Today I chanced upon an animal rights protest meeting at Marble Arch.
The man in this photo was dressed to represent bycatch.
Bycatch
Bycatch is where fishing vessels trap species in fishing gear that they don’t intend to catch. They carelessly catch marine mammals, seabirds, turtles, and sharks and more. And in catching them in the machinery and nets they injure or kill the bycatch even if they the throw the catch back into the sea.
And then there’s trawlers scraping the sea bed with nets as wide as the wingspan of thirteen jumbo jets. The weighted net of heavy ropes scrapes all the life out of the seabed.
Badger Culls
A couple were holding a sign protesting badger culls, and we talked about the court case currently being brought by Wild Justice to try to end the culls.
The science doesn’t support culling badgers as a way to stop the spread of bovine TB. It is not even clear that the vector of transmission is from badgers to cows. It could well be the other way around.
The Badger Trust estimates that since 2013, almost 248,000 badgers have been shot.
It’s heartbreaking. In the past I have said the cull is payback for the mass protests that brought an end to fox hunting.
The couple I was speaking to said that politicians were beholden to the farming lobby but that now even farmers themselves were unsure that badger culling worked.
I’m not sure what the benefit of the protest was. Maybe it gave encouragement to the various organisations that were presented. The speaker was telling the assembled protesters to keep on. The speech was ‘them and us’. The mood was ‘them and us’.
Look at these faces. How is it going to be resolved without demonising others? How am I going to do that?
Leave a comment