Admission of criminal activity on forum

Recently I blogged about the silly ignorance on a horsey forum, where a whole load of hysterical myths were being disseminated because they were angry at a very good letter from Buglife in The Times..
As one person put it to me,  "It is so stupid it becomes funny."

The latest from there is this apparent admission.

ive(sic) been seen pulling it out of the local verges so it doesnt(sic) spread further. NIMBY

 This is rather a silly thing to say publicly. It is a criminal offence under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act to pull up any wildflower unless you are a properly authorised person, basically the landowner , occupier or certain public officials.

Ragwort growing in verges poses little problem as the seeds actually don't normally spread far at all . Most fall at the base of the plant and the rest within a few metres.

Unfortunately the hysteria  and misinformation in the horsey press continues to promote what is essentially habitat vandalism.

Predictable silly ignorance

This week I blogged about the rather excellent letter by Matt Shardlow in The Times.
Rather predictably, there has been a burst of angry ignorance in the horsey community. This beautifully illustrates why it is I do this blog.

The fuss about ragwort, is as I have blogged before, largely made up. The plant is only a risk if it is put in hay and all the evidence internationally shows that poisoning is rare. However, there is so much nonsense in circulation that some people refuse to accept the scientific facts even when they are given them.

Today's great example of this phenomenon comes from the Dalesfans Message board where some horsey people have displayed a marvellous degree of ignorance.  Ignorance is, as I have said before, no crime as the word simply comes from the Latin for not knowing and we are all ignorant of many things. Ignorance abounds about ragwort hence my blogging. It is very irritating.

The first piece is probably an ignorant near malapropism which made me laugh. OK not everyone has studied classical languages but I thought it funny.

Someone who was annoyed with Matt Shardlow's fine letter and disbelieved it through apparent ignorance wrote.

Perhaps we could concoct a reply? 

I read it as meaning "compose a reply" but concoct has a subtly different meaning coming from the Latin "cook together or "cook up".
The massive multi-tomed Oxford English dictionary, which is accepted as the definitive guide to the English language, has the following:-

To make up, devise, or plan by concert, or by artificial combination; to put together, make up, or fabricate (a story, project, fraud, etc.).

The problem is that most of the panic about ragwort has been concocted in this sense! People, often with a  financial interest, have cooked up a load of misinformation and diseminated it.


Another silly misinformed and incorrect comment about Matt Sharlow is:-

What a fool
I'm sure I've read a report about how even a small amount of skin contact (pulling up a few plants) with ragwort and the toxins can be found in our liver

I know Matt Shardlow. He is no fool! The Independent newspaper described him in 2008 as :-

The environmentalist with the most conspicuous rising reputation in Britain.

Of course the clincher is that his critic here has been rather foolish and repeated the nonsensical skin absorption myth which  have blogged about before
To briefly recap it has been looked at by experts including one with a PhD in ragwort and it isn't right!

 But it gets worse! With comments like this!

Everyone should be doing their part to get rid of it. They won't actually mobilize fully until a kid drops dead from the stuff.

This is laughable nonsense. The plant is nowhere near that toxic. There are many plants which contain the same toxins which are all over the place. My local public park has plenty. Of one of them is a close relative of ragwort  and it is no danger. Tomatoes , potatoes, runner beans etc all have poisonous parts, more poisonous probably, but it doesn't stop people growing them.

Then we have this ridiculously inaccurate gem:-

I don't believe this plant should be described as native. Its(sic) not indigenous to these shores. Some Victorian collector brought it back from Asia to somewhere like Kew I think. Can't remember exactly but it was on a gardening programme a few years ago.

I am probably the last person to recommend listening to experts solely as a way of getting information but when a leading nature expert writes to The Times newspaper and says something about nature, as Matt Shardlow did when he wrote, it should at least raise the doubt in any sensible person's mind that he might be right.

Of course this is nonsense. Common ragwort is well-known by any botanist to be a native plant.

This is a classic example of what happens all the time. People having read nonsense in the press, repeat it over and over again, until it is believed.

 

Excellent letter from Buglife

There was a short but rather excellent letter in today's edition of The Times  It was from Matt Shardlow the Chief Executive of Buglife the Invertebrate  Conservation Trust.  They are an excellent conservation organisation that is well worth joining.

There was one of the usual letters in the paper earlier this week repeating the usual nonsense that I blog about. People believe this because of dodgy publicity put out by people with a vested interest and it spreads around. (Ragwort is, as I frequently say, shown to be decreasing in official surveys.)
However, this letter succinctly puts the other side.

    The claim by G. Smithers (Letter 8th Oct) that the public and grazing  animals  are being let down by councils and landowners  who are indifferent to the spread of common ragwort was typical of the  hyperbole surrounding this native flower  The Ragwort Control Act 0f 2003 does not force landowners to control the spread of ragwort, this can only be done via a specific  order served on a landowner. Ragwort is only dangerously toxic if eaten in large quantities. We are unaware of any properly confirmed  livestock death  from ragwort in  the  past decade. A few plants of this native  species along public rights of way  cause no harm  and help to support our declining populations of other pollinators.

Another vet posts bad info?

From time to time I point out how even vets get taken in by the misinformation about ragwort and today it seems we might have another example.

Today we have  this from twitter

 Dr. Anna Russau ‏@WarrentonHWorks 
What do you know about Ragwort? http://fb.me/2eC0Gbah7

and this is how Dr Russau describes herself on twitter

Dr. Anna Russau
@WarrentonHWorks
Warrenton Horse Works, PLC is owned by Dr. Anna L. Russau, DVM, a graduate of University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
Virginia · http://www.warrentonhorseworks.com

It is rather ambiguous as to whether she actually believes the stuff on the website, but I would assume that she wouldn't post it like this if she didn't.

The problem that I have is that the website concerned is very familiar to me and I as someone who has studied ragwort in detail for many years believe that some of the things that it says are as nutty as squirrel droppings.

It exaggerates the risk. It posts nonsense about animals breathing in seeds. It uses exaggerated statistics.
It claims that ragwort seeds are spread widely on the wind when we know from the data and the mathematics that they don't and oh yes, it gets things wrong about UK law too.

Regular readers will be familiar with this site. Someone at Edinburgh University mentioned it before on twitter.
So for full details look at my previous posting. I described it then as "bonkers" and "tripe".

Perhaps Dr Russau would care to correct any false impressions she may have made?

Horse and Hound prints more ragwort nonsense

Horse and Hound is a frequent source of nonsense on ragwort. I blogged on this earlier this year. They have now done it again with more inaccurate and unscientific material.

We are told that ragwort is worse than ever. Why? Because of the weather. You know, ragwort must be the oddest plant on earth. According to the press any kind of weather causes it to grow more luxuriantly.

As I blogged last year,  Horse and Hound were saying it was cold weather and the Western Daily Press had been saying it was hot summer weather. Now we have a cold summer and that is causing it to grow more.
It is a miracle! And apparently you can use to to change water into wine, cure lepers and raise the dead too. :-) (Please note the smiley. I don't want another set of myths going around!)



The facts are that when the research is done properly by an official government survey ragwort is actually shown to be decreasing. It doesn't stop these silly articles though.

Apparently they justify it because , due to the mounting publicity people have sent more replies to the British Horse Societies "Ragwort" ( or rather yellow flowered plants) survey.  This is the same society whose publicity material  led to the Advertising Standards Authority stopping  adverts because they were wrong or had no evidence to support them.

Worse that this the story is being passed, as true, around websites. It got repeated  on the MRCVS.couk site. On the site of TheHorse.com and tweeted by many people.
It seems that critical thinking skills are not always in good supply out there.

Oh and while we are at it there is a classic example in the article of the misunderstanding of terminology. It comes about because of the lack of teaching of Latin in our schools. We noticed   that even an Eton educated patrician toff like the Prime Minister didn't know what Magna Carta meant when asked recently on US television. Fortunately,  even plebs like me can study Latin and I hope to spend some time this evening working on a book on Latin poetry that I am supposed to be writing.

This example is the use of the word "injurious" which  appears as "injurious weeds"  in the  Weeds Act 1959.
The article has a  Mrs Claire Harding-Brown saying :-

It’s an injurious weed and it’s by my horses.

Injurious does not mean poisonous in this context. It derives from the same roots as Justice and Jury. It means harmful to the interests of something. In this case agriculture. Most of the listed weeds are not poisonous. The link in this sentence leads to a briefing  on the meaning of Injurious Weeds with full details.
Remember, as I have blogged before most of the scarey stuff about ragwort has been made up.

Silly story There is no dog poisoning risk

Today's silly story on ragwort comes from the Skegness Standard where a story starts as follows:-

A CONCERNED resident is urging dog walkers, children and passers-by to be mindful of potentially harmful ‘ragwort weed’ which is alleged to be growing in nearby Skegness fields.

The implication being that the plant is of great danger. Of course as regular readers will know the stories about ragwort are largely made up and there is no serious risk. This is one of a regular stream of stories that occur, frightening people about their children and their dogs.

As I regularly say Ragwort is poisonous to both dogs and to dolphins but as neither species eats it and a considerable amount has to be eaten to kill it is not a serious risk.

A while ago I blogged about the well-known author Dr Germaine Grier commenting about this.

Unfortunately common sense and basic biological knowledge do not abound in the press and we see these silly stories appearing all the time.

See this for a briefing on ragwort and dogs.