Saturday 28 December 2013

Badgering

Melissa Kite writes:

The Daily Telegraph’s excellent interview with the head of the Countryside Alliance today tells us what many people in the countryside have known for a long time.The RSPCA is a malign organisation. I wrote my own expose of the ‘charity’ in February this year in which I compared it to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

More and more people are realising that the RSPCA is a powerful group of snoopers who seem to exist for nothing so much as to further their own power.

The RSPCA is really now so political it should not be able to call itself a charity and it should not carry the Royal prefix when it loathes everything the Queen does in her spare time — hunting, shooting, fishing, going to the races, and so on. I am amazed Her Majesty has not told them where to go.

If you want to experience the weird and twisted world of the RSPCA, just pick up the phone and call them now. Their helpline asks you first if you want to report a dead or injured badger. That’s a little protest against official government policy, the badger cull, you understand.

The long, rambling list of options goes on and on until eventually you are offered the chance to report a case of domestic animal abuse.

But you would be forgiven for thinking it really isn’t interested in animal welfare.

The RSPCA is a political lobbying group, a militant animal rights pressure group that exists to push an agenda so extreme it is barely credible that it has been getting away with it for this long.

Using the money left it in wills by little old ladies, and donated by well meaning members of the public who genuinely still believe it will rescue starving horses, the charity forges ahead with a set of beliefs drawn from members of ultra hard-left and decidedly loony organisations like the Political Animal Lobby and the League Against Cruel Sports, many of whom believe animals are equal to humans, and who infiltrated the RSPCA years ago and now hold sway on its ruling council.

They exist now not to help animals in need but to pursue and punish animal-owners whose beliefs and methods they don’t agree with. They like a bit of class warfare above all things.

The RSPCA chief executive Gavin Grant not only wants to save every fox that country folk would quite rightly kill as pests before they maul and slaughter livestock, but has said on record that he is there to protect every kind of vermin including mice and squirrels.

Elderly householders who have killed squirrels wreaking havoc in their gardens have been dragged through the courts and treated like the worst kind of criminal. The only legal way to deal with a squirrel, according to the RSPCA, is to take it to the vets for a lethal injection. Yes, it would be funny if it were not happening.

Mr Grant has his sights set on the racing industry too. Those who enjoy a day out at the races should know that he thinks this sport is cruel and it is on his hit list. He has already had the fences re-made at Aintree, and if his previous record is anything to go by, he won’t stop there.

The RSPCA would have you believe they have special ‘prosecution’ powers but they do not. They bring private prosecutions costing hundreds of thousands of pounds because they can: they use the money people donate to them to wage a war against ordinary citizens.

Why? I believe it is because they are run predominantly by fanatics, and they have become power-crazed. They are the only private group that prosecutes people in this country. They are out of control and totally unaccountable.

They need to be stopped.

However, I for one fail to see what is left-wing about a private organisation, and rather a posh one at that, which dresses up in pretend Police uniforms (is that not a criminal offence?) in order to conduct investigations and then bring prosecutions, as well as issuing "Official Warnings" that are not in fact any such thing.

General Sir Barnaby White-Spunner, the curiously unnamed Telegraph interviewee above, was also interviewed on PM this afternoon, when the BBC decided to prove his point by asking only about the RSPCA and not about his comments in relation to the mobile telephone coverage on which Britain lags well behind comparable countries, or in relation to the depiction of the countryside on the BBC.

"There is more signal in Helmand Province than in Dorset," said Sir Barnaby in the earlier interview, and he would know. Over to Labour, since the Coalition has put every seat into play.

If, that is, Sir Barnaby and his organisation really are prepared to talk and act about mobile coverage, broadband provision, public transport, the Royal Mail, the Agricultural Wages Board, and so much more besides. Imagine the reaction from the Blairite remnant, if quite such causes brought quite such people into the tent.

On hunting, all that Labour has to promise is a free vote. Cameron has failed to deliver even that. Ggavin Grant ran Nick Clegg's Leadership Campaign. Free votes in the Major years delivered majorities for a ban, but the Bills were talked out and such like.

As for the depiction of the countryside on the BBC, it is all upper-middle-class commuters, The Vicar of Dibley for years and years and years, and whatever the Grundys' accent on The Archers (which is allegedly set in the Midlands) is supposed to be. Although it will have to wait for another time, Richard Curtis has a lot to answer for in general.

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