very sustainable) in the UK.
    What bio measures are put in place to make sure birds are riddled with disease? Mainland Europe suffered more from avian flu last year then the UK.
    But if game shoots are not able to produce enough birds why do we see so many dumped after shoots, could it be more people take pleasure from actually shooting them then actually eating them?

  3. Hats off to Findlay!

    The shooting industry is getting very nervous.

    This was recently in The Huff Post:

    “The head of the countryside’s most powerful campaign group has said the Conservative government risks losing the support of rural voters as he warns Michael Gove of “naivity” over the super-viral stories and campaigns fuelling the new Tory animal welfare agenda.

    Blogging for HuffPost UK, Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, has urged Tory ministers not to “take the support of voters in the countryside for granted” as the Environment Secretary leads an orchestrated push to be the ‘party of animal rights’.

    Since rejoining the Cabinet in June, measures pushed forward by Gove include CCTV in all slaughterhouses, a proposed ban on bee-killing pesticides, reintroducing beavers into the UK, making the sale of products with microbeads illegal and a ban on ivory sales.

    Two days ago, the Sunday Times reported the Conservative Party is poised to ditch its pledge to hold a vote that could see the hunting ban repealed.

    While accepting some pro-animal policies have a basis in improving their welfare, Bonner says others are “motivated almost entirely by prejudice” and that Tory ministers are falling for “manufactured online campaigns”.

    An online campaign against hunting can generate more emails to MPs than any other issue, petitions against badger culling and grouse shooting receive hundreds of thousands of ‘signatures’. Yet when those three issues were brought together for a march on Downing Street led by no lesser figure than BBC presenter Chris Packham on the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ (the first day of the grouse shooting season) just 690 people joined the demonstration.”

    Ha!

  4. The thing that the Telegraph and the Washington Post article have in common is that no matter how biased they are the criminal apologists still look like ‘twits of the year’.
    We can’t lose.

  5. Brilliantly funny. The pity of it is that few Telegraph readers will have even an inkling that it is, or why. But even the sight of recidivist Tories manipulating the press to take pot-shots across Sir John’s bows is encouraging: it shows they know they are losing, and they’ll be gone before he is.

  6. I feel it is ‘war’. They have had enough chances to get their house in order.

    With your permission, I would like to write another blog about the shooting industry in the New Year, Mark.

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