You know, there is an awful lot of work that goes into this, It isn't just a matter of writing stuff. There is an awful lot of reading. Just to discover the facts about small doses of ragwort having no effect was extraordinarily difficult. It must have involved at least 1000 and possibly nearing 2000 miles of travel to get the actual documents. Of course I will have used that opportunity for other research but it is a lot of work. I have located some more sources of information recently so there will be more coming out.
A colleague suggested recently that I was probably amongst the most knowledgeable people alive about ragwort. It actually caused me to stop and pause, I'm rather reluctant to accept it, but If I look at it honestly with approaching two and a half decades of work on this , and dedicated reading of the literature I can see why someone might think so.
One of the things I am writing about today is the updated information on the British Horse Society exaggerating the toxicity of ragwort by ten thousand times. Yes, this actually happened and I've got the evidence to prove it. It wasn't just sloppy writing in what they said as they used a term with a precise scientific meaning incorrectly. They called it extremely toxic, but that has a meaning and I've got the literature sources for the toxicity, sources of what is extremely poisonous in chemicals and the mathematics proves it correct. It is all documented on my updated web page on this issue .Ragwort is not extremely toxic.
The other update is about dogs and ragwort. Yes, ragwort is poisonous to dogs, but it is not dangerous to them, there is no likelihood of exposure. The idea that dangerous and toxic not always being the same is, it would seem, invisible to some people. As I keep saying everything is dangerous in sufficient quantity and I actually know someone who was found unconscious by a concerned relative and who spent several weeks recovering in the local intensive care unit. The cause was medical issues which caused them to drink too much water!
And yes I've done my research, there is no reliable test for ragwort poisoning, There are toxins in moulds which could easily grow on dried dog food quite invisibly and they are in the words of an article in Nature, a top tier scientific journal, "indistinguishable from ragwort poisoning."
It is important to note here, It isn't just my research. A colleague, a CEO of a conservation organisation, went to a meeting and discovered it directly from a veterinary professor.
There is also a critical fact there is actually a standard veterinary textbook on things toxic to cats and dogs and it has no mention of anything connected to ragwort. Here is the link to the updated page https://www.ragwortfacts.com/ragwort-dogs.html
Well that just rounds things off for today. There is more to come. I've recently discovered a cache of old magazines with a mixture of nonsense and rebuttals from scientists and experts. I'm sure that will provide a few new web pages and some postings here. Only 800 miles of travelling for this lot, what a bargain!
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