From Magazin “Der Spiegel”: 02/26/2022
The South African government allows hunting of endangered species – including black rhinos, which are classified as critically endangered. The proceeds will go to impoverished villages.

South Africa has cleared a number of endangered species for shooting.
“A total of 10 black rhinos and 150 elephants can be hunted,” said the country’s Ministry of Forests and Environment.
Some leopards will also be shot under certain circumstances.
Proceeds from the sale of hunting licenses go to impoverished rural communities in the hunting areas.

Black rhinos are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The number of animals in the wild had recently doubled from an all-time low three decades ago to more than 5,000.
The ministry said the quota allocated was based on population estimates “which are currently trending upwards.”

In 2014-2017, black rhino poaching had increased dramatically.
On average, 1,000 animals per year were illegally killed during this period. However, the problem could be contained.
Last year, 451 black rhinos were illegally killed.

The official hunting quota for elephants has been set in accordance with international laws on trade in endangered species, the ministry said.
The elephant population is growing (!!!) and 150 animals is less than 0.3 percent.

According to the ministry, hunting of leopards is limited to animals over the age of seven (!!!) and only in regions where the populations are “stable or increasing”.

https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/umstrittene-grosswildjagd-suedafrika-gibt-seltene-tiere-zum-abschuss-frei-a-f934924f-4524-4d83-9a3d-498c846bbf23

And I mean…If a hunter buys such a license, can the animal stay alive?
No! because the hunter wants something for his money, namely satisfying the desire to end a life.

This is blood money.
There has never been a worse excuse to legitimize hunting and poaching.
This is an excuse to bring rich big game hunters into the country.
Any Saudi prince or son of American politicians will take great pleasure in pulling the trigger.
Or can the old king of Spain do it again…

What a disgusting perversion…
Nobody has lost anything in the habitats of these animals.
Rhinos defend their calves should someone get too close to their habitat.
Elephants and leopards too, by the way.
Because humans don’t respect their habitats and rob them, the simplest “solution” always comes up: shoot them down.

Shame on South Africa!
The goal must be for Africa to benefit from its biodiversity and intact nature without destroying it.

And quite frankly now: if a country like South Africa isn’t even able to help these impoverished regions without shooting down these endangered animals, then something suspicious is afoot

My best regards to all, Venus

Or to put it the other way around: what kind of punishment is appropriate for someone who kills a turtledove?

A criminal court in Malta has now answered this question for itself and sentenced a hunter to a fine of 1,000 euros for illegally shooting down a turtle dove.
In addition, the man’s hunting license was confiscated for two years.

Judge dr. Elaine Mercieca saw it as proven that on April 20, 2020, the man had killed a turtle dove near the village of Selmun during the closed season. The main piece of evidence was a video created by the Committee Against Bird Slaughter that shows the shooting down.

The committee welcomes the verdict, even if many feel that the sentence is too low.
The reason is that according to Maltese law it is “only” a closed season offense and not the shooting of a strictly protected species that is protected all year round.

Turtle doves are a huntable species in Malta and may legally be shot in autumn but not in spring when the birds are on their way to their breeding grounds.

https://www.facebook.com/Komitee.CABS/

And I mean…Hunting remains widespread in southern European countries such as Spain, Italy and Malta.
Maltese hunters even start shooting turtledoves in spring

According to estimates by the University of Giessen (Germany) from 2016, millions of turtle doves are shot every year in the Mediterranean alone.
In addition to the official catches or kills for the pastime of the registered hobby hunters, the number of unreported cases is many times higher.
In Italy alone, it must be assumed that 5.6 million birds of various species are illegally killed every year.

The Italian Hunting Federation, a member of FACE, the European hunting federation, has campaigned hard to blast the very last lovebirds out of the sky.

Driven by their murderous hobby, hunters don’t want to give up their beloved prey.

Planck and Einstein thought hunters were psychopaths.
If one reads the daily news how many wild boars with their children or how many foxes are being massacred by hunters and only out of a lust for murder, this opinion is confirmed.

My best regards to all, Venus

Hunting lobbyists always like to use the lack of natural enemies as an argument when it comes to hunting encroachment on wildlife populations. At least in the case of foxes and other predators in our latitudes, this is a false conclusion.

Fox hunting has been banned in Luxembourg since 2015.
The horror scenarios projected by the local hunting association FSHCL, but also by the German colleagues at the time, did not come to pass: Environment Minister Carole Dieschbourg confirmed only last year in response to a parliamentary request from the opposition that after years there were no indications of an increase of the fox population in Luxembourg.

Controls and counts with wildlife cameras would rather indicate a stable, constant stock.

Even the infestation of foxes with the fox tapeworm has decreased since the hunting ban.
While the fox tapeworm was still diagnosed in 40 percent of foxes in 2014, it was recently less than 20 percent.

Nor can one blame the foxes for the decline in ground breeding or even biodiversity.
In Luxembourg, for example, the partridge was almost extinct at the beginning of the 1980s, despite the fact that fox hunting was still intensive at the time.

According to the Minister for the Environment, the loss of biodiversity, particularly among ground breeders, is due to the destruction of the habitat and the associated loss of insects as a source of food.

Luxembourg could be a model for Europe when it comes to fox hunting.

However, there is probably a lack of political will in this country to make hunting at least animal welfare-friendly.
For most animal species there is not even a reasonable reason for hunting within the meaning of the Animal Welfare Act.

Together with many other animal protection societies and the Fox Action Alliance, Wild Animal Protection Germany demands the abolition of fox hunting and the review of all animal species subject to hunting law with regard to a reasonable reason.

https://www.wildtierschutz-deutschland.de/single-post/fuchs-luxemburg

And I mean…While the German lust killers, also known as “hunters”, pursue the foxes with all sorts of violent means at this time of the year, the neighboring European countries present themselves in some cases much more rationally when it comes to hunting.
And they are proud that the abolition of fox hunting, which has been going on for over six years, is so effective.

German hunters kill and dispose of over 400,000 foxes every year
In most federal states, the red fox is hunted without a regular closed season.
During the mating season, during the gestation period, while rearing the young, while wandering in search of a territory.

They are hunted with traps, dogs are sent into their burrow, the retreat for the birth of the puppies, they are kept in barren kennels to train so-called burrow or ground dogs on them, they are victims of battue hunts and fox weeks.

Every year well over 400,000 red foxes die in Germany from hunting!
Foxes cannot be used as food, and fox fur has long ceased to be popular.
About 97 out of 100 foxes killed are thrown into bushes or, at best, buried.

The hunters in Germany basically justify the fox hunt with three “reasonable” arguments:

– The fox also transmits diseases that are dangerous to humans, such as rabies and fox tapeworm,
– It is by no means endangered because of its high population and thirdly
– The fox has to be hunted because there is a risk of wiping out ground-breeding birds that have become rare.

There is also not just one single scientifically reliable research paper that could be used to justify the three steep theses mentioned.
This is especially true for the blind claim that more intensive fox hunting would have a stabilizing effect on the populations of endangered species.
That is just as much nonsense as the statement that hunting can significantly reduce the fox population.

The opposite is true, as scientists and wildlife biologists can attest. The more vehemently these animals are pursued, the higher their reproduction rate.
In this way, losses can be compensated for quickly.
Nature arranged it that way.

So…the only honest reason for fox hunting and any other hunt is, that the perpetrators enjoy it.
And a murderer won’t let that can be spoiled.

My best regards to all, Venus

Following Born Free’s formal response to the government’s call for views on new measures to reduce transmission of bovine TB among cattle, we are pleased to report that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has issued a positive response.

Despite efforts from the National Farmers’ Union to get this process shelved or watered down, new measures will include improvements in TB testing for cattle, speeding up TB cattle vaccine trials, expanding badger vaccination and ending intensive cull licences – although not until 2024.

However, we could still see tens of thousands more badgers brutally killed before the barbaric cull policy finally ends.
Since 2013, over 140,000 badgers have been trapped and gunned down, with many most likely suffering a prolonged and painful death, and at a public cost of over £70m, in the UK government’s ill-advised effort to control tuberculosis in cattle.

“This debacle is the largest slaughter of a protected species in living memory,” explains badger expert Dominic Dyer, Born Free’s British Wildlife Advocate & Policy Advisor. “Badgers have been shot across a huge area of England stretching from Cornwall to Cumbria, pushing the species to the verge of local extinction in parts of the country which they have inhabited since the Ice Age.

“Despite the huge cruelty and cost of the badger cull, the government has provided no reliable scientific evidence to prove that the mass destruction of badgers is making any significant contribution to lowering bovine TB in cattle in or around the cull zones.
The levels of bovine TB in cattle herds within cull zones remains virtually the same as that outside of the killing fields. The cull policy has made no difference, yet thousands more badgers will lose their lives before it is finally brought to an end.

“There are over 9.6 million cattle in Britain and we move more cattle than anywhere else in Europe, the movement of cattle is a key driver for the spread of bovine TB in both cattle and badgers.

For too long the government and the farming industry have wrongly blamed the badger for spread of bovine TB in cattle, which has become a dangerous distraction from tackling the root cause of the disease in the cattle industry.

Despite push back from the National Farmers’ Union, the government is now waking up to this reality and is finally getting serious about an exit strategy from badger culling.
But it can’t come soon enough.

“It’s time the government stops playing the badger blame game and brings an immediate end to all further killing of badgers.”

https://www.bornfree.org.uk/news/badger-culling-to-go-on

And I mean…Badger culling licences have been granted across 44 areas in England, Natural England published a list of regions where badger culling licenses have been issued on September 7, 2020.

Tens of thousands of the animals have been killed in a government-backed scheme lasting nearly a decade that has left campaigners fearing badgers could become extinct in parts of England.

New licences have been issued in areas in Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, Warwickshire, Somerset, Shropshire, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Derbyshire and Avon.

This is no longer a badger control policy, it’s a badger eradication exercise.

The tragedy is, that the “vast majority” of badgers being killed were TB-free, with no impact from their deaths on reducing the disease in cattle.

Badger Trust executive director Peter Hambly said: “New national polling shows that only 15% of people in England support the ongoing badger cull, and yet the cull is bigger than ever and the Government continues to chaotically expand and intensify the killing.

“There is simply no let-up in the way the cull continues to expand and claim more badger lives.

“When the Government releases the 2021 cull figures, people will be shocked at the huge number of badgers killed and increasing areas of the country will be empty or near-empty of badgers.

“This is a national wildlife tragedy happening right before our eyes.”

This is the usual way to “solve” problems, most of which are caused by humans.
This is what the government in Denmark did with the millions of mink, and Germany is also practicing the cruel culling of thousands of chickens because of bird flu

The cruel irony is that such diseases will continue to affect us in the future, as long as we want to engage in factory farming and animal exploitation
Man is the only animal on the planet that doesn’t learn from his mistakes.

My best regards to all, Venus

These are images that animal abusers do not like.

Hobby hunters in southern France are distraught.
Within a short period of time, their animal cruelty facilities were repeatedly destroyed because of a technique they practiced in Provence for trapping blackbirds and thrushes, which is very controversial.

“That’s a real command,” Eric Camoin rants.
“There are several who came here to reconnoiter and then destroy everything – on a full moon night!”
A fortnight earlier similar destruction had been recorded in the departments of Vaucluse and Var.
Near the destroyed posts were found signs calling hunters murderers or animal rights activists.

The chairman of the national association for the defense of the traditional thrush hunt, who invited the local press to express his “weariness”, said: “This is the tenth time this has happened.”
He said: “Whether one likes these practices or not, that’s another debate. I’m not asking you to love the hunt.
Everyone is free in their opinion. But at a certain point you can’t take it all and just destroy it.”

A hunt that sparks debate

“Hunting with glue is part of our heritage,” says Gérard Guidice, President of the Marignane Hunting Society.
“Here we are in Provence. If you attack this kind of hunting, you attack our culture!”
In fact, glue hunting, practiced mainly in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, is regularly denounced by environmentalists and animal rights activists.

At the end of August, Emmanuel Macron decided to suspend the hunt with glue for this season, denounced by environmentalists and bird conservationists.
The gesture was also in response to orders from the European Commission that gave France three months in early July to phase out this illegal hunting method, which a 2009 directive bans barring an exemption.

“There are clubs that stir up hatred against this practice and groups behind it do the dirty work,” according to Eric Camoin.

“We’ve filed complaints,” says Eric Camoin. “However, the gendarmes and police officers don’t even come by.
They don’t care. They receive the complaints and file them. We can’t go on like this.”

“One day we will attack the perpetrators,” says a hunter from Marseille, who prefers to remain anonymous.
We’ll get her. We manage to hunt every kind of animal, so we’ll get them!
This is not a death threat, but a warning…”. (!!!)

Eric Camoin is concerned: “There will be drama. There will be a catastrophe because sooner or later we will find it.
We won’t give up and we’ll manage to find out who it is.
If a hunter comes across a guy destroying a post, I don’t know how the guy will react!”

France remains the only EU country that still allows glue hunting. The hunters are demanding urgent intervention from the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, at the risk of the amateur hunters becoming the police themselves.

https://wildbeimwild.com/unkultur/frankreich-jagdstationen-zerstoert/56857/2022/01/28/

The activists anonymously left the following “message”:

English : Action Stop Hunting Animals in France
“The murderers and animal killers are still cracking down, which is why the members of ALF came back to destroy 21 hunting houses. Real structures in nature with concrete roof steel beams … empty cartridges left to pollute the community.

Armed psycopathes who cut open and put perches to kill all kinds of animals such as thrushes and blackbirds!
You degenerates, have you not seen that there are almost more birds …

For the birds, mumps and other animals you raise, feed and hunt, ALF will always be there.
Also learn to count band of “shit hunters”, not 18 but 21 more cisterns”

And I mean…Hunting birds with so-called limesticks fundamentally violates EU law.
Limestick hunting was once used throughout France to capture and eat songbirds.
Hence the trick with the sticky mass.
This is how you can catch birds without hurting their bodies.

Today, however, the hunt has become more of a competition of murders, where it is all about who catches the most blackbirds or other thrushes.

We’ve been protesting the brutal and illegal method of killing birds with limesticks for decades.
Even the EU Commission warned France’s hunters in July 2020 to end this “illegal form of hunting”.

Apparently, however, the hunters of France do not want to civilize and they still practice their murderous and illegal hunting techniques in the 21st century, in the heart of Europe, in the name of tradition and heritage..

If the hunters from Provence want to take revenge, then they still have to practice a bit.

We show solidarity with the courageous activists.
We say “Thank you”!

My best regards to all, Venus

30 years ago today, on the 9th of February 1991, hunt saboteur Mike Hill was killed at a meet of the Cheshire Beagles.
Towards the end of the days hunting, with sabs having prevented any kills, the huntsman boxed up his hounds in a small blue trailer being towed by an open-top pick-up truck.

The kennel huntsman, Allan Summersgill, along with another man, jumped into the pick-up and on impulse, three sabs who were nearby, jumped onto the back of it to prevent them driving the pack to another location to continue hunting.

Summersgill drove off at high speeds down winding country roads for 5 miles with the terrified sabs clinging onto the back.
It is thought that Mike jumped from the pick-up as it slowed to take a bend but failed to clear the truck properly and was caught between the truck and the trailer, which crushed him.
Mike died where he lay in the road.

Despite the thud, and the screams of the other sabs, Summersgill continued driving for a further mile.
The truck only came to a halt when one of the sabs smashed the rear window of the cab.
The sab was hit with a whip as he tried to stop the truck. Once it had stopped one sab ran back to Mikes prostrate body while the other ran to a nearby house to call for an ambulance.
Summersgill drove off.

Allan Summersgill was never charged

He later handed himself in at a police station. No charges were brought against him and in a travesty of justice, a verdict of Accidental Death was brought at the inquest.
Summersgill is still hunting hares.

Here, a long-standing member of Liverpool Hunt Saboteurs remembers Mike, and the extreme violence that sabs were met with generally throughout that period and which, although to a lesser extent, still continues to this day:

Mike cared deeply about injustice and cruelty towards animals and humans alike.
A naturally kind and caring person who was willing to put hard work into fighting for what he believed in. He loved being with animals and doing rescue work.
It was a natural thing for him to get involved with the anti-hunt movement.
We would talk about the danger of disrupting the hunts.

Sometimes we would make light of it as a coping mechanism but very often the conversation would focus on who was the latest person to be attacked or what we could do to protect ourselves.

So although it was a shock to hear that Mike had been killed, it came as no surprise to most of us.
In fact it was a miracle that we had survived the violence for so long without a fatality.

Continue reading “Remembering Mike Hill” →