Time-travelling pigs, ponies and cattle on a mission to rewild
Happy International Forest Day and what better way to celebrate than release several absent species into a rewilding project just outside Canterbury, Kent.
Wilder Blean saw bison released into the ancient forest last year and now six Exmoor ponies, four iron-age pigs and four long-horn cattle have also been tasked to bring the forest back to its natural habitat from 10,000 years ago. No pressure then.
I imagined them in endless meetings watching PowerPoint presentations with complicated diagrams about what they needed to do and how to achieve it. But apparently it all comes naturally.
The long-horn cattle will use their horns to break up the scrub and vegetation and then their grazing allows light to enter the forest floor, encouraging new plant life which increases the number of insects, birds and reptiles.
Meanwhile, the Exmoor ponies follow the cattle after they’ve cleared the areas as well as working their way through the undergrowth as their preference is a more woody variety of vegetation.
Behind them come the iron-age pigs whose snouts snuffle around in the soil, allowing new seeds to come to the surface to germinate.
Who’d have thought leaving animals to do what they do best could benefit other creatures.
We can stop online abuse of animals and wildlife trafficking with a new Bill
It’s almost incomprehensible that online creators torture and maim animals in order to make money and people actually buy and sell endangered animals on social media platforms.
Since March 2021, the Asia for Animals’ Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition has identified more than 13,000 social media links depicting animal abuse. Polling by the RSPCA in 2018 indicated that almost a quarter of 10-18-year-olds had witnessed some form of animal abuse online.
I remember my daughter being very upset by a video of a teenage boy biting off a pheasant’s head in the back of a car. She showed it to me and like all violent images there is no unseeing. It stays with you for life. I complained to my local MP whose words were genuine but who was toothless in pursuing any comeback.
And I’m still waiting to hear back from the CEO of Snapchat Evan Spiegal who I wrote to back in July 2019. To be fair to Mr Speigal, the press office did ring me to find out more about it. However, they came back the same day saying they couldn’t find the offending image which is no surprise because…hey, Snapchat’s USP is that you can send images and videos which disappear seconds after they’re viewed.
In 2018, tech companies set up the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online and introduced technology to find and remove such content but admitted “the people behind this awful activity are persistent and constantly evolving their tactics to try to evade those efforts”
But perhaps at last there is some light at the end of the long and dark animal rights’ tunnel in the form of the UK’s much faffed about Online Safety Bill. It’s close to going through Parliament and, as such, it’s up to us to make sure our Government adds animal cruelty and wildlife trafficking content to the Bill’s scope to protect the animals we all profess to love.
If you can spare a moment, please ask your MP to support the amendments set out by the Born Free Foundation. There’s even a template of a letter to use. Thank you.
The Missing Fur Series new book coming soon!
I’ve been desperately trying to finish off the first draft of the third book in the series, The Monkey Stones and I’m nearly there. Hoorah.
If you’re looking for a fast-paced mystery which touches on endangered species and wildlife conservation for a small person aged from 8 to 12, the paperback version of The Macaw of Doom is a bargain at the moment, available for just £4.50 from Amazon.