More Cows In The UK Spend Their Entire Life Housed Inside

Hundreds Of Thousands Of Wild Animals Killed In Scotland Just So ‘Hunters’ Can Shoot Birds.
An Oxford-led academic study has claimed a staggering 260,000 animals are killed in Scotland every year to protect the grouse population for shooting on country estates.
They said the practice of using traps to cull predators on Scottish moors causes “tremendous, unjustifiable suffering” to creatures and must be fully banned.
Animals targeted include foxes, weasels, stoats, rats and rabbits, as well as crows, magpies, jackdaws, and jays.
However, other animals often end up caught by the traps, such as hedgehogs, badgers, deer, hares and rare pine martens.
The study, by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, claimed even the most humane traps only kill 80% of animals quickly, leaving the other 20% to suffer “for days” with “appalling injuries”.
( Supertrooper, 17.01.2024 )  ..  focusingonwildlife.com

The Royal Society For The Protection of Birds (RSPB) Deliberately Kill Hundreds Of Wild Animals And Birds And Say It’s Predator Control.
The UK curlew population is in critical decline, and the RSPB’s national Curlew Management Trial Programme uses different measures to try to increase it.
Some of the measures focus on habitat management –  where wader numbers are increased and sustained through land restoration.
Another approach is predator control – as used at the RSPB Big Moor reserve: the extermination of foxes, crows and other species which may pose a risk to curlew numbers through predation.
The RSPB maintains that predator control is a last resort, undertaken by thoroughly vetted contractors.
An investigation by Hunt Investigation Team called this into question.

The RSPB were using Larsen traps to capture crows during the springtime breeding season.
Larsen traps are a highly controversial and archaic form of bird trap, used primarily by gamekeepers who have no concerns about their inherent cruelty.
Larsen traps were invented in Denmark, where they have since been banned for being inhumane.
Larsen traps inflict intolerable mental and physical suffering on captive birds.
Trapping during springtime also means that not only do caught birds die, but their dependent chicks also starve in the nest.
Better is expected from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Foxes were also killed on the programme: shot by night in the nature reserve.
The RSPB fox shooting season runs from 30th October – 30th June, which includes the sensitive time in which vixens are pregnant, and when the dependent cubs of killed adults would also starve to death.
This is simply cruel and unsustainable.
It is well known that when one fox is removed from its territory, another will move in, and therefore a continous cycle of killing would be required.
The contractor employed by the RSPB on its Big Moor site is a known member of the local fox hunting and grouse shooting community.
His social media profiles contain gratuitous pictures from hunting and shooting, and he describes himself as “living for hunting and shooting”.

The RSPB publish annual figures of actual animals killed on their behalf.
For example, in 2016-2017, the RSPB killed 661 crows and 434 foxes in the UK.
However, these figures do not account for the thousands of dependent young chicks and cubs who starve to death in the nest or the den as a result of their parents being killed.
The RSPB’s figures therefore grossly underestimate the number of birds and animals killed – and do not reflect the true scale of the suffering.
And the numbers are going up significantly for foxes, crows and red deer (also killed on the Big Moor site).
( Hunt Investigation Team )  ..  huntinvestigationteam.org

A Shocking Decline In Wildlife Populations.
According to the Living Planet 2024 report — compiled by WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) — Earth’s wildlife populations have plummeted by 73% on average in half a century.
The highest declines, 95%, were seen in the Caribbean and Latin America.
A 76% decline was recorded in Africa, and a 60% decrease in Asia and the Pacific.
In the report, the scientists said species loss could speed up along with increased global heating, precipitated by tipping points in the Arctic, the Amazon rainforest and marine ecosystems.
This could lead to disastrous consequences for humans and the environment.

“Globally, we are reaching points of no return and irreversibly affecting the planet’s life-support systems. We are seeing the effects of deforestation and the transformation of natural ecosystems, intensive land use and climate change,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s minister of environment and sustainable development and president of the 2024 United Nations COP16 biodiversity summit.
( Supertrooper, 15.10.2024 )  ..  focusingonwildlife.com

More Cows In The UK Spend Their Entire Life Housed Inside.
The number of larger-scale beef and dairy “mega-farms” in Britain has increased from 756 to 802 in five years, now holding more than 915,000 cattle.
While there is no formal definition of a “mega-farm” in the UK, it is a term commonly used by animal welfare campaigners to describe a large-scale farm confining its animals and using intensive farming practices.
To label a cattle farm as a “mega-farm”, the U.S. definition of a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) is often used.
A business is a CAFO if it houses 700 dairy or 1,000 beef cattle.
The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) revealed that there were currently 802 farm operations in England, Wales and Scotland that held more than 700 dairy or beef cattle.

One farm business has a recorded capacity of up to 12,000 cattle, although any one farm may hold its cattle in smaller herds over a number of different sites.
In Northern Ireland, there are 141 farms with more than 700 cattle, holding a total of more than 141,000, according to the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera).
None of the UK’s devolved administrations could provide the exact number of large-scale farms using continuously housed cattle systems, which animal welfare campaigners often refer to as “mega-farms”.
( Malcolm Prior, 14.08.2024 )  ..  bbc.co.uk

Boris Johnson Supports Killing Foxes For Fun.
But every now and then hard evidence reveals that underneath the sheepskin, Boris Johnson is an elitist wolf who acts to protect the elitist pack.
His opinions on fox-hunting laws from an article he wrote for the Spectator in 2005, he said:
“It is like skiing, in that you are personally tracing, at speed, the contour of the landscape, and then there is the added interest of the weird semi-sexual relation with the horse, in which you have the illusion of understanding and control. There is the military-style pleasure of wheeling and charging as one, the emulative fun of a pseudo-campaign.”
He argued that the fox-hunting ban was “a Marxian attack” by the Labour government on the upper classes and nothing to do with animal cruelty, and he urged fox-hunters to break the law and keep killing animals.
( Liz Webster, 28.08.2024 )  ..  yorkshirebylines.co.uk

Morons Are Killing Birds Of Prey To Stop Them Killing The Birds They Shoot For Fun.
More hen harriers were killed in 2023 than in any other year on record.
The RSPB’s Bird-crime report also found that at least 1,344 individual birds of prey were persecuted in the UK between 2009 and 2023, and that 75% of people convicted of offences related to the persecution of birds of prey in that period were connected to the game-bird shooting industry.
Shooting estates have historically killed birds of prey because of fears the raptors will eat game birds such as grouse, meaning there are fewer for people to shoot.
Birds traditionally targeted include rare and threatened species such as golden eagles, hen harriers, peregrine falcons, white-tailed eagles and goshawks.
The RSPB is calling for laws to be tightened; though birds of prey are protected by law under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, only one person has been jailed in the past 15 years.
( Supertrooper, 31.10.2024 )  ..  focusingonwildlife.com