My blog last week didn’t happen due to us taking our son
Sam to settle him in at his chosen university where he is going to study
agriculture and all aspects of land management.
A very exciting time for Sam but a little sad for Jackie and I. Our daughter left home to go to Kings University
London to study medicine two years ago and now with our son flying the nest, it
is extremely quiet at home. The years of
them hanging on your every word and listening to your words of advice are now a
memory. The pangs of any parent being
left out of the loop at this particular stage of their life can be quite
traumatic. Will they eat properly? Will
they make new friends? Are they going to like it? And will they be safe? You are only too well aware that your job as
the family protector has been somewhat diminished.
As my wife and I waited for confirmation of him enjoying
it or otherwise, time seemed to pass immeasurably slowly until my wife screamed
from the kitchen to the sitting room. “He
has put some photos up on Facebook,” and
there he was smiling with new found friends, another degree of confidence and
all round, looked a very happy chappie, just like his sister when she started
her university. Jackie and I were really
pleased and were now able to relax in our new life of just the two of us.
Politically, the autumn conferences from the Labour Party
and the Conservative Party went pretty much in the direction that I would have
expected. Labour in their conference
announcing that if they were to win the General Election they would put an end
to this cursed Badger Cull nonsense.
While the Conservative Party’s Environment Minister, Liz Truss has said
that she would like to re-introduce Fox hunting. Such a lame, destructive voice which conjures
up even more loss to our precious environment. The figures of 40% of the world’s
wildlife being lost since 1945 seems to completely evade her. The Coalition
Government of the last four years of the Conservatives and the Liberals on the
whole have served very well although now, the marriage seems to have
irretrievably broken down, with the two parties being at logger heads over
almost everything. But the true saving grace for the
Conservatives was the sending of our British Tornados to be alongside the
Americans in hitting this Isis menace head on once and for all. How wonderful it would all be if the whole of
our Government were to concentrate on the combatting of the Isis terror rather
than needlessly generating and unleashing the Badger Cull terror within our
countryside.
The Badger Cull is now half way through its proposed
running time and already from the people that know, the killing targets are not
being reached. Hardly surprising, because
I have said so many times before, the countryside is not awash with families of
Badgers now or ever has been.
Inhumane, brutal, barbaric actions handed down to one of
nature’s total innocents, the British Badger.
Already there has been many horror stories of vicious treatment being
metered out to the black and white beast which was also very predictable. The Badger Cull in the British Isles of 2013
and again this year has diminished the protected status of the species, inevitably
the consequences were always going to be thus.
DEfRA and the previous minister of the Environment, Owen
Paterson and now Liz Truss have spoken of going out on a late summer’s night
and just popping off the Badgers in a most matter-of-fact childlike, naivity
manner. When in reality those of us who
have studied Badgers know that they can pick up scent from two miles away, they
can hear a twig crack from three quarters of a mile away and for a stranger to
get near a sett to shoot one is nigh on impossible, so they were always going
to be shot from range. Blundering
tactics creating and inflicting wounds which in all cases will cause a very
slow and lingering death.
The Coopers who look over my own Badger sett have
dismantled their tent and withdrawn from the woodlands for their own comfort
and safety. The weather now is starting
to get a lot more autumnal. As I sit on
the edge of the woodland looking out over the autumn brown landscape I see a
tractor and seed drill in the distance.
Plumes of dust trailing in his wake.
We have had the driest September since 1910, the Badgers have found
foraging these last three weeks difficult.
Daddy Cool, the big old male Badger has led them further and further
away from their sett. They are going outside
the safety of his woodland stronghold. This
first autumnal rain that we are enjoying for some time is as welcome to the
Badgers as it is to the newly drilled seed for germination.
Please watch my short film which shows the return of
Daddy Cool to the woodland slumping down, yawning and then falling fast asleep
after a long night’s foraging.
A humble, hardworking and total innocent of the senseless
slaughter that surrounds him. Long live
the Lord Protector of our woodlands.
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