Jeremy Clarkson: forget Chris Packham’s coup — we farmers speak the only language pigeons understand
Fishing. It’s not one of my specialist subjects. I do not want to stand up to my gentleman’s area in an icy Scottish river and I’d rather spend my spare time in the pub, with friends, than sitting, by myself, on a damp canal bank with a bag full of maggots. Fishing, really, is for people who hate their children.
But, this morning, I feel duty-bound to come to the defence of the nation’s anglists, who are being blamed for an alarming drop in salmon numbers in Scottish rivers. There used to be a time when 25% of all the fish that left their birthplace came back. Today, it’s just 5%.
Those who enjoy animal rights say fishermen and fishermen women are to blame, along with farmers and bankers and possibly Mrs Thatcher, and conveniently fail to mention a couple of important points. Almost all the salmon caught by anglers are allowed to resume their journey after they’ve been landed. And, more importantly, the mouth of every Scottish salmon river is patrolled these days by an armada of hungry seals.
You want to get the salmon numbers up, you must do something about the number of seals. But what? Seals have big doe eyes and puppy-dog faces, and no one wants to see them being beaten to death with bats.
This, then, is the problem with conservation. Protect one species — and seals are very protected — and it’s going to have an impact on another. It’s all a question of balance and being sensible. Which, I’m afraid, is hard when our government is being advised by a Swedish teenager and Chris
Packham is a wildlife presenter on the BBC, and I like him. He’s a good communicator, fun to be with, hugely knowledgable about punk rock and able to tell a corn bunting from a reed bunting at 400 paces. He’s also a fine lobbyist. So fine, in fact, that, having teamed up with a former conservation director of the airborne wing of the Labour Party, the RSPB, he was able to convince the government’s conservation watchdog, Natural England, to announce that it is now illegal to shoot pigeons.
Now I’m not going to be silly about this. Last weekend, as the sun blazed down, I very much enjoyed sitting in the garden listening to the wood pigeons cooing away. It’s a sound that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And I don’t hold with the argument that town pigeons should be hounded to extinction because they crap on your car. They do, but it’s not a big issue to get a hosepipe and wash it off.
However, I’m a farmer these days, and one of the things I grow is oilseed rape. I grew enough last year to make 100,000 bottles of vegetable oil.
This year, though, things are tricky, because a weed called black grass, which is immune to herbicides, is ravaging the crop.
And what’s left is being half-inched by pigeons. I’m told that I can try scaring them away with loud bangs and kites and statues of Jon Pertwee, but I’m also told by the Viyella army of local countrymen that none of these things actually works. You have to shoot them. And now we can’t.
Score one for Packham and Corbyn’s RAF. But hang on, because if there’s less oilseed rape, that means there’s less vegetable oil, which will drive demand for alternatives such as palm oil. And palm oil production is what’s destroying the jungles of Indonesia, and with them the orang-utan.
So what the do-gooders have done by helping the pigeon, which is as prolific as nitrogen, is kill more of Borneo’s endangered orange monkeys. And that’s obviously idiotic. Happily, there seems to be a solution.
For nearly 40 years farmers have been using a so-called general licence to shoot pigeons, because they’re protected under wild bird legislation, drawn up to save important stuff like the osprey and the golden eagle and so on.
In short, you could get permission to shoot certain kinds of common and unimportant wild birds, such as pigeons and crows and magpies, if it was bleeding obvious they were stealing eggs, pecking out the eyes of lambs or devastating crops. Well, thanks to Chris Packham’s lot, that permission has now gone.
There is one idea for keeping the pigeon under control. Simply remove it, along with the crow and the magpie, from the legislation covering wild birds. Then no special permission to kill it is necessary. It’s not as if this minor shift in the law would cause millions to take to the countryside each weekend in weirdo NRA combat strides, because to shoot a pigeon you need a gun, and you still need a licence for that.
But will the government allow a pigeon free-for-all? It should. It makes sense. We live in weird times, though, when governments in general and ours in particular are entirely detached from the real world. They seem to live in a universe full of unicorns and magic fairy dust. So there’s no way Michael Gove, who’s running the countryside this week, is going to say, “Lock and load, Farmer Giles. Let’s waste the motherf******!”
So what about this for a plan? We pat Chris Packham on the back and say, with a magnanimous smile, that he has won. A bit like remainers are being urged to do by Brexiteers. But then we carry on as before. A bit like Brexiteers are being urged to do by remainers.
Seriously, can you see the police being that bothered? Really? About the death of a pigeon? And how would they ever know? A shotgun is noisy, but it’s not so noisy that it can be heard in the nearest police station, which these days is usually 20 miles away. And only open from nine to five. On a Tuesday.
Plod isn’t interested when I have a gate or a quad bike nicked, so I can hardly see a Swat team coming through the door with an enforcer ram because they suspect the pie I’m taking out of the Aga has four and twenty pigeons in it
Originally Posted by thieuster
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