Sam Tiley more ragwort nonsense

I wrote a blog entry about this woman Sam Tiley (Samantha Victoria Tiley) a few days ago 

http://ragwort-hysteria.blogspot.com/2021/01/sam-tileys-poor-thinking-and-ragwort.html

Sam Tiley posted nonsense but she is still claiming that all the experts who told her she was wrong are crazy. This sounds like arrogant ignorance to me . She claimed that ragwort is poisonous to the touch. It is nonsense and is fully debunked in the earlier post. One little illustration.  Our UK ragwort used to have the scientific name Senecio jacobaea. It is now called Jacobaea vulgaris. (I quoted the professor who did this  work  in the previous posting debunking Sam Tiley's claim.) There  is another plant with the same toxins in it that used to be called Senecio grayi but it is now Brachyglotis grayi. It and hybrids with other Brachyglotis species are frequently planted in public places. I know of a housing  estate where it is planted in every garden. I think by the building company. It is planted in raised beds by the seats in a local town centre in the pedestrianised streets. One council even has it as a feature outside its headquarters. It,, as I said, contains the same toxins as ragwort. Would it be planted if those those toxins made plants toxic to the touch? Of course not!

It would appear from her recent tweet  that Sam Tiley is trying to ridicule me and is potentially inviting people to mock me. Before you do that just take care to check your facts. I am an accepted expert on this issue.  If  you want written proof you can google the details of this letter to the Daily Telegraph which I co-authored with the CEOs of several conservation organisations in the UK. Would a crazy person be allowed to do that? It isn't just ragwort, some years ago the US government asked me to peer review some completely unrelated ecological issue. They don't ask cranks!

This is an excerpt from a two page article about my work as a conservationist from Invertebrate Conservation News in 2011. This goes out to several thousand insect specialists in the UK.

"A significant blow for conservation was struck in June 2011, as a result of a set of complaints sent by Neil Jones to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about companies who were selling ragwort
control using dodgy facts and falsehoods.As a result, a load of misinformation was changed and taken down. This includes the awful leaflet that was produced by the British Horse Society and Warwickshire
Council. There was no question of asking them in this case. The ASA just told them get rid of it!"

Ragwort is a problem in hay everyone knows that, but it is subject to many urban myths and Sam Tiley  was, frankly, not knowledgable of smart  enough to know better. worst still she is so  ignorant and closed minded that she can't understand this when it is explained to her and abuses people  who question  and correct her. Oh and before you take to twitter as  Sam Tiley suggests, do note that I quoted three professors  in that  support of what I say. Do you know better than  them?

This is the reason I write my blog. Horsey people have swallowed nonsense and it damages conservation. It is a pity also that some ignore evidence and reason.

 

Sam Tiley's poor thinking and ragwort rubbish!

As I often do I am using this blog as an extension to twitter. It is in reply to a woman called Sam Tiley who according to her Facebook account, which bears the same photograph is, Samantha Victoria Tiley in full.

The BBC TV programme Countryfile showed a very brief picture of ragwort in an item mentioning the rewinding of a village which resulted in her tweeting something.

I'm including a picture of the entire interchange so that you can see the responses to Sam Tiley and so that you can see for yourselves that her responses are irrational.

 

As you can see Sam Tiley received a number of responses asking the quite reasonable question of where she, Sam Tiley, got her information.

Although I know this is nonsense. It is important for me as a conservationist to ask questions of this nature to people like Sam Tiley, because new sources of known hysterical myths can  bring with them useful new information. Since we know this stuff is nonsense and, as I will explain below, it harms nature conservation, more examples of nonsense are useful in persuading politicians that it is indeed nonsense. This is why I asked Sam Tiley the question.

It is a reasonable and sensible question to ask where someone gets their information from. However, Sam Tiley didn't get it. 

 

She had said something silly on line and was questioned and corrected over it.It certainly doesn't warrant  the kind of bad language that was in Sam Tiley's replies.

 

Let's deal with the substantive issue. Ragwort is not poisonous to the touch. As Esther Hegt the Dutch ragwort expert said in the twitter thread above, she debunked it years ago. Here it is http://www.ragwort.org.uk/component/content/article/7-i/13-ragwort-poisoning-through-skin-absorption-fact-or-fiction

You will note that the article is co-authored by Dr Pieter Pelser who is an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He is a world renowned academic expert on ragwort and its relatives. His PhD is actually on the plant.

 

The twitter nonsense from Sam Tiley didn't stop. In response to another twitter user  she posted this.

I've checked and the thread above was all Sam Tiley had received. I can see no barrage of abuse. None of it justifies the abusive adjective crazy. She has continued to make this false claim this but I really don't want to include all of her four letter insults.

The people who are concerned about the false information being disseminated about ragwort on-line are not crazy. 

Ragwort is one of the most ecologically important wildflowers. To quote Friends of the Earth in their Briefing Sheet Ragwort: Problem plant or scapegoat?

 

"Ragwort (was Senecio jacobaea now Jacobaea vulgaris) is an important wildflower for invertebrate wildlife:-35 insect species totally rely on Common ragwort for food including 7 moth and 7 beetle species;

 

 -Another 83 species are recorded as using Common ragwort often as a significant food source, with a further estimated 50 species of parasite in turn feeding on those;

-In addition to these 133 species, Common ragwort is a significant source of nectar for others including bee species that specialise in feeding on yellow Asteraceae (daisies) and many species of butterfly. 

-Government research shows that of over 7,000 plant species in Britain Common ragwort is the 7th most important nectar-producing plant."

 

They go on to say, quite correctly:-

 

" Common ragwort has been subjected to a campaign of “awareness raising” often involving distribution of a whole set of misunderstandings and falsehoods in which:

 -Ragwort has been blamed for animal deaths which were unproven or obviously not ragwort-related;

-Bad or irrelevant statistics and poor and biased surveys have been used to spread scare stories; and, 

-Ragwort has been falsely branded a threat to human health or to the countryside."

 

My twitter feed contains a number of academics agreeing with me. For example this one replying to me after I debunk a really bonkers claim from the same person who started the scare story about ragwort being poisonous to the touch. He is very  modest in just using his name without a title but he is a retired professor of ecology who has studied ragwort.

Here is the leading veterinary expert on ragwort  Professor Andy Durham the sound only video lasts less than 2 minutes but he says we should stop talking about it because ragwort poisoning is so rare.

 

 

 

 

In short Sam Tiley is wrong. The experts she has dealt with weren't abusive and certainly are not crazy. They are people who are knowledgeable about the subject. Scientific experts who know the subject and whose general stance is supported by major environmental organisations who are concerned about the dissemination of nonsense about one of our most ecologically important wildlife resources.

If you want a good example why nonsense such as this stuff damages conservation then read Isabella Tree's excellent book Wilding, where she describes that her important and famous nature conservation project at Knepp was nearly stopped by ragwort hysteria. I review it here.