British Horse Society Farcical Ragwort Facebook page

The story of the British Horse Society's promotion of Ragwort Awareness Week is rapidly becoming really farcical. Earlier in the week I blogged how their page on facebook was full of nonsense and even confessions of criminal breaches of wildlife law induced by the hysteria over ragwort. Then there was that daft letter full of errors that someone who seemed well connected with them had written that was in the Daily Telegraph.


Well now there is more.

Their promotion page for Ragwort Awareness Week has someone posting a link to a website full of the daftest inaccuracies. It repeats the silly story about animals being poisoned by breathing in "spores" and seeds of ragwort and tells people that the law means you have to control it. ( Which of course it doesn't)

I blogged some time ago about this breathing seeds business which was again in that awful letter to the Telegraph. I called it tripe and it is.
It is hardly surprising that their supporters think that ragwort has to be controlled by law, because the BHS was telling them that this was the case for years!

They recently had a leaflet stopped. You can read here about the story of the British Horse Society / Advertising Standards Authority. In addition after the ASA acted to stop the leaflet several companies had to stop repeating the crazy exaggerated figures of horse deaths that the BHS had been using.

Let me define what I mean by the word ignorant before I use it. I am using it in its simple original sense. It comes from a form of the present participle of the Latin word Ignorare which means "to not know". So it simply means lacking of knowledge of something. This is no crime. We are all ignorant of far more things than which we know. but this is the problem with the BHS. They are nice people I am sure. Caring about animals is a good thing. I actually care about all the tiny invertebrate animals that are being harmed by the pointless eradication of ragwort and anything else that might resemble it from roadside verges etc..
But what they have constantly shown is that over the years people preparing their statistics, vetting their facebook fora and the members supporters supposedly surveying do not have much idea of the science or even what ragwort looks like. They are too ignorant to do this.