Another Father’s Day in which I have been spoilt with
some wonderful gifts. I am always touched by the high esteem in which my
children and Jackie always hold me in.
Yesterday evening we had a delightful meal in our local
restaurant to celebrate Sam’s 18th birthday, Father’s Day, Sam obtaining
a place at The Royal Agriculture University and Sophie passing all her second
year medical exams. It was a very jolly evening had by all and the conversation flitted from local through to
national and international affairs dominated by the main talking point which
was the birthday gift my daughter Sophie was about to present to her brother
Sam, which was an imminent climb of the
O2 arena. Listening to them, their
excitement was quite palpable. It is amusing how even now as they are getting
bigger that their gifts to each other excites us all in the same way as the gifts
that were bestowed on them as they were growing up by their mother and I.
An
interesting development this week came from the Humane Society International UK
urging farmers to reject the Badger cull and to become more Badger friendly
instead, because clearly protecting the species is one of the best ways of
mitigating the risk of infection spreading.
The call follows the publication of new research by Jon Bielby and his colleagues
suggesting that even small scale Badger culling might increase rather than
reduce the spread of Bovine Tuberculosis.
Research has shown that culling a single Badger from a family can cause
a perturbation that spreads TB. Quite ironic how behaviour of ignorance can
cause such dire deprivation not just in nature, but the whole of life in
general.
I listen to the miserable news now coming out
of Iraq. It was in the early nineties with the operation of Desert Storm led by
“Storming Norman” Schwarzkopf to end one of the world’s most brutal regimes of
Saddam Hussein’s. His statue in Baghdad
was eventually toppled on April 9th 2003 and here we are in 2014 and
Iraq is one of the most dangerous places on earth. The disturbances throughout the Arab
uprising, Egypt in particular springs to mind.
When the West cries out for regime change hoping in their naivety it
will make the peoples’ lot in that particular country so much better when in reality,
it is the total reverse. Whereas in these dictatorships the majority of law
abiding people can bring up families and have a certain degree of stability in
their day to day lives and a degree of certainty of when the next bottle of
water can be obtained and the next loaf of bread can be placed on the
table. Democracy is the finest old wine
of them all. It takes hundreds of years
to get it right, in the UK’s case, just over four hundred years. But we seem to
have an appetite to blast democracy into countries that realistically are
simply not ready for it. Democracy is an
evolution. It is an evolution of
fairness, justice for all and above all else, humanity. So many peoples’ and families’ hopes have
been given an expectation that realistically could never ever have been
achieved on a timescale that quite honestly is literally comic book. A
Hollywood type of leadership has been brought in to world affairs where the
bigger the crash, bang, wallop the quicker these sad situations would be
resolved, when in reality it is time, education, patience, nurturing and very
often help, the type of help that is tangible to these fledgling democracy
economies that is needed. Simply an
economy that filters that particular country’s wealth and resources from the
great to the humble is the most fundamental attribution to any democracy.
Speaking
of democracies, my Badger sett practices nature’s democracy in the woodland on
a daily basis. The cubs are now almost
the size of their parents and the play fighting and wrestling is a constant
source of entertainment. A pecking order
is found and an equilibrium is practiced to the degrees of tolerance that a lot
of world societies would be happy to call their own.
Please watch my short film of my Badgers
wrestling and frolicking in a Cotswold woodland.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKjT28UNUTE&feature=youtube_gdata
Badgers wrestling in the woodland.
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