Ragwort Debates and Authoritarian Behaviour

 One of the most consistent thing that  I’ve encountered during the more than  two decades that I have  studying ragwort, its ecology, toxicology, etc, is that conversations about this plant very often take on an authoritarian tone.

I don’t mean the sorts of  people who wear jackboots , although some of the attackers definitely meet the definition of far right trolls,  but rather a certain  type of rigid mindset that appears over and over again in online postings, public commentary, and even in important  policy documents. So having studied this  I think it’s worth mentioning some of the reasons  why this happens and as I'll show it leads to poor information being disseminated.

Psychologists who have studied it define authoritarianism not merely as a political stance but as a cognitive style. Its  nature is characterised by:

• Deference to authority figures

• Hostility toward dissent or ambiguity

• A preference for certainty, control, and clear rules

This  scientific framework is well-documented in Canadian scientist Dr Bob Altemeyer's work on Right-Wing Authoritarianism  from which I will show a large quote  in a section below,

In ragwort debates, this often manifests as:

• Appeals to status over evidence ("He’s a vet, you’re not")

• Harsh reactions to being questioned ("Stop spreading misinformation")

• Misuse of rules and laws to assert control ("You’re legally required to remove that") It's generally not true with regard to ragwort anyway

• Dismissal of uncertainty or nuance ("It’s poisonous, so it must be dangerous")

The issue here is that ragwort pushes several psychological buttons:

• Fear: It is widely believed to be a serious poison, especially to horses. Largely as I show due to false information from equine organisations.

• Control: It grows in unmanaged spaces, often defying neat control measures.

• Tradition: It has become a kind of symbolic enemy in some  of those narratives that surround land management 

When people perceive that there is a threat whether it is real or not, and especially when it concerns animal welfare, a subject that is almost bound to give rise to emotional arguments, it’s natural for some people to want simple answers and clear action. However, it is the case that desire often overrides careful reasoning and that is quite simply a problem for society. 

So when someone like me comes along and says, "Yes, it's toxic, but the science doesn't support the hysteria," the reaction isn't just to disagree with it. I find there is  often moral outrage, which leads to me being abused and attacked  as if questioning the narrative is dangerous in itself.

I've seen it time and again this kind of poor reasoning accompanied with the most illogical statements.

• People objecting to Freedom of Information requests and claiming they're a "waste of official time"

• Individuals insisting that because a respected vet made a claim, it must be true

• Accusations that questioning public messaging is "dangerous"

• Dismissals of scientific studies as "too old" when they're still valid and widely cited 

For example, Harper & Wood’s 1957 study is still  very relevant and cited today in scientific literature. It is clear to anyone with proper reasoning ability that longevity alone doesn't invalidates scientific findings. Let's remember that we still learn Newton's laws which come from the late 1600s!

Sometimes it is so irrational that even minor corrections (like a typo or small logically irrelevant wrong number) are jumped upon with glee on the quite incorrect assumption that they undermine my position.

It is worth noting in this context  that authoritarian thinking tends to correlate with lower educational attainment. This is particularly so in fields that emphasize critical thinking and openness to complexity. The research demonstrates that individuals with higher education and in particular those who score high in the well established and studied personality dimension of openness to experience  tend to  to tolerate ambiguity and question traditional hierarchies.  Studying  complex ideas and the concepts around them are often their idea of fun. This is me. I identify strongly with this sort of behaviour and thinking.

Something I have noticed quite often is many of the people who make the most rigid arguments in ragwort debates also show basic literacy errors and  also a tendency to rely on memorised claims rather than reasoned evidence. Of course, spelling errors alone don’t indicate authoritarianism, and  in my  case spelling errors can and do sometimes creep in, but poor literacy can be a sign of gaps in the kinds of reasoning skills that protect against it.

This is a serious problem because authoritarian reasoning stifles scientific discourse. It replaces open debate with really poor thinking.

If we are to care about  understanding the issues and the science properly  then, naturally,  we need to resist this style of thought. It's of course  entirely possible to take plant toxicity seriously without falling prey  to exaggerated fear or rigid dogmatic thinking. However, this blog exists because so many people do just that with all sorts of crazy claims having been made.

Ragwort isn't just a ecologically very important wildflower. It's become a symbol onto which people project all sorts of irrational and illogical thinking . We find that when those things get challenged, the reaction is all too often highly emotional and so often it is not about about the facts.

It is an essential part of its nature that science thrives on questions. It is crucial and important that we must be free to ask them without being accused of endangering society every time we point out that the emperor, or the expert, might just not have all the clothes that some poor reasoners would think that they have.

These people rely  so far  too much on concrete thinking that abstract ideas and complexity are invisible to them. I often joke to myself that the concrete starts at one ear and ends at the other!

Here is the extract from Dr Altemayer's  work illustrating the all too typical poor thinking that frustrates me when dealing with these people. Research shows that this sort of personality has poor creativity and rarely succeeds in the complex world of scientific endeavours.

 I should also explain that RWA in his text, means Right Wing Authoritarian. It has not escaped my attention that when I examined a certain word in the copy of the Oxford English Dictionary , the definitive dictionary of the English language, in my local library  that the definition included  the phrase, "a person of right wing authoritarian views."  If you haven't already guessed,  that word is "fascist." I would hasten to say of course that not all the people whose bad thinking I criticise here would necessarily fall into that camp, but I do know that some of them do.

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 Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989,  Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel  universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to  have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not  remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they  steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.

 Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who “got it wrong” had been mainly high RWAs. So she  recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students  from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For  example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on  a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more  trouble remembering details of the material they’d encountered, and they made more  incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the  authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.  Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames  more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or  deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

 All fish live in the sea.

 Sharks live in the sea.

Therefore, sharks are fish.

 The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they  would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the  reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way,  they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test. 

 This is not only “Illogical, Captain,” as Mr. Spock would say, it’s quite  dangerous, because it shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the  logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for  a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that a conclusion is false. 

Deductive logic aside, authoritarians also have trouble deciding whether empirical evidence proves, or does not prove, something. They will often think some thoroughly ambiguous fact verifies something they already believe in. So if you tell them that archaeologists have discovered a fallen wall at ancient Jericho, they are more likely than most people to infer that this proves the Biblical story of Joshua and the horns is true--when the wall could have been knocked over by lots of other groups, or an earthquake, and be from an entirely different era (which it is).

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This is good stuff and if you like it then the good Dr has made it available for free for you to read as a free download.  Don't let the fact that it is free make you think it is of less value. He actually warns against that irrational conclusion. I suspect strongly that he has a good wage or pension and is keen for as many people to read his work as possible, REmember hIt can be found here on his website The Authoritarians

What an AI makes of Defra's ragwort Code of Practice. It is scathing!

AI has its issues and it can raise concern such as is it putting people out of work, However it can prove a powerful tool in evaluating evidence and finding bits of research that might be difficult to find. I often think of it as "Alien Intelligence," as it is much different to human intelligence.

What I have done here is ask three questions. The first one is a real quote from DEFRA's guidance on ragwort control and it is the absolutely key factor in how they establish and promote the amount and rate of ragwort poisoning. The "he" in the quote is Professor Derek Knottenbelt who has also been quoted rather ridiculously as claiming that ragwort is poisoning the Cinnabar moth, which I hasten to say is NOT the main reason that ragwort is an ecologically valuable wildflower.

Here I have used ChatGPT as an independent evaluator of the policy. At first it points out the strength and weaknesses of DEFRA's statements. Then, when it is supplied the actual data obtained from Freedom of Information requests it points out it is completely wrong to use the data and when I tell it that the sentence is from government advice then it  becomes really scathing about the bad science. I quote the responses entirely as a cut and paste from the output of this clever computer program. I have only labelled the questions for clarity

Question 1

What can you tell me about the logic and reasoning in the following statement? "He has estimated a figure of 500 horse deaths from ragwort poisoning in 2000. This figure is based on the number of confirmed horse deaths from ragwort poisoning seen by the Philip Leverhulme Large Animal Hospital Teaching Hospital at Liverpool University as a percentage of all the horse cases treated during the ear, and grossed up to be representative of the total horse population."

ChatGPT said:

The statement presents an estimate of horse deaths from ragwort poisoning using inductive reasoning based on extrapolation. Here's a breakdown of the logic and reasoning behind it, including both its strengths and potential flaws:

---

🔍 Summary of the Logic

1. Observed Data Source:

   • A specific number of confirmed horse deaths from ragwort poisoning were observed at a single veterinary hospital (Liverpool University's Philip Leverhulme Large Animal Teaching Hospital).

2. Proportional Estimation:

   • This number is taken as a proportion of total horse cases treated at that hospital during 2000.

3. Extrapolation:

   • The proportion is then "grossed up" (i.e., scaled) to estimate the number of deaths across the entire horse population in the UK (or another broader context).

---

✅ Logical Strengths

• Use of empirical data: The estimate is grounded in actual confirmed cases, not speculation.

• Methodical scaling: Applying a proportion to a larger population is a common statistical technique when comprehensive data isn't available.

---

❌ Logical Weaknesses and Concerns

1. Sampling Bias:

   • The Liverpool hospital's cases may not be representative of the whole UK horse population.

   • Horses seen at a teaching hospital could have more severe or unusual conditions, potentially overestimating rare events like ragwort poisoning.

2. Confirmation Bias:

   • Only confirmed cases were counted. Ragwort poisoning is difficult to diagnose definitively, so the actual number of cases may be underreported, or misdiagnosed, affecting reliability.

3. Assumption of Uniformity:

   • It assumes the same rate of ragwort poisoning applies uniformly across all horse populations in different regions, which is unlikely (as environmental exposure varies).

4. Small Sample Size Risk:

   • If the number of observed cases was small, the resulting estimate could have high variance and large margins of error when extrapolated.

---

🧠 Type of Reasoning

• Inductive Reasoning: Drawing general conclusions (nationwide deaths) from specific observations (hospital cases).

• Statistical Estimation: Involves proportional scaling and population inference.

---

🧮 Example Analogy

Imagine seeing 2 red cars in a dealership that sells 10 cars and concluding that 20% of all cars in the country are red, then scaling that to millions of cars. That only works if your sample (the dealership) is representative — otherwise, your extrapolation may be way off.

---

📌 Conclusion

The reasoning shows a structured attempt to estimate a figure from limited data, but it relies heavily on the representativeness of a single data source, which is a major potential flaw. It's a reasonable starting point, but not robust enough to be definitive without additional, more representative data.

Question 2

You said:

What can you tell me if I say that a Freedom of Information request to the hospital actually shows only one case in an eight year period?

ChatGPT said:

If a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the hospital reveals only one case of ragwort poisoning in an eight-year period, it severely undermines the credibility and validity of the original estimate of 500 horse deaths in a single year. Here's a detailed analysis of what that implies:

---

🔍 What This New Information Reveals

1. Factual Discrepancy:

   • The original estimate was supposedly based on a meaningful number of confirmed deaths at that hospital in 2000.

   • But if only one case occurred over eight years, then the hospital could not possibly have had a significant enough sample in 2000 to justify such extrapolation.

2. Invalid Assumptions:

   • The method described (taking the hospital’s confirmed ragwort deaths as a proportion and scaling up) relies on false or exaggerated input data.

   • This suggests that either:

     • The original estimator misunderstood or misrepresented the hospital data.

     • Or the methodology was used in bad faith (deliberately misleading).

---

❌ Logical and Ethical Consequences

• Flawed Reasoning:

  • The extrapolation logic collapses entirely if the base figure is incorrect or negligible.

• Inflated Estimate:

  • The claim of 500 deaths is now shown to be not just imprecise but likely unfounded.

• Potential Misinformation:

  • Such a statement, if made in a policy or advocacy context, could be highly misleading, leading to poor regulation or misplaced public concern.

---

🧠 Implications for Critical Thinking

• Always check primary sources: This is a clear example of why it’s essential to verify claims, especially when they're used to support large-scale generalizations.

• Be skeptical of gross-ups: Scaling from small or non-representative data to national figures must be done with rigorous checks, transparency, and peer review.

• Use FOI data carefully: FOI responses, being from authoritative sources, are strong evidence — and in this case, they directly contradict the original narrative.

---

🧾 Summary Judgment

The FOI response strongly suggests the original estimate of 500 deaths due to ragwort poisoning in 2000 is invalid. It exposes either a methodological failure or a misrepresentation of data, making the figure deeply unreliable and potentially misleading.

If you're investigating this further or challenging a claim, this FOI result is a powerful rebuttal.

Question 3

You said:

What can you tell me if I say that the original quote comes directly from government advice?

ChatGPT said:

If the original quote estimating 500 horse deaths from ragwort poisoning in 2000 comes directly from government advice, yet a Freedom of Information request shows only one case at the referenced hospital over eight years, then this raises serious concerns on multiple levels:

---

⚖️ Implications of a Government-Originated Estimate

1. Government Credibility at Stake:

   • Government-issued advice is expected to be evidence-based, transparent, and reliable.

   • If it includes a wildly inflated estimate based on non-existent or misused data, it damages public trust in that institution and its policies.

2. Policy and Regulation Impact:

   • This estimate likely influenced ragwort control legislation, land management obligations, or public guidance to landowners.

   • Policies based on false or unsupported figures may be disproportionate, costly, or even unjustified.

3. Misuse of Authority:

   • Using an authoritative tone (e.g., citing a university hospital) to support a claim that is not factually accurate borders on misinformation, whether intentional or negligent.

---

🧠 Analytical Breakdown

Let’s connect the pieces:

• Claim: 500 deaths based on extrapolated data from Liverpool University's animal hospital.

• Reality (via FOI): Only one case in eight years—not even one per year.

• Logical consequence: The core data point used to justify the extrapolation never existed.

This suggests one of the following:

• The estimation method was fabricated or misunderstood.

• The government relied on poorly vetted secondary sources.

• There was a deliberate inflation to justify a policy objective.

---

🧾 Accountability Questions

This scenario invites tough questions for policymakers:

• Who created this estimate?

• Was the source peer-reviewed or independently verified?

• Why was the estimate not updated or withdrawn when more accurate data became available?

• How was the FOI data reconciled with the original policy narrative?

---

💡 Broader Takeaway

This is a textbook example of why transparency, evidence verification, and skepticism are essential in interpreting government guidance — especially when it leads to regulation. It shows how bad data, once institutionalized, can cascade into widespread misinformation and skew public perception for years.

---

✅ Conclusion

If a government document made this claim, yet the cited data source (the hospital) reports only one case in eight years, then the claim is:

• Demonstrably false or grossly exaggerated,

• Potentially misleading, and

• In need of correction or retraction.

It may justify a formal challenge or review of the guidance that relied on it.

Dr David Marlin's Ragwort Mistakes.

 

Once again I find myself expressing my honest opinions and debunking some misleading anti-ragwort propaganda. One of the problems is that there is a bubble in the equine community. Incorrect facts circulate inside this bubble and are considered correct because they have been repeated so often.

I don’t suffer from this. It was abundantly obvious that misinformation was being circulated even before I started my researches over two decades ago. I get my information from the scientific literature. As regular readers will know I have been studying the science on this for more than two decades.

Today I am debunking an article posted on Facebook by one David Marlin. He is attacking another posting made by someone else elsewhere on Facebook. I'm going through it line by line.

He starts by quoting this other article and criticising things that he thinks are wrong but where the evidence tells us something different.

Dr David Marlin

RAGWORT POISONING IN HORSES 

Lots of "misinformation" about RAGWORT.

This is unquestionably true. There is so much misinformation that there are entire blogs and websites devoted to documenting just some of it as I will show here today.

RAGWORT has been "wrongly labelled as a weed"

It is quite normal and usual for people who study wildflowers not to like them being called weeds.

People who say RAGWORT is a problem for horses are "Scaremongering".

There is no question at all that scaremongering exists. I’ll show examples in this posting!

There's apparently a lot of "Fake News" being spread about RAGWORT and horses.

Unquestionably this is true. This blog is all about it!

RAGWORT is apparently "Not a threat to horses".

This is a small quote taken out of context

An "average horse" would have to ingest over "50kg of RAGWORT" apparently for it to be "Toxic".

Now this is where the bubble comes in. Let's look at this one. Is it reasonable to say this? There will be many horse people who will say that it is nonsense of course, but actually it is not!

One of the first things to determine is how toxic the plant is, and I think it's fair to assume that what the author of the video meant is that it takes 50kg to kill a horse.

We can do this and we can go to the scientific literature. Well, there is an article in the American Journal of Veterinary Research, written by well-known ragwort toxicology experts and we find this statement

"Horses, cattle and rats are susceptible to toxicity (chronic tansy ragwort lethal dose is 5% to 25% of body weight.)"

Incidentally, tansy ragwort is just the American name for our ragwort.

A quick google, which we can assume the author of the video did gives an average horse weight of 700kg to 1000kg. For the lower figure, 5% of body weight is 35 kg and 25% is 175 kg, and the figures for the upper figure are 50 kg and 250 kg. The published research shows that this is correct!

"...We are wrong to remove them [RAGWORT]".

It is a common place opinion for conservationists not to like people removing wildflowers.

These are all pearls of wisdom from some nameless "expert" from a page called WILDLIFE CONSERVATION IN THANET!

Not sure how owners who have lost horses to ragwort poisoning will feel about his comments.

It is at this point that it becomes clear that he doesn’t properly understand the issue. I’ll explain it below but how would they possibly know that they have lost horses to ragwort poisoning! People inside the bubble might believe it is easy to tell but as I will explain below it really isn’t.

SOME RAGWORT FACTS......

Of 865 liver samples received by pathology services over a 5 year period, 72 (8.3%) were found to have evidence of megalocytosis; an indicator of ragwort poisoning. This actually translates to 57 samples a year.

Hang on a minute! The maths is wrong here! 72 divided by five is 14.4 not 57!

The really crucial thing here is that megalocytosis does occur in ragwort poisoning, often known technically as Pyrrolizidine Alkaloid Toxicosis after the toxins in ragwort. BUT the important fact is that it has other causes too. Most significantly mycotoxins, toxins produced by often invisible moulds in feed.

In fact the most recent research by Professor Andy Durham in a paper on these mycotoxins in horses says,

“Liver disease is commonly encountered in equine practice both as clinical and subclinical disease. Outbreaks of hepatic disease are common and once often were suspected to be caused by pyrrolizidine alkaloid (PA) toxicosis,although more recent evidence suggests that PA toxicity is far less common than generally suspected”

REMEMBER - this is going to be a gross underestimation of the number of cases as the majority are unlikely to have samples submitted for diagnosis. Some cases will be treated, some will die, some will be euthanised without a diagnosis.

This is obviously bad thinking since we know there is no way of identifying cases with certainty.

Then there is more bad information.

In 2014 a BEVA survey reported that of 303 vets, 41% had seen at least one suspected case of ragwort poisoning in the past year. Each vet was seeing at least 2 cases per year. 49% died or were euthanised.

It is first necessary to establish what a suspected case can be. The British Horse Society actually published a case in their newsletter where they described a vet turning up to a case and pronouncing on the spot that it was ragwort poisoning without further tests at all.

An equine charity responded to me with a four letter insults on-line insisting they knew of cases based on blood tests. As an expert I can tell you these only tell you there is liver damage which has a multiplicity of causes but they had evidently, it seems, been informed by their vet that blood tests were enough.

More bad information again.

In a survey by the BHS & DEFRA in 2014, 19% of respondents knew of a horse that was susepcted[sic] to have been poisoned by ragwort, with a defintive[sic] diagnosis in 21% of those cases. It was reported that 39% died or were euthanised.

First of all let’s deal with the issue again of a claimed definitive diagnosis. As I have said the evidence is very very clear you cannot have a definitive diagnosis.

It is this bubble again. I have checked and checked. There are scientific papers going back years, one of them in the highly respected journal Nature says that poisoning by fungal toxins is “indistinguishable from ragwort.”

Secondly this survey was RIGGED. First of all there were leading questions telling people ragwort was appallingly dreadful at the beginning but worse than that there was an article in the BHS newsletter instructing people to fill in the survey AND IT GAVE THEM A CASE that they could use to justify the reply that they had heard of to use. This was the case with a vet turning up and pronouncing a diagnosis without tests which I wrote about above.

In any case knowing of a horse that had ragwort poisoning is a very poor question without proper qualification of how they knew. Was it this year or 50 years ago?

Even a few mouthfulls [sic] of ragwort will cause some degree of IRREVERSIBLE liver damage. The more that is eaten, the more the damage. Damage accumulates over time! Moore RE, Knottenbelt D, Matthews JB, Beynon RJ, Whitfield PD. Biomarkers for ragwort poisoning in horses: identification of protein targets. BMC Vet Res. 2008 Aug 8;4:30.

Regular readers will notice the name Knottenbelt. Yes this is the man who claimed it is poisoning the cinnabar moth and who claimed it was a serious problem in South Africa, where the plant has never been recorded.

This is a common claim but as I explained above the literature tells us that small doses have no effect.

As little ragwort as 1% of bodyweight can prove fatal over time - Fu, P. P., Q. Xia, G. Lin & M. W. Chou. 2004. Pyrrolizidine alkaloids - Genotoxicity, metabolism enzymes, metabolic activation, and mechanisms. Drug Metabolism Reviews 36: 1-55.

Just look at this reference! As soon as I saw it I was on the alert. I am very familiar with this paper. It DOES NOT SAY THAT! It is not about that kind of thing at all. What is going on here? Is this just carelessness or is it a deliberate attempt to mislead? In my honest opinion if someone wanted to bamboozle people with bad science this is exactly the sort of paper that would be used it is 55 pages long and full of degree level biochemistry.  In fact it is worse than that I took a random sample of text and put it through something that calculates a measure of readability called the Gunning Fog  Index where Fog stands for Frequency Of Gobbledegook. An index of 17 requires you to have a university degree but this actually came out at 19.5! Most people wouldn’t have a clue about what it says. The word “ragwort” does not even appear in this scientific paper!

On the basis of what I have read in over 2 decades of detailed study of what is known from the scientific literature, claiming that 1% of body weight  being fatal is I something I can honestly describe as scaremongering.

The risk from ragwort poisoning is not simply from plants grazed in paddocks but from ragwort contamination of feedstuffs such as hay or haylage.

The ONLY problems are in preserved forage or where pasture is so bad that they are starved into eating the plant.

Contrary to the video, pyrrolizidine alkaloids (the toxic compounds in ragwort and other plants), are absorbed through the skin. The absorption is low, not non-existent. If you handle ragwort frequently without gloves you will develop liver damage.

Where is the evidence? First of all he overestimates the toxicity of the plant and now he is making statements of something definitely happening when there is actually no case of people being poisoned in this way in the scientific literature.

The issue here is the bubble again, believing in things in general circulation amongst horsey people rather than looking properly at the scientific literature.

If small amounts are absorbed they are not necessarily toxic in their absorbed form. They would then have to be converted into that toxic form, the first step of this usually takes place in the gut so it wouldn’t necessarily happen happen but if it did they then have to go through another step and there are several things than can happen. They can just be broken down. They can be detoxified by reacting harmlessly with other substances, which includes the one that detoxifies paracetamol. If tiny amounts arrive at the DNA molecules where harm can happen then there is a DNA repair mechanism.

There are several published scientific papers showing that animals fed only small amounts of a plant with the same toxins as ragwort had no damage to their livers!

So ragwort posoning [sic]does occur in horses. It is realtively [sic] rare, but this likely due to its removal from many areas horses and ponies graze.

"However, a justification or recommendation for relaxation in ragwort control would be a risky strategy as it is possible that the

apparently low prevalence of ragwort toxicity in horses might be as a result of generally effective pasture management that, if relaxed,

might lead to an increase in toxicity cases." Andy Durham, BSc, BVSc, CertEP, DEIM, DipECEIM, MRCVS, Liphook Equine Hospital, Veterinary Record, June 13, 2015.

 Notice the use of authority to make a point all those letters after his name are used to give an air of authority. It is a big no no in science. The question to really ask is if this author is really aware of all of the falsehoods, including those in the posting I am criticising. My honest belief is that the posting I am quoting is a particularly egregious example of the common place habit of equine activists of carelessly acting in a manner that at the very best is grossly overstating the problem.

 Postscript - “If you own horses, ponies or livestock you must not allow them to graze on land where you know ragwort is present” https://www.gov.uk/.../stop-ragwort-and-other-harmful…

This is another  example of argument from authority a no no in scientific thinking. Regular readers will know that Defra is a lousy source of information. They once told people our native ragwort was on a list of dangerous foreign invaders. It is obvious to me as an expert that they are not experts.

"Pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) constitute a class of plant toxin associated with disease in humans and animals. They are found in a wide variety of plant species in the world and it is estimated that ∼3% of the world's flowering plants contain toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids. The toxin is present in more than 12 higher plant families, among which three families, Compositae (Asteracea), Boraginaceae, and Leguminosae (Fabaceae), contain most toxic PAs." RAGWORT belongs to the family Compositae (Asteracea). Ibanez, G. (2005) Encyclopedia of Toxicology (Second Edition) https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../encyclopedia-of-toxicology

So, MR WILDLIFE CONSERVATION IN THANET..…

So what! It isn’t an issue that they are toxic we all know that. However toxic doesn’t necessarily mean dangerous and as I have pointed out repeatedly he gets his facts wrong.

1) Please get your facts right

2) Horse owners aren't looking to pull up every single ragwort plant in existence. Only the ones in the fields where our horses and ponies graze.

This simply isn’t the case. The British Horse Society tried to legislate for control on public lands and Professor Derek Knottenbelt has been quoted repeatedly in the press saying, "It is toxic to humans, so what the hell are we doing with it in this country?"

And frankly, if we do want to remove them, that is absolutly[sic] none of your business!

Actually we have a biodiversity crisis, that with climate breakdown threatens everyone’s future. Ragwort hysteria actually effects many of the nature sites in Britain. Unless you are some kind of weird anarchist you have to expect that we have rules to live by and that conservationists will work to conserve nature. It is really unacceptable to have equine activists inventing nonsense to scare people and I really really do have good evidence of this happening.