Your horse forum bad hysteria

If you want to see the effect of bad writing in the press, you have to look no further than the Your Horse forum.

Your Horse is a magazine with a bad history of  posting nonsense about ragwort. Printing alarming nonsense about the law and other things and encouraging the readers to pass this on to MPs. So it should come as no surprise that its forum contains people repeating nonsense about ragwort.

This is just one example of a rich vein of material recently drawn to my attention. There are some really silly quotes.

Don't farmers realise that ragwort is dangerous to ALL animals, even humans?

Yes it is poisonous to things that eat it., but animals avoid it when it is growing and eat around it and humans don't eat it. The class of dangerous chemicals present are actually found in 3% of the world's plants.
 May may plants are poisonous but plant poisonings are very rare in animals and in humans.

I  believe the farmer ( & actually everyone else! ) has a legal duty to keep his land ragwort free as it is a notifiable weed 

There is no automatic legal duty on any one  in the UK to keep land free of ragwort and there is no such thing as a notifiable weed in UK law.


And lo and behold we have the old skin absorbtion myth again!.

Sorry its the juice of the plant which soaks through your skin that causes the problem and it will cause liver and kidney failure not a nice way to go.

This has been looked at . There is no problem here. The toxins need to be absorbed in quantity, ar poorly absorbed through the skin , and then need to be changed in the gut before they become toxic.

This blog does tend to get a bit repetitive I know but these stories need to be combatted.
It really isn't at all acceptable for people to be mislead into saying silly things on the internet as a result of campaigning , often with those with financial gain at heart.

I could if I chose to devote the time probably find something somewhere on the internet everyday that is repeating false material about ragwort.