The RSPB wanted to electrocute badgers using “honey, syrup, peanut butter or treacle”?!
BLOG: In case you missed it, the RSPB - one of Britain’s foremost animal protection charities - advised its members to lure badgers to electric fences using sweet treats. The reaction from other groups was rightly damning, but once again it demonstrates the insidious nature of speciesism amongst our most hallowed animal-loving organisations.
Last week, The Telegraph broke the news of a furore amongst several of the UK’s top animal protection organisations, following the publication of a new manual from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
The RSPB guidance on how to keep predators out of the charity’s many bird reserves included advice on using cotton wool soaked with “honey, syrup, peanut butter or treacle” plus other irresistible treats attached to live electric fences to electrocute predators.
The advice wasn’t limited to badgers, however, or even only to wildlife. According to reports, the guidance was applicable to hedgehogs, otters, badgers, foxes… and cats. Granted there are wild and feral cats, but domestic cats can roam for many miles and wouldn’t turn their noses up to strips of bacon wrapped around electrified fencing “at the height of a fox’s nose,” another of the RSPB’s bizarre recommendations.
It’s hard to say how dangerous this advice is to badgers, but the barbaric instructions would nonetheless have seen a great many animals receive horrific burns to their mouths and tongues, a wholly unnecessary and disproportionate means of deterring predation on ground-nesting birds such as curlews. Hedgehogs, being quite a lot smaller than badgers, are more vulnerable to electrocution - as the RSPB itself explained in the manual, hedgehogs “tend to roll into a ball when shocked rather than to move away.”
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The manual admitted to frogs dying from multiple shocks and that deer can get trapped on electric fencing, therefore suffering countless electric shocks until they are freed… or worse. Consider also that the RSPB advised that the shock should be strong enough to create a spark large enough to burn grass - and they wanted that to pass through an animal’s tongue?
The Telegraph also revealed as part of its report that Bedfordshire Police were reviewing the manual following a complaint from former England cricketer Lord Ian Botham, on the grounds that it encouraged the offence of “cruelly ill-treating a badger” under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. The RSPCA then got involved, prompting the RSPB to take down the manual.
A spokesman for the RSPB went on to tell the newspaper that they “never use bait to attract predators to the fences nor encourage others to do so,” but made no secret of the fact that they use “predator-exclusion fencing, some of which is electrified… to protect some of the UK’s most threatened birds, such as stone curlew and lapwing”.
But as Lord Botham pointed out, why is the RSPB even using electric fencing in the first place, let alone bait them? The RSPB’s own advice states that fencing can separate chicks from their parents and that adult birds often fly into them. Furthermore, the recommended power for electric fencing given by the manual was 10,000mJ - 2,000 times more powerful than the 5mJ electric shock ‘e-collars’ that the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs wants to ban for the trauma they cause to dogs.
Yet Defra is unlikely to ban electric fencing, meaning that it is yet again one rule for our more beloved animals, and another for the others that society doesn’t want to think about. If that isn’t the epitome of speciesism, we don’t know what is.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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