And thanks to Clare for this post!

Clare has opened a livery yard and in her fields lives a badger family.

Britain's largest carnivore. And we killed more than 200,000 of them this year. So far, no change in Bovine TB. As the science predicted. The cull is a way to appease farmers. I wonder how much it costs?

The US spends $1bn per annum killing predators. Mainly coyotes but also wolves, bears, otters, cougars, bobcats, beavers (which are not even predators) and hawks. Depredation on livestock? Far far lower than the number that die while giving birth, due to inclement weather, through disease, accident of mismanagement. Maybe you can blame 5% of the deaths on predators. Depredation on elk, moose and deer that people want to shoot? That's given as a cause though dramatically more of the wild herbivores die of starvation on overgrazed and limited areas than through predation. So, why? To appease hunters and ranchers.

We just don't like animals being free. We don't want predators eating animals that we want to kill for ourselves and we don't want herbivores eating the grass and tress that we want to use.

Rewilding? How can any type of animal rewilding work when we kill so many animals? I don't know how many deer are killed in the UK annually because they are where we don't want them to be. The ones which are where we want them to be are farmed for food or shot for sport.

Animal Rising protested at the Grand National recently. Three horses died at the event this year. That's bad but it's the tip of the iceberg. 80% of racehorses have ulcers - because horses did not evolve to stand in stables eating high energy food. They should roam about eating roughage. How many die in training? we don't even know. How many are killed because they simply aren't good enough? The BBC did a documentary about that some years ago - the shock as far as the doco was concerned was that they might end up as meat. That's not the shock - why is horse meat worse than cow meat? The shock is that it seems to have had no impact on the racing industry.

Oh but people love it and enjoy it! It's wrong to disrupt people's fun! Oh but people love their horses. Oh but it employs so many people! FFS.

I did not know that millions of chickens die in barn fires annually. I did not know that 18,000 cows died due to a methane containment plant explosion on a dairy farm on Texas recently. Collateral damage because people love the taste of cheap meat and cheap milk. FFS.

I'm disgusted by all this. Disgusted.

I wish the animals would rise.

A couple of quotes from Sy Montgomery's The Spell of the Tiger about the tigers of Sundarbans who have chosen to prey on humans, unlike most other tiger populations.

So seldom do we Westerners think of our own flesh as meat. So seldom do we consider ourselves another being’s food. So seldom do we dare think that a clawed predator could stalk us, kill us with its face, chew our meat from our bones. We live in a land where our ancestors felled the forests and eradicated the predators so that we could pretend we are not made of meat. But the tiger knows this is not true. For beneath our professions and our words, beneath our culture and our clothing—beneath our very skin—we are still, we are always, as we have been since the creation of our kind, prey in the mind and the jaws of the tiger. It is a truth we remember in our childhood dreams of monsters lurking in the dark. The ancestors of the tigers, the leopards, stalked our progenitors from the Pliocene through the Pleistocene; their fearsome cousins, the saber-toothed tigers, with curved, stabbing canine teeth as long as a woman’s forearm, hunted us for eons. This fact, like our instinctive fear of falling— legacy of our tree-dwelling ancestors—we cannot even now completely forget. Though we may work in steel- boned skyscrapers, though we can conceive children in test tubes, though our scientists have invented chemical substitutes for human blood—still, in our darkest dreams, monstrous predators hunt us in the night.

[...]

Even the skeptical Rathin sees the sense of the idea. The man-eater, he says, is the most powerful force protecting Sundarbans’ forest—and protecting the people who depend upon its bounty. “The tiger is silently doing the work of ecodiscipline,” he told me. “In that way the tiger is a god—the tiger is looking after the forest, and the forest is looking after it.” It is no accident, his words suggest, that the largest population of tigers in the world lives in Sundarbans, and that here survives the largest remaining tract of mangrove forest on earth. Here the tiger still wields its most potent power over people.