Do you recall that over a year ago a PhD position was advertised at the University of Northampton, just down the road from me, on the social impact of driven game shooting. At the time I wrote this.
Yesterday I went to a seminar on the first year of the study and heard how the successful candidate is getting on.
I think the points in my original blog still stand.
The student hasn’t had time to read Inglorious in their first year of study on driven game shooting so I said I’d send them a copy. I also said I’d email them some thoughts on their talk.
Here is how the PhD study was originally advertised.
£15,000 plus fees Baksheesh. I believe here it is called a bung.
Pretty standard salary for a UK PhD student in fairness, all the other nonsense in the description notwithstanding!
Does this research work still fall within the auspices of Mils Hill (crazy name, …)? I found this from his list of publications on the UON website – judge for yourself its academic merit and the ‘august’ journal in which it appeared!
https://countrysquire.co.uk/2017/09/26/nowt-wrong-with-3-47-chicken/
An extraordinary mish-mash of unsupported assertions daisy-chained together to reach outlandish conclusions. Apparently if you are concerned about the welfare of farm animals then you undoubtedly think it appropriate to send your pooch for an MRI scan and are therefore in some unexplained way responsible for the suffering of people in Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. QED!
Crazy name – crazy guy! And I’m him.
And the key question: who is providing the funding? I that stated anywhere?
And this guy Mils Hills is an associate professor, words fail me ( doesn’t happen often). I hadn’t realised that one could get professorships whilst spouting complete bollocks. The PhD will be a shoe in to justify the prejudices of those who shoot and support it, then used in the future no doubt by spin doctors like Gilruth and Anderson to justify pleasure killing.
I discovered last week that the huge pheasant shoot here makes no attempt to sell their shot pheasants and redlegs, what the paying guns don’t get goes straight in a big hole in the ground!!! All part of the “Ethical” industrial provision of living targets for the over wealthy.
Hey – thanks for the feedback!
Well that’s pretty clear then – this is what country sports do you’ve to prove it. I wonder if any applicant will at interview say that they will carry out a completely objective study and subsequent write up? I have a feeling they won’t. What a glowing example of why such studies need too be genuinely independent.
Paul, if this shoot operates as blatantly as you suggest, irrefutable evidence should be gathered,
and details made public.
It may be possible Trapit, I have been told twice by different parties that is what happens in both of the big shoots here (Llandinam/ Llanidloes area in mid Wales). I’m not “in” with the keepering team nor the man who runs the shoot ( an ex-keeper) renting the shooting from the Davis estate, having declined beating with them and being a volunteer warden on the local wildlife trust reserve where they are not welcome.
It means I no longer have that little twinge of guilt when I eat the ones that come in our garden or chicken run.
As an academic, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen as bizarre a publications page as the one Mils Hills has:
https://www.northampton.ac.uk/directories/people/mils-hills/
Normally, you’d just list peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and (sometimes) published conference proceedings. He lists presentations, unpublished work, and blogs. None of which are academic publications. Bizarrely, he also lists what journals he reviews for in his publications. If I were being cynical, I would suggest that this is to flesh out a weak publication record and to make his research career look better than it is, but either way it’s strange.
Well, that’s AN opinion. In fact, us academics are required to maximise our visibility and impact. And I’ve done a great deal more than just be an academic in my career, so I do have an unusual publications profile for sure.