Daily Telegraph ragwort scare again

Every year we get some articles in the press prompted by the British Horse Society scaring people about ragwort with poor facts. They have a long history of putting out suspect information on ragwort. Back as far as 2002 they put out a press release saying incorrect things about the law, using figures apparently derived from a nonsensical statistical method to claim large numbers of horse deaths and exaggerating the number of seeds produced. They got hammered last year as the Advertising Standards Authority acted against one of their leaflets and a series of companies repeating their nonsense.

It is pretty safe to say, from the evidence, that if the British Horse Society says something about ragwort there is a high likelihood of it being inaccurate.

One of the latest attempts to scare people was an article in the Daily Telegraph
Apparently they think ragwort is some kind of weird triffid spreading across the landscape killing horses whereever it goes.

The BHS in typical scary unsubstantiated style say:-

The British Horse Society (BHS) believes the poisonous weed is proliferating and that councils are failing to tackle its spread on their land.

If ingested, ragwort causes irreversible damage to the liver, resulting in an extremely painful death for horses.

Unless it is removed, its seeds are scattered by the wind, leading to an even greater spread in future years, the BHS said.

Well we know that they have been claiming  that it is increasing this since for over ten years. The fact that a proper scientific study run  by the government shows  a significant decline seems to be irrelevant to them.
The plant's distribution hasn't changed since surveys have been done in the 1960s and we know from the research that the seeds do not spread very far at all.

Then the article quotes Professor Derek Knottenbelt. This professor is a well-known anti-ragwort campaigner who seems to make rather extreme and suspect claims. His statements are well known to those in the ragwort field. Things like, “Ragwort is a thug. lt is the most hideous stuff in the world,"and
 "It is toxic to humans, so what the hell are we doing with it in this country?". 

These make no sense to me. We'll have to stop growing tomatoes and potatoes then and get rid of all  the bluebells and oak trees if we can't have any poisonous plants in the country.

The professor says :-

“In the beginning we were killing an awful lot of horses with it, up until around the mid-Nineties,” he said.
“Then there was a spell until about 2010 when the number of ragwort poisoning cases was dropping and dropping. The plant was being removed from fields, pastures and roadsides.
“However, over the last two or three years I know that it’s started to come back.

It is always rather difficult to get to the bottom of the professor's claims on poisoning  figures.  In a letter in the Yorkshire Post he said that he gets around 10 cases a year but a freedom of information request to his university shows they had recorded no cases at all in the previous 5 years.
 Some of his other claims in that same letter are also questionable. He stated that ragwort was causing massive concerns in South Africa and elsewhere he is quoted as saying that it may have caused cancer there. People would of course be scared by things like that so I checked with the experts  and their equivalent of our Kew Gardens, their national repository of botanical data, say they have no record at all of the plant growing there!.

Again in the same letter he blames ragwort for causing poisoning in Uzbekistan.  Now there is some good documentation about  poisoning by the toxins in ragwort, that also occur in many other plants, and it would appear that the only documented cases  in Uzbekistan were actually caused by plants in a different botanical family.

Altogether we have an article in a national paper frightening people for very little need.

Jersey Government's ragwort lies.

This blog post is prompted by this posting on twitter:-

 Jonathan Walker ‏@RocqueJon 3h

    @jimrondel I'd put it the other way around States must clear it just as other landowners must - evil stuff #ragwort

Well I would contend on the basis of an enormous amount of evidence that the fuss about ragwort is made up.  Going by the international scientific information, not the nutty stuff we get in the press, it may quite well be possible that there has never been a recorded case of possible ragwort type poisoning on  Jersey. I have to say ragwort type poisoning because there is no test to identify it with certainty. See Ragwort poisoning there is no test.

 We get a lot of false claims in the UK. We get false claims, that it kills dogs, is poisonous to the touch, that it may have given people cancer in South Africa(  It doesn't grow there!) that it kills thousands of horses a year. (The Advertising Standards Authority acted against ads saying this) and so on ad nauseam.


This tweet mentions "States". This is about "The States of Jersey" the government on the channel island of Jersey.

Just to make it clear Jersey is not part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The Head of State is nominally the Duke of Normandy, which is for historical reasons the same person as the British Monarch.

To explain briefly for any foreign readers. Long before Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were added to England to make the United Kingdom. William Duke of Normandy conquered England  in 1066 and became King. Later on one of his descendants King John lost all the rest of his French lands in battle, but the current Queen still retains the channel  islands as a separate domain. They make their own laws as a result.


There is a law about ragwort and the Jersey Government is quite simply lying about it.
 
This is what they say on their website.
 

"Ragwort is specified as an Injurious Weed under the Weeds (Jersey) Law 1961 which requires occupiers to prevent it from spreading.

Land occupier co-operation is required to control this weed and prevent it from maturing, seeding and ultimately spreading throughout the island. This is a legal requirement if you are the occupier of the land upon which the weed is growing. " 

This sounds very clear, but it is wrong.

We can look at the law on weeds and lo and behold we find that it doesn't say what is claimed!
 It doesn't make it an automatic legal requirement to control ragwort.
This is what is says:-

The Minister, if satisfied that there are injurious weeds to which this Law applies growing upon any land, may cause to be served on the occupier of the land a notice in writing requiring him or her, within the time specified in the notice, to take such action as may be necessary to prevent the injurious weeds from spreading. 

This is basically just a copy of the Weeds Act in the UK. It places no obligation on anyone to do anything unless the minister decides to issue an order. There is not even any obligation on the minster to issue it.

So while the person who wrote the first bit on the website may well have believed it true, but it isn't, and the government know this so as a body the government is lying to its populace about its own laws.

Perhaps someone needs to tell them that the fuss is made up. They are wasting money and making their farmers and landowners waste money and damage the environment while they do it.

New Forest Damaged by Ragwort Madness

There are so many things to blog about today it is a real job to know which one to pick. However, there is a story in circulation about the New Forest's ecosystem being damaged by do-gooders acting out the hysteria 
over ragwort.

It quotes Buglife's Steven Falk.

"Ragwort pulling in the New Forest is a truly ill-informed and damaging activity that is totally unnecessary. There are so many rare insects in the Forest, and it is well known that a general reduction in the number of flowers in the Forest over recent decades has placed many insects under severe threat of extinction there. Examine any patch of flowering ragwort in fine weather and you will see an astonishing array of bees, butterflies, hoverflies and beetles".

 Quite right and it is also illegal in a number of ways both under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and under Countryside and Rights of Way Act. The first prohibits the removal of wildflowers unless you are a landowner, occupier, someone authorised by them or certain unusual kinds of public official. The second prohibits damage to  Sites of Special Scientific Interest including the New Forest.

But how did this get encouraged, well our old friends the British Horse Society who got hammered by Advertising Standards for false information are involved again.

I think, on  the basis of the evidence, it is quite fair to say if the British Horse Society gives you a piece of information on ragwort, it has a high likelihood of  being wrong.

This example is one of many they have put out on press releases

They have been pushing their misleading, unscientific survey on the New Forest National Park Authority

This is an item on the National Park's website. It does not make the National Park look good.
It is a very very badly designed survey. It is known to some of us as "The yellow plant survey" and it is based
on a very unscientific false premise.

More than 75 percent of cases of ragwort reported in the 2010 survey involved land that animals were grazing on or near. Across the UK a total of 13,189 horses were identified as grazing on ragwort-infested pasture, with the figure for cattle and sheep being estimated as approaching 20,000.

Well so what! The animals have co-evolved with these plants and we know from the science that the level of resistance of an animal species relates to its likelihood of encountering the plant. There is no evidence at all that the mere presence of the plant is a problem. Do they make a fuss about all the other plants with the same
problem alkaloids in them that commonly occur in the presence of grazing animals , of course they don't!


And another amusing apparent illustration of bad science. This was the 2011 survey and  they said this.

Conducting the survey during one week means that results can be compared to the same week in subsequent years, enabling trends to be identified

What happened in 2012. They moved the week!  It is perhaps co-incidental that the change made it coincide with the school holidays when perhaps more people would be available to get higher figures.

But if you want real hysteria. There was a piece in  the New Forest edition of the Bournemouth Echo a few years ago.

It has such scary gems like this

Teams of Forestry Commission workers and seasonal staff have been toiling since July to uproot tons of the poisonous plant with its bright yellow flowers before it can be eaten with fatal results by ponies and other livestock roaming the open forest.

Lets get this straight we have good of evidence from the science to explain why the horses , which have been co-existing with the plant for thousands of years, don't eat poisonous plants. Any animal that commits suicide by eating poison does not pass on its genes. Nature therefore shapes them to avoid poisons. Like these that occur in 3% of the world's plants. It is only a problem in hay, or in cases of cruel starvation.

Then we have this piece of bizarre misinformation.

Just two pounds of ragwort is enough to kill a horse and the poison, which attacks the liver, is cumulative, untreatable and invariably fatal, leading to an agonising death for affected animals.

All the scientific papers I have seen in over a decade of detailed  study of this issue quote figures in percentages of body weight for toxicity which for a horse is a lot more than two pounds. The breakdown products that cause the toxicity, can react harmlessly with lots of things in the liver and it appears can even be detoxified by water. So they are only cumulative in action if each dose goes over the threshold set by these detoxification routes. It is certainly not invariably fatal since there are examples of recovery in  the literature, which of course implies that there is at least some element of treatability.

Then we have this exaggeration:-

Seeds produced from the profuse flower heads on stems up to 5ft high can be spread over a wide area to lie dormant for up to 20 years before germinating another deadly harvest.

The seeds do not spread over a wide area, they have parachutes, not wings and fall within a few metres of the parent plant. Quite a lot of them never even leave the plant. The 20 years figure is an estimate of possibility in unusual soil conditions where the germination rate would fall to 1%

You'll see on the Ragwort Myths page that it appears that the British Horse Society were circulating false information that after 20 years 70% percent would germinate. You see what I mean by them being a bad source?


We have ecological damage in a national park as a result of bad information being circulated and people getting hysterical about ragwort.

Matthew Parris's Rubbish Ragwort Article in The Times

I used to like Matthew Parris, but alas no more.  He is a national figure, regularly on television and a well-known journalist. He sounded as if he was worth listening to. Now, I shall not be able to think about him without the image of a "loverly jubberly", dirty yellow, three-wheeled, Reliant van popping into my head.  I will never be able to think of him without a connection to the Peckham Plonkers of Only Fools and Horses comedy fame.

I usually treat people who make errors about ragwort with the benefit of doubt. You would expect ordinary people who have been mislead, to understandably have wrong ideas. Matthew Parris is different. He is  a well-known national figure and a former MP. He has a first class law degree from Cambridge and has also studied at Yale. You might actually think he would have some critical thinking skills, be able to find the facts of the law, and check his facts first before committing to print. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.

Matthew Parris, wrote an article in The Times, that was nothing less than appalling. It stank. It stank of horse manure.The main thrust of the article seemed to be that ragwort was some kind of dangerous angry triffid marching across the landscape.

He said,

  "The seed is spreading on the wind like wildfire"

This is NOT true. We have proper studies of this and they only fall within a few metres of the parent plant.
Decent critical thinking skills should tell you this anyway,as the seeds, which are heavier than air, have no motive force only parachutes. Of course there are going to be exceptional dispersal events but simple physics tells you the seeds cannot spread like wildfire.

Then he repeats a well-known myth about the law.

"Landowners are under a legal duty to remove it."

This is NOT true. There are a set of weeds which you may be ordered to remove under a legal order, but landowners do not have a general legal duty to remove it. What is more the guidance from government tells people not to remove it everywhere. For a Cambridge law graduate Parris doesn't half  seem to make a hash of explaining it!

He then says

"UKIP  will doubtless claim, like some country folk,
 that the plant has been introduced by foreigners,
 probably from the EU."

Common Ragwort is a native plant, he does go on to mention it being here in the 19th Century, but, quite dreadfully, he never makes it clear that it is native.

He mentions that he thinks, without offering, evidence, that one of his llamas may have died of ragwort poisoning. Well if it did it may be a first. Contrary to all the nonsense to the contrary we know that ragwort poisoning is rare. The often repeated statistics seem to be very badly derived and come from what seems to be an unreliable source.

Parris is, it would seem no stranger to making foolish remarks. He caused outrage  amongst  cyclists when he said. 

"A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists."

As a joke it was seen in really bad taste, and there is even evidence that someone may have followed his advice.

The really annoying thing is that all of these myths are easily researched. Just google ragwort law and you  will find half a dozen sites explaining it on the first page. The lesson for Matthew Parris is check your facts.
I think that no horse would believe his stuff and only fools would. Unfortunately, as I regularly show with this blog there are plenty of fools out there.

Another misleading ragwort article in Horse and Hound

Another  misleading story has appeared in Horse and Hound magazine, which unfortunately has a long history of printing misleading stories on ragwort. Like this one last year and this one later on. I am currently compiling a list and timeline of misinformation for my main website and they feature prominently 

This time it appears to be a  seriously misleading story. They are apparently claiming falsely that a legal case forces people to remove ragwort from their land. They say, with the emphasis on their website preserved, :-.

"A prosecution has highlighted the importance of clearing ragwort from your land.
Not only can ragwort be fatal to horses, owners may face fines and even imprisonment if it is allowed to grow on grazing areas.
In a recent case, a traveller was convicted at Guildford Crown Court for offences under the Animal Welfare Act, after 2 ponies died from ragwort poisoning."

 But we are fortunate to be able to look at a court transcript relating to the case which says:-

"The case has come before the court in rather unusual circumstances. At the end of July 2010, RSPCA inspectors found three ponies owned by the interested party, Mr William Brazil, a traveler and a horse dealer, to have been subject to ill treatment. They were in a large field in Witley near Godalming in Surrey with very little forage and a large area of cut ragwort."

So according to the court transcript it appears that it has nothing to do with live ragwort not being cleared. It is abuse by starvation and dead ragwort.
We have to wonder if even the hysteria about ragwort is part of the problem. There is a lot of  confusion around. Why was the ragwort cut? Was it because of the false story that it is illegal to grow it?

You see we know from pretty basic biology that there are very good reasons why horses don't eat fresh ragwort. There are also good reasons why small doses probably have no effect and this probably explains why, for example, Liverpool University tell me they didn't record a single case of ragwort poisoning over a five year period.
I am currently working on a set of proper web pages about this. It has taken a lot of research. There are some real hoots coming. I have been getting people laughing a lot recently when I tell them things like the claims that our ragwort is a menace in South Africa and that it may have caused cancer in people there. The South African National Botanic Gardens tell me they have no record of the plant growing there!! It really scares people though, like a lot of the falsehoods.


 The evidence shows that ragwort is not the problem portrayed contrary to the scary stories put about, often in magazines like Horse and Hound, which led to the adverts  being stopped after action by the Advertising Standards Authority. They are after all an independent body who just look at the evidence.

Ragwort is actually decreasing in the UK.

There has been a lot of activity recently on twitter and this tweet is rather typical.

Amanda ‏@burt625 40m

@HertsFarmer @FarmersGuardian Believe me it is no different in the Midlands. Ragwort everywhere, increases every year!

Well actually we know that ragwort is DECREASING in the UK. How do we know that?
Well there has been a survey and contrary to the propaganda we see regularly in the press it shows a decrease. This is a proper government survey  using proper methods to ensure accuracy.

One of the problems is that people have been making things up about ragwort  these have been drawing attention to ragwort unnecessarily. This then leads to a well known phenomenon in psychology sometimes called the "Recency effect" or the "Baader Meinhoff phenomenon" ( after a researcher noticed it happening with research on the terrorist group). This phenomenon is where something is drawn to your attention that was there all along, but you think it is commoner because you now notice it.

I myself have noticed this. There is a plant called Brachyglottis grayi. It is a close relative to ragwort and contains the same alkaloids. It is planted commonly as a shrubby flower all over the place. It never causes any problems despite it containing those alkaloids that cause such panic when described in lurid terms in the press.
I didn't notice it for years until I noticed how similar the flowers are to ragwort and looked it up.
Now it seems to be common everywhere. I know I have been missing it because it has been in several places that I visit regularly and being a shrub it doesn't grow up overnight. On the way to a local library that I visit most weeks and in a planter outside a local supermarket where I buy food several times a week. Indeed I have been eating snacks outside on a bench right next to a large shrubby plant for several years, without realising.

I also want to say that I have really good proof ( and I mean proof) that Defra's advice contains serious mathematical flaws and the advice they give out is really poor.  To put it briefly, and I will have more to say, they are extrapolating from an unrepresentative sample for poisoning statistics (and a seemingly unreliable source anyway) so they have their maths wrong and because this is mathematics is one of the few areas where you can be absolutely black and white about it.

We have the science now to show that they have been taking advice from rather suspect sources. Any serious scientist knows anyway that you should get your information from evidence not from government departments.

A lot of this is being prepared for the web.It is fairly clear from the first principles of science but being methodical about ragwort  I have spent many hours firing off emails to experts around the world and pouring over scientific papers on psychology, evolutionary biology, enzymeology , statistical methods and  toxicology to ensure accuracy and it will be on-line soon.

In one case Defra have accepted evidence without checking from a source who has also claimed that Ragwort is a problem in South Africa. The experts there tell me they have no evidence that our ragwort grows there!

Telling the truth about ragwort.

There are several of postings on twitter again and as I often do I reply on this blog.
Twitter is very good at short pithy messages , but you cannot get longer messages across easily.
It is almost the epitome of the phenomenon described centuries ago by the Roman writer Horace.
"Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio." ( I labour to be brief, I become obscure.)

There are a several tweets by Guy Gagen like this one.

Guy Gagen @AgricPolicy
@OliverDowding I understand there is a highly active pro-ragwort campaign lobbying to down play the impact on agriculture

Actually this is not true at all. No one is playing down the impact on agriculture. People are using science, reason, evidence  and rational thought to tell the truth.

As well as being a science buff I am also interested in music. I come from a very musical family and I have a strong musical sense. Indeed as I am typing this I have some nice Bach playing in the background.
A while ago I was subjected to having to put up with the sound of someone singing off key for a long period. In the end I plugged the Classic FM radio station into my earphones to drown it out. The discordant off-key singing was intensely irritating . It is the same thing with the hysteria about ragwort. If you look at the research you will find that rational minded people are very irritated by irrational nonsense. It is the motivation of debunkers everywhere and this is what the people who tell the truth about ragwort are doing. They are using their rational senses to debunk nonsense.

This is another of his tweets which illustrates the problem.

Guy Gagen ‏@AgricPolicy
@ecology_digest @Buzz_dont_tweet not really sure that is a gd example of balanced argument on ragwort, ignores harm to agricultural animals

At this point I can honestly and rationally ask, "what harm to agricultural animals?"
What we have had is a constant stream of exaggerations and falsehoods. As I previously blogged there has been a lot of made up stuff on ragwort. Yes, the plant is poisonous and the properly collected figures and surveys show that occasionally, when it is in hay and when animals are abused by starving, ragwort is a problem, but it is really clear that there are far far worse problems which should be tackled first rather than what is, reason and science tells us, actually a tiny  problem.

It isn't just the stuff mentioned in that old posting. The Daily Mail told us, falsely, that ragwort is increasing by 10% per year. There have been motions in parliament with clear falsehoods. And what  I rationally described as a bonkers letter in the press, Politicians making false statements to get the law changed and so on ad nauseam. I am currently compiling a time line of the campaign. It takes a while because unlike the anti-ragwort lobby I care about the truth so I collate my evidence carefully.

If you want the confirmation that this stuff is false. The Advertising Standards Authority who are unbiased and simply have a rational code to guide them acted against a number of adverts repeating the hysteria last year.

Guy Gagen  also wrote

Guy Gagen ‏@AgricPolicy
@ecology_digest @NFUtweets @Buzz_dont_tweet all for supporting invert sp, but are you seriously suggesting there is a shortage of ragwort?

 I can honestly and rationally say yes to this. There are fewer wildflowers generally than there used to be. The recent State of Nature report shows that 60% of wildlife species are in decline. We know that ragwort has declined seriously in the UK. We know this not because of a daft,  "Them plants is yellow, like. They is ragwort. I seen more of it. It is increasin' ", survey that is run  but a proper survey run by the government on proper scientific lines.


If you really want an example of how the campaigning  exaggerates the risk with apparent  "Cargo Cult Science", stuff that looks scientific but isn't. You only have to look at the original stuff from the National Farmers Union which started the debate.
It is not the worst example,but ironically placed in a science and environment section it is rather ignorant of the facts.

Grazing land should be regularly inspected when animals are present and the plant should be pulled, removed and disposed of responsibly.
Ragwort poses a real risk to animal health with potentially fatal consequences if it is ingested by horses or livestock, either in its green or dried state. 

It is a problem in hay but we know that animals are extremely reluctant to eat the green plant unless they are starved into it,. It isn't so much that the plant tastes bitter but it is because of a basic, simple to understand, element of science. So simple and fundamental in fact that it is now to be taught to primary school children.
This primary school science says that animals that eat poison do not pass their genes on to their offspring and that nature creates a system that will prevent this happening. Nature's reaction to this is the sensation of intense bitterness when consuming the alkaloids in ragwort, which actually occur in 3% of all plants.
 The man who discovered this, Charles Darwin, is so revered in the UK that his picture appears on the Bank of England £10 note.

The NFU continue:-

 And left unchecked the problem is likely to become worse, as growth acts as a reservoir for seeds and spread.
Cut and pulled flowering ragwort plants may still set seed and ragwort has a 70% seed germination rate.

Here we go again. You know that this comes from the circulating propaganda when you see that 70% figure.
It is constantly trotted out, It may be about accurate but it doesn't paint a truthful  picture. It is high and scary  but normal figure for almost any flower. In using rational thought to determine what will grow it is irrelevant. On average in the UK , because ragwort is declining, each plant produces less than one offspring. Of course a high figure like 70% sounds scary. Who cares about being rational when you want to scare people into action.

The reality of the matter is that people fight against the anti-ragwort propaganda because it is characterised by a hideous web of falsehoods and lies. It damages the environment for no benefit to anyone and it preys on the cognitively deficient to spread itself. Anyone with proper critical thinking skills should see this clearly.