The petition to get chris packham sacked

[Whisky2014]

Wtf is this shit?

"87,866 Supporters
BBC to sack Chris Packham
As an employee of the BBC, Chris Packham should remain impartial and keep his views and beliefs to himself however, he is the face of many anti hunting campaigns and uses his celeb status as a platform to push his anti hunting agenda, he has made his goal to ban all kinds of hunting, and country sports and pursuits and I feel he is no longer fit to work for the BBC"

How about David Attenborough then? From this person's logic he should also be sacked

You don't live in the country, do you? We're over run with the damn things.

Yep, I live in the country, very rural sheep farming area. I see corvids every day, as well as perfectly healthy live lambs and sheep.

I think people are missing the point in that the licensing change still allows people to shoot them if they have tried every other means

So if you genuinely have a corvid problem, then you can sort it out. No one is stopping you from doing so.

I presume that’s s no derxa, the lamb will be slaughtered the same as it would have anyway, and money will be going in your pocket yes? Hmm, sorry your good deed for the day was a selfish one

They worry that a dead lamb is a financial loss, they see their crops being eaten as a financial loss.
Very unfair to generalise a whole industry of people and say that's all they care about. There are so many different types of farms and ways of doing things that you can't lump the whole lot in together.
I sobbed when the vets had to put down one of my lambs this week that I've been hand feeding but she just couldn't make it.

lamb will be slaughtered the same as it would have anyway It's a ewe lamb so no it won't.

As a pp said above, some species now need culling in the UK such as deer because we have messed up the ecosystem and removed the natural predators. Do we really want to keep repeating that mistake?
Well, as I hoped you'd get from what I said, human population pressures mean that we are not going to be able to reintroduce all those predator species all over the UK AND manage to provide a reasonable amount of our own food at the same time. So we have to cull to retain woodland cover, allow some bird species to survive, and enable us to grow some bloody food.

It's also worth remembering that the large corvid populations present are AFTER the use of the old general licences for going on for thirty years. The numbers of birds culled had in no way driven corvid populations down: I see far more jackdaws, crows and magpies now than I ever did as a kid. Wood pigeons ditto.

Prompted by this thread, I took a look at the new crow licence (one for magpies has yet to be issued, so if it's magpies going after your lambs, you are, for the moment, fucked). It's very much open to interpretation, so much so that I can imagine someone acting in good faith ending up with a conviction.

Emma, you clearly dislike livestock farmers. For what it's worth, you might want to consider the amount of 'wildlife management' aka pest control that goes on around cereal and vegetable crops. No food is 'cruelty free', and extensive livestock systems (like most sheep farming in the UK) provide a lot of spaces within them for wildlife - far more so than does intensive arable farming and vegetable growing.

Rolott Stupid thing to say. A slow horrible tortured death rather than a quick dispatch- can you not see the difference?
Sheep farmers are not in it for the money. It’s a way of life. If you saw how hard being a shepardess or literally any other works you’d be embarrassed you ever said that. Unless you liked animals and appreciated the countryside you’d never do it for the money.

Where would you like your vegetables grown exactly? Plastic poly tunnels blocking more of the countryside off? Other side of the world so you don’t have to see them defending them from being eaten? Or maybe just produced in factories in chemical form. Then we can get rid of farms, farmers and the countryside once and for all.
We could just make it recreational national parks. No need for any sort of animal control there ( aside from the rats, deer eating the trees, grey squirrels)

Assume you mean Emma hopefully Velvet?

As we know from this thread Emma does indeed grown all of her own vegetables and lives an entirely sustainable and cruelty free life, and is in fact so environmentally friendly she has even adopted children rather than add to the population.

I assume she is so perfect she must be queen vegan or summink

We can all learn a lot from Emma

Scrowy, who do you think you are? I adopted children rather than add to the population? You don’t know the reason behind why I have adopted my children. What is your need to have gone so personal like that?

Possibly because, by talking about farmers 'pretending to care' about their stock, you may have pissed her off a little? You have been very rude on this thread, so don't go all 'Oh, you're being nasty!!' when someone has a go.

You also said this:
It’s your job to grow my vegetables so stop moaning. You think I owe you something? We pay you, that’s how jobs work, I don’t owe you anything more than that you get my money not my respect.
which seems to be a bit contradicted by this:
I don’t eat cereals and I grow my own vegetables, My families food is grown on my land and cooked in my kitchen. I don’t knowingly harm any animals in the making of my meals

So you eat just vegetables and fruit and nuts and pulses, nothing else? At all? Just curious about if you buy anything, because if you do, you will be benefiting directly from commercial-scale pest control. And quite probably, you benefit indirectly from local pest control efforts when you grow your own. Unless, of course, you net it all to keep the wildlife off completely.

GrumpyMiddleAgedWoman there’s one thing talking about vegetables and there’s another talking about someone’s children.

I stand by my point, these people are constantly moaning about how horrible their jobs are, horribly long hours, all these horrible pesky crows ruining their lively hoods. My comments were in a response to someone basically telling me I should respect them because they grow my food and I said me paying them is what I owe them not respect.

So to answer your next question I do grow everything the best I can, I have also said that when I do buy food I would happily pay more for it, so for the people saying ‘I bet you wouldn’t be happy if the prices increased’ I actually wouldn’t mind!

Perhaps if you are right and I am indirectly benefitting from pest control, it doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.

Rolott Stupid thing to say. A slow horrible tortured death rather than a quick dispatch- can you not see the difference?
Sheep farmers are not in it for the money. It’s a way of life. If you saw how hard being a shepardess or literally any other works you’d be embarrassed you ever said that. Unless you liked animals and appreciated the countryside you’d never do it for the money.
I am a farmer! I was quoting another poster that said farmers were only in it for the money and disagreeing! I get upset when my lambs die because they're my lambs not because of money.

Scrowy, who do you think you are?

Ummm, Scrowy... ma'am

I think if people look back at your posts they will see that I'm not the one that made it personal. Im only repeating the information you offered up as evidence as to your eco friendly credentials.

Meanwhile I will carry on putting up signs, writing letters to the parish newsletter, fundraising for electric fences round curlew nests, spending my evenings and weekends asking dog walkers to put their mutts back on leads in a SSSI

Oh and sheep farming in a traditional way, providing high quality, low input grass fed protein into the food chain.

these people
Emma, you really don't like farmers, do you? And as for pest control, do you have any viable alternatives? Given the billions of people on the planet who all need to be fed? It's an unpalatable truth: for humans to survive, other animals are going to die. It's how ecosystems work: organisms compete for resources.

Nobody was asking for your 'respect'. They were just pointing out the power that shoppers have when it comes to what is grown.

ColdNeverBotheredMeAnyway

My post: They are extremely aggressive to other birds, frequently attack smaller birds in flight, and also have a habit of dive bombing cats.

Your reply: "Every single predator is extremely 'aggressive' to its prey.

Cats, in fact, are one of the worst.

So are we saying that some predators are ok because they're cute, but others aren't?"

No, of course not. I prefer cats to crows though - that's just my own preference. Domestic cats are usually well fed so don't need to hunt for their food, but they still have the hunting instinct in them, which is not their fault. It seems that instinct means that they still enjoy chasing and catching prey, even though they often don't know what to do with it once it's dead.

I'm not suggesting that crows are inherently evil, or that they should be wiped out, but I do think there are less hawks and other larger birds of prey around today to keep the crows under control, so I understand why farmers may need to shoot them. Also, I do think that many farmers care about their animals, and want them to have quality of life, no matter how short that life may be. It's entirely possible for farmers to care about animals AND profit margins, these things are not mutually exclusive.

I have read many accounts of crows pecking out the eyes of live lambs and find it utterly horrific. I try to understand why a crow would do that, and the only possible explanation is that it simply sees lambs' eyes as tasty treats to nibble on, while having no thought of the suffering it is inflicting on the poor lambs. It's probably just eating to survive, with no particular thought in its head other than "this tastes nice". But still, as a farmer, I'd do anything possible to stop crows blinding lambs. They don't have very long lives, just a few months, but they should not have to cope with being tortured and blinded by a crow, who just happens to think that eyes make a tasty snack.

Crows presumably go for eyes because they lack the weaponry and strength for a more direct kill? They are very clever, and presumably have worked out that disabling the victim via eyes = good meal shortly. I'm dealing with 150 ravens and 1800lambs right now. Ravens are more powerful - they can bite off a lamb's tail and work in groups to separate lambs and mothers. They also know when a ewe will have a second lamb and steal her first while she is disabled pushing.

I like ravens, but its horrific.