Remus Horse Sanctuary Dodgy? Ragwort Nonsense

The Remus Horse Sanctuary has been engaged in some rather dodgy behaviour on-line. At least that is my honest opinion. They have been passing around incorrect information about ragwort that sheds some light on why ragwort hysteria exists.

The Remus Horse Sanctuary has been passing on dodgy information about ragwort and this exchange from twitter confirms it.


Alison Page ‏@thealisonpage Jul 30

RT @RemusHorse: So many people seem to ignore the risk of ragwort. It is cumulative but the death is slow.. { link to dodgy newspaper article removed}

  Bill Ellson ‏@BillEllson Jul 30

@thealisonpage @RemusHorse Utter BS. Did you read the article? Gildor was put down after suffering kidney failure.

  RemusHorse Sanctuary ‏@RemusHorse Jul 31

@BillEllson clearly error in reporting but article's essentially about ragwort & horses still dying from poisoning. Our duty to help educate

  Neil Jones ‏@ragwortfacts Jul 31

@RemusHorse @BillEllson But by passing on false info you are MISeducating and breaking Charity Commission rules. Unacceptable for charity!

  RemusHorse Sanctuary ‏@RemusHorse Jul 31

@ragwortfacts @BillEllson merely passing on an article already in the public domain. Please take it up with the journalist.

The situation is a highly inaccurate article about Gildor the Horse which claims that a well known horse was killed by ragwort affecting his kidneys. Now as anyone knows it is the liver that is the prime problem with ragwort not the kidneys and you will notice that Remus Horse Sanctuary dismiss this as a mere "error in reporting". Well actually it isn't! At least  that is what the evidence says.

There are articles going back to February in a variety of newspapers saying kidney damage.

It is also rather suspicious that the horse died some time ago but the story is being resurrected six months later and given the spin that ragwort is to blame.

But of course that doesn't matter . It doesn't matter that people will be misled about  the nature of ragwort poisoning as long as they are fed a scary story that will lead them to believe what Remus Horse Sanctuary believes.

We have seen this all before with the British Horse Society who  have been putting out atrocious information about ragwort for years. Using false statistics that it kills 500 horses a year then 1000 and then an even dafter claim of 6500. All with no basis in truth which got people repeating it into trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority.

We have had them telling people ragwort, a native and ecologically valuable plant, is  "an environmental disaster" and a prominent officer of the BHS claimed it is a serious problem in South Africa and may be giving people cancer in that country when the experts there tell me that there is no record of the plant every being recorded there!  It all seems to me to be the same problem. It doesn't matter how accurate the stories are ,or how scientifically or otherwise literate you are  as long as you scare people because that nasty triffid, yellow peril, ragwort is killing the cuddly animals.

One story circulated by the BHS was an emotive account of a poor horse dying in agony  when a vet turning up pronouncing on the spot that it was ragwort and that the horse would have to be immediately put down.

Now the story my be true as even vets are reading the nonsense so often that they are assuming that every case is ragwort. In fact we know only a small minority of cases fit the diagnosis, that a microscopic examination of the liver is needed to progress the diagnosis and even then there are other things which can cause the same symptoms as Ragwort poisoning. Notably poisoning from toxins from mouldy hay and other feed stuffs which is indistinguishable,

The BHS should have known this and not circulated the story, but of course it would appear to be better campaign fodder than a more accurate story. It scares more people.

The  questions we have to ask is what is happening as a result of stories being circulated by people like the BHS and the Remus Horse Sanctuary. 

How many misdiagnoses are there?

How many horses are being unnecessarily put down?

How much money tax payers money is being wasted on unnecessary controls?

How many horses are dying of mouldy feed which is preventable when all the emphasis is on ragwort?

Now back to the Remus Horse Sanctuary.

Government Commission rules state:-

Many charities, by the nature of their work and the issues they deal with, will raise issues which some people find emotive. Such charities’ campaign materials will frequently have an emotive content, and this is perfectly acceptable so long as it has a well-founded evidence base and

is factually accurate. However, trustees will need to consider the particular risks of using emotive or controversial materials, which may be significant because of the risk to public perception of the charity.

 Now it is abundantly clear that the stuff circulated by the Remus Horse Sanctuary does not have a well-founded evidence base.

As for their perception . Well mine isn't a good one. I would say find a better charity to give your money to.,

The Donkey Sanctuary's poor ragwort information

I regularly blog about the nonsense around about ragwort. This particular entry is prompted by the Donkey Sanctuary putting inaccurate information on their website. and by a twitter discussion involving another charity The Donkey Breed Society which was passing on the Sanctuary's dodgy information.

They got a telling off from a nature expert who called it unethical. Read on and you'll maybe see why.

There are many experts on nature who are deeply annoyed and upset by the torrent of pseudo-scientific nonsense about ragwort that we are immersed in daily in the world of social media.

The Donkey Breeds Society  replied that ragwort is poisonous and that it is of concern to donkey owners. Well let's examine these.

I had a discussion recently with a conservationist colleague who happens to be a GP.  ( for foreign readers GP = General Practitioner = Family Doctor) We weren't talking about ragwort, but about critical thinking and I mentioned people googling symptoms and getting daft answers. Her view was that people in general don't understand risk and chemistry, which is precisely the problem with ragwort.

Let me explain it with a well-known "poison" or at least something which can cause something akin to poisoning. This stuff can kill if enough is taken. I genuinely know someone who nearly died as a result. He was discovered lying on the floor of his home by a relative who had become concerned at not getting answers to phone calls. He had slipped into a coma and spent days in intensive care recovering consciousness.
You can find information on line about it under the name DHMO. It is used in nuclear power stations, in the manufacture of styrofoam, in the preparation of GM crops. It has been used as an instrument of torture and it kills hundreds or may be thousands of people every year.

There are documented examples of politicians trying to ban this substance because they believed these stories.

If you are like me you would not be taking this at face value as I didn't with the ragwort stuff and look a little deeper. This rather advisable, because DHMO
is rather less harmful than the stories suggest it would be.

DHMO stands for DiHydrogen MonOxide which those of you who know chemistry would realise is a fancy chemical name for water!

Everything I said about it is true. The unfortunate individual who ended up in a coma had some complex medical problems which led to issues regulating his water intake.

This is the dose that makes the poison! This is one of the most fundamental questions and as I mentioned in my last blog entry. This has been erroneously described in the case of ragwort by exaggerating the toxicity by around TEN THOUSAND TIMES!.
 

There are as I said in that last entry crazy things being said about ragwort to quote some of  what I said:-

We have had them claiming, falsely that it is a serious risk to public safety, a serious threat to dogs, that it is killing off the cinnabar moth  which actually relies on it for a food supply and that it is a serious problem in South Africa, where in fact there is no record of the plant occurring!

What is more the number of deaths of animals has been so grossly exaggerated that advertisers repeating the claims have had to stop making these claims after action by the Advertising Standards Authority.

We have guidance from Defra that bases the risk on an innumerate use of statistics that makes them entirely invalid and that turns out to be based on figures that don't seem to even  be  real when you ask the source for them!

Is it any wonder that the nature experts who understand the science are crying foul?!

It is of concern to horse and donkey owners largely because of campaigning misinformation and we have an instance here of a donkey charity acting on these concerns and in doing so promoting more misinformation.


Let's deal with the Donkey Sanctuary's claims. as I am compiling this I notice some helpful tweets from another nature expert one of which expounds the general point that it doesn't really matter if something is toxic, it is how toxic or how dangerous. As we have seen even water can be dangerous in overdose, so even by talking up the danger the Sanctuary's stuff can mislead  but as people have been telling the Donkey Breeds Trust there are definite factual in accuracies in the Sanctuary's webpage which the Trust have been promoting on-line.


Aside from the fact that it talks about ragwort in unjustified alarmist tones there are factual inaccuracies.

Let's start with the problems with the first paragraph:-

Ragwort kills

Ragwort acts as a cumulative poison, eventually destroying the liver. It is a yellow flowering plant and is poisonous both dead and alive. Ragwort can cause serious liver damage over a period of time. It must be pulled with gloves in the early floret stage and burnt. Be very aware of this plant both on your pasture and in the hay. High risk and a common cause of chronic liver disease.

The headline doesn't put the risk into proper context, as with the example above it could have said "Water Kills". Ragwort is only a problem in two circumstances where it is fed in large quantities in hay and where animals that are already weakened by starvation are forced to eat it.

Then  there is "cumulative poison". It is cumulative in the same way as paracetamol is. The breakdown products of the alkaloids in ragwort are detoxified in a number of ways including by glutathione which detoxifies paracetamol. So it is the dose that matters, and this isn't mentioned.

It says it is a "high risk" and "a common cause of chronic liver disease". In fact it is only a small fraction of liver disease cases in horses that are shown to be associated with liver disease. Freedom of information requests to some of the laboratories show a tiny handful of cases. Maybe even only one or two a decade
at each lab! It may well be that other labs have more cases and there is evidence that this is the case but we know that ragwort poisoning is not particularly common and that the overwhelming number of liver cases do not have a pathology consistent with ragwort poisoning, where they do they will be abuse cases, abuse through feeding contaminated hay in quantity or through cruelly starving animals. It is not a problem just growing in fields because animals avoid it. There are a number of other common plants that contain the same class of problem alkaloids. They are never mentioned. One is used as a cattle feed and another is used in the preparation of an alcoholic fruit cup drink that is popular at high society events.


This material disseminated by these donkey charities seems to be very highly misleading information.

There is then a false claim:

Common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) is a poisonous plant that is becoming increasingly common in Britain.

In fact it has been surveyed as a part of a government survey on plants and ragwort was found to have been decreasing quite significantly, but of course to say that would not be in keeping with the panic generating, alarmist tone of the piece.

Then we have this piece of nonsense:-

 "Equines (horses, ponies, donkeys, mules) and bovines (cattle) are more susceptible to ragwort poisoning than other livestock;"

It again talks up the risk by saying that it is even more dangerous to the animals that they and their audience care about, but it simply is not true. It is much less toxic to sheep for example, but in other animals it is more toxic. The general succeptiability to the alkaloids is, according to the literature pigs 1; chickens 5 cattle and horses 14;  and sheep and goats 200. 

It goes on in its alarmist way talking about symptoms of ragwort poisoning that are actually the symptoms of liver damage which can have many causes.

Then we have this real give away for poor botanical knowledge

Other species of ragwort, e.g. marsh ragwort (Senecio aquaticus), hoary ragwort (Senecio erucifolius) and Oxford ragwort (Senecio squalidus) are less common but may still need to be controlled as they may be equally toxic to horses or other livestock.

Oh boy if you have Oxford Ragwort in your pasture you have a real problem.
It doesn't grow in places like that. It is a weed of waste ground. I most usually see it growing in the crack between the pavement and a building.  Why mention it when it doesn't cause problems? It seems to me that they lack the botanical knowledge to know that it isn't a problem.

Then we have this registered charity misleading citizens about the laws that govern us.

  "the occupier of the land, who is responsible under the Weeds Act 1959 and Ragwort Act 2003 (England and Wales only), to remove the ragwort."

My honest opinion is that anyone reading this would believe that the legislation places an automatic responsibility for the occupier to remove the ragwort. IT DOES NOT.

You may in extreme circumstances be ordered to control the plant  but in the absence of an order you need do nothing.

Government charity guidance states:-

Many charities, by the nature of their work and the issues they deal with, will raise issues which some people find emotive. Such charities’ campaign materials will frequently have an emotive content, and this is perfectly acceptable so long as it has a well-founded evidence base and

is factually accurate. However, trustees will need to consider the particular risks of using emotive or controversial materials, which may be significant because of the risk to public perception of the charity.

I think it is quite clear that the charities in question here do not have a well founded evidence base for their claims and they are not factually accurate.


 As I say above ,  a number of claims made by equine charities, when repeated by companies, have led to adverts being stopped after action by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) because they were misleading. The ASA are independent and just look at the evidence and  they won't even take up cases unless there is good evidence that the adverts are wrong.


Producing advertising that misleads customers  is a criminal offence under The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. If companies repeat these falsehoods that being distributed by these charities to sell their products they will be committing a criminal offence.

My honest opinion is that this reflects very badly on the charities concerned and I think it creates a risk to the public perception of these charities that they will be seen as poor organisations that use materials to promote themselves and their aims that are not properly checked and which have the potential to cause criminal acts.

British Horse Society wrong by around 10,000 times!

The British Horse Society has over the years been involved in grossly exaggerating the problem of ragwort, as I regularly blog about they and their members have been saying the craziest and most bizarre things. We have had them claiming, falsely that it is a serious risk to public safety, a serious threat to dogs, that it is killing off the cinnabar moth  which actually relies on it for a food supply and that it is a serious problem in South Africa, where in fact there is no record of the plant occurring!

One top of that we have them going on the media and saying the nuttiest things like the cinnabar moth only living for a day and generally over exaggerating the issue time after time. In fact I think it is quite fair to say that a lot of what they have been saying is hysterical exaggeration. I have been doing some more research recently and I sent one article quoting the BHS to another expert and got the reply :-

“Wow that article is really hysterical!”

When the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), who are independent and just look at all the facts, have looked at company adverts repeating the nonsense then the adverts have been stopped, because they are misleading.

This time we have documentary proof once again of them exaggerating the risk once more. It concerns their very poor survey which they did last year. It is a masterclass in how not to do one. It asks leading questions and even repeats myths about the law, which of course being written in black and white is pretty much indisputable . These myths have led in the past not only to problems with the ASA but with the Press Complaints Commission too!

This time though I am going to deal with their gross exaggeration of the toxicity of the plant. Ragwort is toxic, but when you examine the data properly the main problem is abuse by starvation  and there is also a problem with ragwort in hay on occasions but ragwort poisoning, we know from the international data, is not the problem it is made out to be.

They claimed in their survey, quite falsely, that “ragwort is extremely toxic to horses”. This simply isn't true. The term “extremely toxic” has a meaning in science. It means that 5 milligrams or less of the substance per kilogram of body weight is lethal. Now since there are a million milligrams in a kilogram we can say that this means 5 parts in a million of body weight is lethal. You will find this figure being used in a number of mainstream scientific sources as the consensus position of a definition for what constitutes an "extremely toxic" substance.

Now we actually have figures for the toxicity of ragwort to animals and they vary a bit from source to source but let's take a reasonable round figure of 5 percent of body weight.  It isn't far different from the figures and the error here is so large it makes little difference. Some sources even give a higher percentage. I am using low figures here if anything. 5 percent is 5 parts in a hundred, comparing this with 5 parts in a million we get a bit of a  difference.

This is to say that the British Horse Society is overestimating the toxicity of ragwort by:-

AROUND TEN THOUSAND TIMES!

Even if the figures I have researched from the scientific literature on the lethality
of ragwort should turn out to be wrong by a factor of ten which is highly unlikely then the BHS is still saying it is still wrong by around a factor of a thousand!

One of the sources I am using is a paper by well-known experts which appeared in the American Journal of Veterinary Research.

Which said:-

" cattle and horses ......... intakes of 0.05 to 0.20 kg/kg of body weight are lethal."

0.05 kg in a kg is 5%. So you see 5% is on the lower side of the estimates so on that basis it is probably an error of more than ten thousand times.


What is worse 97% of people surveyed think the BHS is correct. This is dreadful. They have created such a hysterical panic that people are obviously being misled. We do know that this registered charity has been fund-raising using this kind of information. Ask yourself is this acceptable behaviour for a charity?


Another article on this is available here

Incidentally, people may think that that what I am saying is incorrect because ragwort is a cumulative toxin, well it won't be a surprise to regular readers that this isn't strictly true either.

Paracetamol can be a cumulative toxin, if you take a small overdose every day it will eventually poison you but if you just take a therapeutic dose it is harmless because a substance in the liver called Glutathione detoxifies the toxic breakdown products. Guess what? Glutathione detoxifies the ragwort toxic breakdown products too and it isn't the only substance to do it  either.

Horse and Hound retraction on ragwort misinformation.

It has been a busy winter and this actually happened sometime ago, but it doesn't detract from the value of the information.
Regular readers will know that I have regularly mentioned the magazine Horse and Hound printing nonsensical or incorrect information about ragwort, like exaggerating things about its seeds.

On another occasion I blogged about the snobby toffs on its on-line forum and their snooty remarks about a foreign ragwort expert.

This time they claimed quite falsely :-

Under the Weeds Act 1959 and the Ragwort Control Act 2003 you are obliged to remove or treat ragwort on your own land."

Of course this is nonsense as it is clearly untrue. However, the editor wouldn't print a correction. And lo and behold it turns out she is the wife of an Eton housemaster. Of course with this piece of evidence we all know know there is nothing snobby or toffee nosed about Horse and Hound don't we!

However, after the  Press Complaints Complaints Commission became involved in the matter a correction was printed. Given that the Advertising Standards Authority stopped a British Horse Society leaflet making the same false claim it is hardly surprising.

You can read more details at this link :

Ragwort and Horse and Hound Press Complaints Commission