I have had a limited amount of time to do this but there has been some activity on social media and it merits a blog entry to act as a reply to some of the nonsense out there.
The current leading expert on this issue in the UK is Professor Andy Durham and this is what he wrote in a recent article:-
Let's get it straight here. Ragwort is poisonous, just like many wild plants, but it is nowhere near as dangerous as is often claimed. There is a campaign against the plant which raises false awareness.( It raises funds too.) I can show by scientific evidence that this campaign is based on falsehoods and exaggerations.
The essence of the story behind the social media activity is that a columnist in The Spectator, called Melissa Kite, wrote an anti-ragwort piece attacking my website and making a blatantly wrong claim about what I said and then Matt Shardlow CEO of Buglife and I complained to the press regulator and The Spectator published an apology.
It was claimed that I had something ludicrously wrong about ragwort which I hadn't said and surprise, surprise, Melissa Kite got the law wrong!
(I do intend to come back to the subject of the apology and the original awful article at some point but I need to put something to match it on my main website first.)
You really would expect that Melissa Kite, as a professional journalist, would know how to check facts. There are several copies of the law on-line now. The first one that went on-line I put on myself, but either she did not read the law or did not understand it.
I want to come back to this at some point but there is a real issue here and it is one of proper behaviour in a democracy. This is not specifically about the failure of Melissa Kite to do her job properly but a wider issue about whether it is right for people to use misinformation to promote things that benefit them or things they claim to care about, and raise money in the process. Remember, there are quite a few people employed by the equine charities that have gained coverage and eventually money as a result of their reprehensible activities in promoting the proven falsehoods about ragwort.
Let's start here by discussing my motivations. Yes, I am interested in nature. Yes, I am a nature conservationist. However, that isn't all of it. I am interested in science and I dislike seeing unscientific falsehoods being spread around.
I can describe it like this. I am also a musical person. I have some nice Bach playing in the background as I type. Some years ago I was in a situation where I was near a pub that had a Beatles tribute band playing. I quite like the Beatles but I didn't like this because the singers were singing out of tune. I had to put headphones on and listen to something else. It offended my musical sense.
It is a similar feeling with the nonsense around ragwort. It offends my sense of reason. I am not alone. You will find debunkers like me all over the internet. They will be debunking nonsense like the claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; the earth is only 6000 years; the Apollo moon landings were faked; vaccines cause autism and so on. One of the people who tweets like me on ragwort also debunks the notion that chalk marks on pavements are signals between thieves wishing to burgle houses, when in fact they are placed there by utility companies. He also has a interesting way of correcting people who tweet historical inaccuracies. Like a lot of debunkers out of necessity he has become very knowledgeable. You can't do this in public, on-line forums, unless you know your subject, because you get flattened by your opponents.
Now let's get to the nonsense about ragwort. I used to say that things had been grossly exaggerated out of all proportion. I now have the evidence to say that things have just been made up. The anti-ragwort campaign is based on both exaggerations and clearly established, provable, unequivocal falsehoods. An example was the error about the law which Melissa Kite's employers had to apologise for.
I'll give you just a few further examples :-
It was falsely claimed that it was a serious problem in South Africa and may have given people cancer there, when in fact it has never even been recorded in that country.
It was falsely claimed that it was increasing at a wild rate when in fact the available proper evidence showed it decreasing.
It was falsely claimed that it was killing thousands of horses a year. The claim here was crazy. The statistics were just done incorrectly in a really amateurish and incompetent way, taking a tiny and poorly identifiable response from a massive survey and multiplying it as if everyone had replied! It was based on supposed confirmed cases when no check seemed to have been done on how they were confirmed and in any case there is no really reliable test since common toxins in mouldy feed produce the same microscopic and biochemical changes.
It was falsely claimed, as I blogged about some time ago, that ragwort is poisoning the cinnabar moth and causing its decline, when in fact the moth is dependent on the plant for survival. As I called it at the time I wrote about it, it is BONKERS. I try not to use too much emotive language, but to someone like me, who has studied this since early childhood, this really is insane.
It would be bad enough that this claim was made in print at all but it is published in a textbook on horse care by Horse and Hound!
This could go on and on with example after example of published nonsense.
I will however, draw my readers to one other thing. On my website I have an analysis of a really bad article by the British Horse Society who are responsible for a lot of really really bad information. This was published in 2001 when they had been campaigning for a couple of years, and it contains a stunning confession.
They have publicised crooked statistics, performed biased surveys ( which actually wouldn't prove anything about the plant anyway.) published more silly articles ad nauseam.
The real problem here is that we get very authoritarian attitudes developing regarding this plant and its control. ( There is good evidence that authoritarianism is clinically linked to poor thinking.)
This means that millions of pounds are being spent by councils on unnecessary controls. Council websites often have misinformation on them too, no doubt as a result of inaccurate articles like Melissa Kite's in The Spectator. Cornwall council had something on line about spending £100,000 a year on control. This is money wasted that could be spent on better things.
People are joking, I hope, about "Big Ragwort" attacking The Spectator.
Oh how I wish there was a massive organisation to pay all the travel and hotel bills I have amassed over the years, as I seek out documents from far flung locations. It cannot understand how The Specator type crowd don't see it as authoritarian "Big Government" led by nutty animal people, which would be in line with other material I have read in the magazine. They don't seem to think of the "Big Government" that the hysterical mob wants to peer and snoop into every field and garden lest it harbor a yellow flower.
(Ironically, despite Ragwort being touted as a risk to children, new houses near to me have arrived with gardens containing its pretty perennial relative Brachyglotis grayi, laden with the same toxins, without a hair being turned.)
Animals are being put at risk. The overwhelming majority of liver cases have been shown by research as not being due to ragwort type poisoning, which remember cannot be proved definitely. Yet, the impression is being given that every case is due to ragwort and because of the difficulty of making a definite diagnosis it is rubbing off on vets. I just wonder how many beloved animals have been put down due to a diagnosis of ragwort poisoning when, if properly investigated, they might have got better because of better treatment of the real condition.
This is not a minor issue involving just one plant. It affects nearly every nature site in the country. Ragwort is well established, by good evidence, as the one of the most ecologically important plants.
Go and read Isabella Tree's wonderful book Rewilding where her chapter on ragwort says that the hysteria nearly sabotaged the whole project. I review it here. In the Netherlands an important rewilded nature reserve called Oostvaardersplassen is being threatened partly by clueless activists repeating nonsense they have read in the British equine press.
Just to refute one of the sillier arguments that is being pushed out on social media which goes along the lines of, "Well it's poisonous so don't take the risk."
What about the risk of the animal in a field being struck by lightning?
It is difficult to get good statistics on lightning strikes but it seems a similar level of risk. Especially relevant when you know that ragwort poisoning, in reality, is overwhelmingly due to preventable bad care of the animals. What about Equine Grass Sickness? It is , it seems, some kind of infection associated with eating grass. In any case removing all poisonous plants for zero risk would dull our world, removing the oak trees and bluebells that grace our woods in springtime.
There are people out there who will, in an authoritarian manner, tell you to follow Defra's Code of Practice. It is marked as being withdrawn anyway, but it gets the fundamental issue of risk wrong and is therefore a poor source of information. As I said, the evidence says authoritarianism is linked to poor thinking ability, so ignore the people who promote this. They frequently make statements that are flawed in other logical ways too.
There is a concept in psychology called "dysrationalia" and it is defined as the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. It is this that is key here whether it is Melissa Kite getting her facts wrong because she was, as it seems, overconfident that they were correct and didn't check ,or Defra officials making crass errors because they don't check their facts or know how to perform the proper mathematics necessary to get statistics right. A lack of proper critical thinking skills colours the whole issue.
Rational thought and the evidence shows that the ragwort bashers are wrong. It really doesn't kill as many horses as has been claimed and the hysteria generated by the false awareness raising with article after article publishing what we now have come to know as "Fake News" is leading to a significant amount of money wasted and also environmental damage. Let alone the misdiagnosis and consequent harm to animals.
The current leading expert on this issue in the UK is Professor Andy Durham and this is what he wrote in a recent article:-
Perhaps the best-known cause of liver disease in UK horses is pyrrolizidine alkaloid toxicity resulting from ragwort ingestion. Clearly this might be expected to occur as an outbreak in horses sharing pasture or forage sources. So well-known is this disease that there has been a strong temptation to speculatively attribute causation of many liver disease cases to ragwort in the absence of specific evidence of such; creating a self-fulfilling belief that it is a common cause of liver disease.
Recent surveys of horse owners, veterinary surgeons and pathologists however, indicate that genuinely confirmed ragwort toxicity is actually not at all common in UK horses
Let's get it straight here. Ragwort is poisonous, just like many wild plants, but it is nowhere near as dangerous as is often claimed. There is a campaign against the plant which raises false awareness.( It raises funds too.) I can show by scientific evidence that this campaign is based on falsehoods and exaggerations.
The essence of the story behind the social media activity is that a columnist in The Spectator, called Melissa Kite, wrote an anti-ragwort piece attacking my website and making a blatantly wrong claim about what I said and then Matt Shardlow CEO of Buglife and I complained to the press regulator and The Spectator published an apology.
It was claimed that I had something ludicrously wrong about ragwort which I hadn't said and surprise, surprise, Melissa Kite got the law wrong!
(I do intend to come back to the subject of the apology and the original awful article at some point but I need to put something to match it on my main website first.)
You really would expect that Melissa Kite, as a professional journalist, would know how to check facts. There are several copies of the law on-line now. The first one that went on-line I put on myself, but either she did not read the law or did not understand it.
I want to come back to this at some point but there is a real issue here and it is one of proper behaviour in a democracy. This is not specifically about the failure of Melissa Kite to do her job properly but a wider issue about whether it is right for people to use misinformation to promote things that benefit them or things they claim to care about, and raise money in the process. Remember, there are quite a few people employed by the equine charities that have gained coverage and eventually money as a result of their reprehensible activities in promoting the proven falsehoods about ragwort.
Let's start here by discussing my motivations. Yes, I am interested in nature. Yes, I am a nature conservationist. However, that isn't all of it. I am interested in science and I dislike seeing unscientific falsehoods being spread around.
I can describe it like this. I am also a musical person. I have some nice Bach playing in the background as I type. Some years ago I was in a situation where I was near a pub that had a Beatles tribute band playing. I quite like the Beatles but I didn't like this because the singers were singing out of tune. I had to put headphones on and listen to something else. It offended my musical sense.
It is a similar feeling with the nonsense around ragwort. It offends my sense of reason. I am not alone. You will find debunkers like me all over the internet. They will be debunking nonsense like the claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; the earth is only 6000 years; the Apollo moon landings were faked; vaccines cause autism and so on. One of the people who tweets like me on ragwort also debunks the notion that chalk marks on pavements are signals between thieves wishing to burgle houses, when in fact they are placed there by utility companies. He also has a interesting way of correcting people who tweet historical inaccuracies. Like a lot of debunkers out of necessity he has become very knowledgeable. You can't do this in public, on-line forums, unless you know your subject, because you get flattened by your opponents.
Now let's get to the nonsense about ragwort. I used to say that things had been grossly exaggerated out of all proportion. I now have the evidence to say that things have just been made up. The anti-ragwort campaign is based on both exaggerations and clearly established, provable, unequivocal falsehoods. An example was the error about the law which Melissa Kite's employers had to apologise for.
I'll give you just a few further examples :-
It was falsely claimed that it was a serious problem in South Africa and may have given people cancer there, when in fact it has never even been recorded in that country.
It was falsely claimed that it was increasing at a wild rate when in fact the available proper evidence showed it decreasing.
It was falsely claimed that it was killing thousands of horses a year. The claim here was crazy. The statistics were just done incorrectly in a really amateurish and incompetent way, taking a tiny and poorly identifiable response from a massive survey and multiplying it as if everyone had replied! It was based on supposed confirmed cases when no check seemed to have been done on how they were confirmed and in any case there is no really reliable test since common toxins in mouldy feed produce the same microscopic and biochemical changes.
It was falsely claimed, as I blogged about some time ago, that ragwort is poisoning the cinnabar moth and causing its decline, when in fact the moth is dependent on the plant for survival. As I called it at the time I wrote about it, it is BONKERS. I try not to use too much emotive language, but to someone like me, who has studied this since early childhood, this really is insane.
It would be bad enough that this claim was made in print at all but it is published in a textbook on horse care by Horse and Hound!
This could go on and on with example after example of published nonsense.
I will however, draw my readers to one other thing. On my website I have an analysis of a really bad article by the British Horse Society who are responsible for a lot of really really bad information. This was published in 2001 when they had been campaigning for a couple of years, and it contains a stunning confession.
To begin with it was difficult to get the media interested. Their first question was always ' how many horses die of ragwort poisoning every year?' The answer of course was we don't know. We couldn't even come up with an owner whose horse had died of ragwort poisoning- The necessary 'case study' that is so vital for any media story.So you have it from the Horse Society's mouth. They started the campaign without any proper evidence, and it has continued the same way.
They have publicised crooked statistics, performed biased surveys ( which actually wouldn't prove anything about the plant anyway.) published more silly articles ad nauseam.
The real problem here is that we get very authoritarian attitudes developing regarding this plant and its control. ( There is good evidence that authoritarianism is clinically linked to poor thinking.)
This means that millions of pounds are being spent by councils on unnecessary controls. Council websites often have misinformation on them too, no doubt as a result of inaccurate articles like Melissa Kite's in The Spectator. Cornwall council had something on line about spending £100,000 a year on control. This is money wasted that could be spent on better things.
People are joking, I hope, about "Big Ragwort" attacking The Spectator.
Oh how I wish there was a massive organisation to pay all the travel and hotel bills I have amassed over the years, as I seek out documents from far flung locations. It cannot understand how The Specator type crowd don't see it as authoritarian "Big Government" led by nutty animal people, which would be in line with other material I have read in the magazine. They don't seem to think of the "Big Government" that the hysterical mob wants to peer and snoop into every field and garden lest it harbor a yellow flower.
(Ironically, despite Ragwort being touted as a risk to children, new houses near to me have arrived with gardens containing its pretty perennial relative Brachyglotis grayi, laden with the same toxins, without a hair being turned.)
Animals are being put at risk. The overwhelming majority of liver cases have been shown by research as not being due to ragwort type poisoning, which remember cannot be proved definitely. Yet, the impression is being given that every case is due to ragwort and because of the difficulty of making a definite diagnosis it is rubbing off on vets. I just wonder how many beloved animals have been put down due to a diagnosis of ragwort poisoning when, if properly investigated, they might have got better because of better treatment of the real condition.
This is not a minor issue involving just one plant. It affects nearly every nature site in the country. Ragwort is well established, by good evidence, as the one of the most ecologically important plants.
Go and read Isabella Tree's wonderful book Rewilding where her chapter on ragwort says that the hysteria nearly sabotaged the whole project. I review it here. In the Netherlands an important rewilded nature reserve called Oostvaardersplassen is being threatened partly by clueless activists repeating nonsense they have read in the British equine press.
Just to refute one of the sillier arguments that is being pushed out on social media which goes along the lines of, "Well it's poisonous so don't take the risk."
What about the risk of the animal in a field being struck by lightning?
It is difficult to get good statistics on lightning strikes but it seems a similar level of risk. Especially relevant when you know that ragwort poisoning, in reality, is overwhelmingly due to preventable bad care of the animals. What about Equine Grass Sickness? It is , it seems, some kind of infection associated with eating grass. In any case removing all poisonous plants for zero risk would dull our world, removing the oak trees and bluebells that grace our woods in springtime.
There are people out there who will, in an authoritarian manner, tell you to follow Defra's Code of Practice. It is marked as being withdrawn anyway, but it gets the fundamental issue of risk wrong and is therefore a poor source of information. As I said, the evidence says authoritarianism is linked to poor thinking ability, so ignore the people who promote this. They frequently make statements that are flawed in other logical ways too.
There is a concept in psychology called "dysrationalia" and it is defined as the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. It is this that is key here whether it is Melissa Kite getting her facts wrong because she was, as it seems, overconfident that they were correct and didn't check ,or Defra officials making crass errors because they don't check their facts or know how to perform the proper mathematics necessary to get statistics right. A lack of proper critical thinking skills colours the whole issue.
Rational thought and the evidence shows that the ragwort bashers are wrong. It really doesn't kill as many horses as has been claimed and the hysteria generated by the false awareness raising with article after article publishing what we now have come to know as "Fake News" is leading to a significant amount of money wasted and also environmental damage. Let alone the misdiagnosis and consequent harm to animals.
