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.
No comments:
Post a Comment