this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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UK Nature and Environment
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What a shitshow of a headline, story, source and comments.
The headline leads one to believe he's an indiscriminate animal killing monster. He's calling for culling to create healthy populations. Now I have zero idea what that looks like in the UK. But neither am I giving a vegan website much credibility for fairness in reporting this.
As to the badger cull, they post both sides. Good on them! Haven't read those articles, but the sources seem fair enough. (We're one of the few US states with zero badgers, what do I know?)
As to beavers, yeah, they can indeed tear shit up. There's a dam down the road from my camp, and it's glorious! Totally changed the landscape (several acres) and raised biodiversity, you can tell by hanging around and investigating. One small example; There are wild pitcher plants where there otherwise would be none, and those are endangered here.
Probably not so glorious depending on the intent for that land... I'd gladly turn over my couple of acres of swamp to beavers to make a pond and a creek, maybe not if I relied on that land for food and income.
He is being indiscriminate. He literally said that "all wild animals have to be culled". There are tens of thousands of species in the UK. There are maybe only a handful of these species where you could possibly argue that culling is required (when ignoring viable alternative solutions).
It concerns me greatly how easily you trust Drax and how confidently you speak regarding this topic despite knowing nothing about what healthy populations of wildlife in the UK look like.
Drax owns thousands of acres of farmland, he has a vested interest in protecting livestock over wildlife. That alone should make all of us skeptical about anything he says.
The primary reason we're culling badgers is because of the issues they cause to the owners of livestock. It's nothing to do with creating a healthy population of badgers.
Drax says that deer need to be culled because otherwise the health of deer will deteriorate. That's nonesense. Deer are culled because they destroy vegetataion, especially young sapling trees, which is only a problem because we have systematically elimiated all large land predators in the UK over the course of hundreds of years (e.g. wolves, lynx, bears).
If it was about creating healthy populations of wildlife then it would be much more effective to reintroduce these large land predators back into the UK instead of culling. But it's never been about creating healthy populations of wildlife, it's about making as much money possible through farming. Therefore reintroducing large land predators is absolutely not an option for livestock owners because large land predators will also prey on livestock.