UK Blog documenting the hysteria about this ecologically valuable plant. From an expert who works with major conservation organisations on the subject.
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.
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.
A recent article on the website of the magazine Scottish Horse has come to my notice.
As usual for the horsey press it is light on understanding of science and logic and heavy on promoting hysteria.
To quote it:-
On another September topic, the BHS in England has just completed a massive important survey with Defra looking into people's attitudes towards the yellow peril (ragwort). We await the findings with interest as increasingly we come across people who question its toxicity or don't see ragwort control as a priority.
Anyone with the slightest grasp of how you conduct a survey properly will know that it is useless.
It was carried out in a crooked manner in a way that will give crooked results. Like for example starting it with a video which falsely talks up the problem. There is abundant psychological research which shows that this will bias your survey. Then there are leading questions etc etc. It is useless!
In Scotland, currently our government guidance says where ragwort grows in a high risk situation, that means within a certain distance of grazing animals or in conserved forage, we should see enforcement with the perpetrators being asked to control it on their land.
An this is a result of people encouraged by magazines like Scottish Horse who print silly articles like this.
As I blogged yesterday a tendency to follow authority, the research shows, can be a very clear sign of a mental deficit. So it doesn't generate faith in the writer especially as they have faith in a bent survey.
The problem, as ever, is being able to prove it kills horses - vets don't always do liver biopsies at post mortem. However, we know it is toxic to all animals and humans and needs to be controlled.
This is really bad logic. We do know that when tests are carried out the number of cases of liver damage due to ragwort poisoning is minuscule So minuscule in fact as to be almost invisible. I blogged about this before.
Saying it is toxic to people is just a scare story, so are runner bean roots and potato leaves. and the plants of Brachyglottis greyi which is growing in a public park a stones throw from where I am sitting even contains the same toxins as its close relative Common Ragwort. Brachyglottis is planted all over the place as are a number of plants containing the ragwort toxins. There is no risk from it.
I have researched the subject extensively are no cases at all of ragwort poisoning being diagnosed in people in the UK. Yet the stories will continue and more people will be frightened
For your entertainment I provide a piece of comic relief on surveying Defra style. We have Sir Humphrey Appleby on the comedy series, Yes, Prime Minister explaining how it is done.
Notice him describing it as a "perfect balanced sample." That is appropriate given the title of yesterday's blog entry.
I was actually planning to write this entry today anyway, but there was a great example to follow on the BBC last night. For the benefit of my many foreign readers I will explain. There is a consumer rights programme called Watchdog and part of is is something that was originally a separate series called Rogue Traders.
Rogue Traders is now a series of segments inside Watchdog. It used a wonderful example of debunking pseudoscience, which is what I do with this blog. A dodgy company was frightening people into buying unnecessary water filters and it was doing this by using a conspiracy theory that there was a plot to put to much chlorine in the water. The programme was done with the usual humour comparing the theory to the world being ruled by lizards or that Elvis was still alive, but most importantly it used evidence to show that the company's claims were false. There were some hilariously wrong claims. The company claimed that there was no regulation of chlorine in the water and that someone just "shovelled it in". This is of course simply nonsense since the chlorine added to the water supply is usually added as a gas which you can't shovel!
It is only by the means of evidence that we know that things are true and this is central to the scientific method. Now we come to a common criticism that is levelled at those of us who debunk ragwort hysteria. Our arguments are not balanced. There are two sides to the story. Well let's go back to the chlorine in tap water example. There are two sides to the story there. The company's claims and the scientific evidence.
As the programme showed these rogue traders were deceiving people with pseudoscience. So one side is wrong. It is a well-known logical fallacy called an "Argument from moderation" to argue for balance. There is no competing balance in the chlorine story. It is a hoax perpetrated by rogue traders to get money out of ignorant people. You cannot half shovel a gas into water, because it is a gas.
There are two sides to the ragwort story too but the balance is all on one side. There are those who have made claims and there is the scientific evidence. For example, the claim that a particular university records many cases of ragwort poisoning and the second claim that you can use the that figure to get a picture for the whole country. Well, we can apply the scientific method to that first claim. We can use the Freedom of Information Act in the UK to ask the university for the real figures. I did this. There were almost no cases at all so that claim was false. The balance shows I am clearly right. We can then apply the scientific method to the claim that you can use those false figures to represent the picture for the whole country. Well ,even if the false figures were correct you couldn't use them because that breaks the rules of science. I explained this a while ago in an earlier posting. In short they are not a representative sample. You will see I quoted a famous medical expert and fellow pseudoscience debunker as saying that it you did a very similar thing you were an idiot. Again there is no competing balance the science shows that my side of the argument is right.
Incidentally, there was an interesting story in a newspaper recently a journalist asked for facts and made a request to a lab which is owned by another university for their figures on ragwort poisoning.
This is what they said:-
"A Freedom of Information request to Langford Veterinary Services in Bristol, home to the diagnostic laboratories that serve vets across mid-Somerset, revealed they have treated a total of 16 horses for forms of liver disease since 2006 – none of which died. Only one of those cases was attributed to Ragwort poisoning."
This is what always happens when people disregard the hysteria and look for the proper facts. It is shown that ragwort poisoning is rare. There are two problems, significant quantities when fed in hay and abuse by starvation forcing animals to eat anything in desperation.
There is also the false story in circulation that even the tiniest quantity is a cumulative poison. Well, paracetamol is a cumulative poison too. but it is detoxified in the body. It so happens that one of the several mechanisms that detoxifies the breakdown products of ragwort is exactly the same one that prevents normal doses of paracetamol from causing poisoning,
I can show that pretty much all the claims about ragwort that get people fired up are false and when companies repeat them the Advertising Standards Authority has taken action to stop them. They looked at the scientific evidence and decided the claims were false. There was no half way position, the science showed that the balance was all one way. I would say at this point that a lot of the people making false claims are doing so in good faith. They just aren't knowledgeable enough to know the truth.
Finally I'd like to write something about the argument put out by critics who say things like Defra has some guidance and it is your responsibility to follow it. Well there is some very powerful and research on this kind of poor thinking research which if it turns out to be incorrect means that the whole field of personality research is wrong. It shows that that kind of unscientific thinking, which involves thinking that authority must be right because it is authority despite the evidence showing the contrary, shows a deficit of a particular personality trait. One of the names used for this trait in the research "intellect" and you will not be surprised to see that a deficit of this "intellect" is associated with lowered intelligence.
In fact we see this all the time. Intelligence is just the capability to understand things. It comes from the Latin word "intellegere" which means to understand. In the other language I use in my day-to-day life, Welsh, the word we use translates literally to "understanding-full-ness" and we see this lack of intelligence displayed all the time amongst the anti-ragwort brigade. I was told all the attacks on me trying to make me look bad were not "derogatory" ( Don't laugh! . It happened!). For clarification of any doubt, the Oxford English Dictionary, the most comprehensive dictionary of the language, defines the word as, "Having the effect of lowering in honour or estimation; depreciatory, disparaging, disrespectful, lowering."
In short arguing from tradition or authority is known to be commonly the mark of stupidity. We have the research to show it and it seems there are many examples out there.
John Cleese humorously explains the problems this causes in terms of some other research on ability.
Lord Norman Tebbit of Chingford is a well-known British politician . He was a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government. He is infamously outspoken, not just for implying that the unemployed should get on their bikes and look for work. This outspokenness has led to a fair share of bad press. The satirical puppet show Spitting Image portrayed him as a violent, leather-clad bovver boy and some press wag gave him the nickname,"The Chingford Strangler," which stuck.
Given his career as a minister and the bad press he has had you would then think that he would know to do his research before he asks questions of ministers, but he evidently hasn't learnt this lesson.
He asked this question in the House of Lords a short while ago.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether there are any control orders made under the Ragwort Control Act 2003 currently in force; and whether there are any plans to make any such control orders.
As the reply he got showed there are no control orders that can be made under the Ragwort Control Act 2003 This is something he would have known if he had done the slightest amount of research before asking the question. There are several copies of the act concerned available on-line.
I should make clear at this point that all though ragwort can be poisonous. Most of the stuff you read, which Norman Tebbit doesn't seem to have checked out, is based on stuff that has been made up
They evidence clearly shows that ragwort isn't really much of a problem at all.
It is not the first time that Tebbit's stance on ragwort has come to my notice.
Robin Page, who is notorious for writing balderdash about ragwort like in his book Messages From a Disappearing Countryside, quoted him in an article in the Daily Telegraph.
Like me, his Lordship is horrified at the amount of ragwort growing free along our roadside verges, and believes that the Government should take action. His solution is that landowners should receive large fines – £500 or 500 pounds of pulled ragwort; that would solve the problem almost overnight.
Well my message to Lord Norman Tebbit is this. Ragwort isn't the problem you think it is. Please get on your bike and do some research before you form your opinions.
It has been an unusually long period between blog postings. This is not because I have lost interest. It is because there has been a lot of other ragwort stuff to do. Some of it I am likely to blog about in the future.
I documented there someone wanting to destroy this rare native plant which has a wild population in a single ditch in Cambridgeshire!
Now the plant has been sprayed with weedkiller. It may well be accidental but it would still appear to be a criminal act. The site is, I am told, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and it is a criminal offence to cause damage to one.The plant is also a listed protected species.Anyone working near this plant should have known to be careful!
The person who did this is almost without doubt a vandal. As the Oxford English Dicttionary, the accepted authoritative dictionary of English, defines it.
a wilful or ignorant destroyer of anything beautiful, venerable, or worthy of preservation.
So please make a fuss and COMPLAIN! This email address is the only one I can find but it will do the job enquiries@naturalengland.org.uk
While you are at it you may care to take note of the hysteria and tell them that if they are enforcing Defra's code on COMMON ragwort they may be endangering this rare plant FEN ragwort as well as their own reputation. People on social media are already commenting about the link.
I have a lot to do today so I am not going to wtite a long blog entry but these are the salient facts.
There is a great deal of bigoted prejudice against ragwort as a plant. While on rare occasions where an animal is mistreated it can cause poisoning, as can many other plants, but most of the fuss about it is based on hysteria. We're used to hearing politicians talking utter twaddle about ragwort like conservative peer Baroness Masham.
This time it is someone who appears to be a spokesman for organization calling itself Blue Labour who appears to think that ragwort is a cause of mass destruction and should be obliterated. (He has their web address as the sole item in his Twitter profile.) Well I have to say that rather like Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction whose existence was believed by many labour politicians, the claims about ragwort are based on poor intelligence. We have seen a series of tweets , like this.
Bryn Phillips @Bryn__Phillips Jun 1 Far better to pull the fatally poisonous ragwort up if you spot it! @PeterJCook1 @Ragwort_horses @ragwortfacts @HalleysFeeds @BillEllson
Bryn Phillips @Bryn__Phillips Jun 1 @PeterJCook1 @Ragwort_horses @ragwortfacts @HalleysFeeds @BillEllson Pull it wherever it rears its toxic head! Nasty weed
One of the things that concerns me about this is that we frequently find that misinformed and ignorant people are pulling ragwort Willy Nilly all over the place, and that tweets like this will only encourage the practice. They should remember that it is a criminal offence under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act to remove ragwort from anywhere without the permission of the landowner or occupier. See this briefing on the law.
I regularly blog on this issue, and those who follow me know it is a serious matter for me, but there are times when I can't help laughing. This is an example. I came across this stuff when I was browsing around for something else and I just burst out laughing. The level of ignorance that it seems to show is just hilarious. As regular readers will know, I've established by the means of rational evidence that the fuss about ragwort is clearly and unequivocally exaggerated. In fact the evidence clearly shows that things have been made up about it. However, this stuff is just hilariously wrong. Perhaps it is not quite so obvious to those people who don't study the subject, but to someone like me who would have known this was wrong at the age of seven, it is so hilariously wrong I just can't help laughing. To put it into context, imagine somebody claiming that flies are poisonous to spiders, or that carrots are poisonous to rabbits.
It is also very important to realise, humour aside, that the academic concerned has been very very active in the matter of encouraging control of ragwort. He has been quoted and quoted repeatedly all over the press and giving many talks to influential people.
This claim is a quote in a book from Professor Derek Knottenbelt. The professor is well known to people who work in the ragwort field. Suffice it to say that the people who I deal with who are experts in the field do not seem to be particularly impressed with him. For example, he claimed in a letter in a newspaper that our common ragwort was causing serious problems in South Africa. I checked with the experts there and there doesn't seem to be any record of the plant ever growing there.
The quote is in a book called The Horse and Pony Care Bible in Association with Horse and Hound. This book was published in 2007. The only question I would have as a rational person is, is the quote accurate? I'm afraid given what I've seen the professor saying before it seems entirely credible to me. In any case it seems to bring the book into total disrepute. From where I'm standing no one with any proper knowledge of entomology would ever make a statement like this. [Subsequent to the writing of this blog entry I have discovered an article actually written by Professor Derek Knottenbelt which rather seems to confirm this. See the end of this entry.]
Professor Knottenbelt is quoted as saying: -
`I would not normally advocate the eradication of any species, but this one has nothing to offer. I don't accept that eradicating ragwort would eradicate the Cinnabar Moth, which feeds on it. Ragwort is burgeoning and the Cinnabar is declining. In fact, I believe it is being poisoned. The moth was common throughout the years that ragwort was rare and now that ragwort is widespread, Cinnabar Moths are difficult to find. If we care about the moth, we have to find out why its population is declining in the face of an ad lib supply of "feed'.
This seems so ridiculous to me that it is hard to know where to begin. The most obvious hilarious thing is of course that the Cinnabar Moth uses ragwort as a natural food. In fact it seems essential that the ragwort alkaloids are present in the plant to enable it to be eaten. Without the alkaloids the moth would ignore the plant.Plants with the alkaloids are the only food. Looking at it rationally, in a calm and considered manner, the only appropriate word to describe this part of the claim seems to be BONKERS!
It is true that the Cinnabar Moth is declining, but what is also clear from the proper government scientific survey which was actually published in the same year, 2007, is that ragwort is also declining, and what is more, the decline is a marked one. The professor has been saying for many years that ragwort is increasing greatly, but all the evidence is that this is not the case. In fact it seems absolutely clear that the reverse is the case. Certainly having watched it for many years I can never remember a time when I ever noticed that ragwort was a rare plant.
Of course the real issue over biodiversity and ragwort is not the Cinnabar Moth, but all the other wildlife that depends on it. It is also vitally important to realise that we know from very clear evidence from a study of population dynamics that even declines in common plants which still leave the plants relatively common can have disastrous effects on the animals which require them for food. Indeed, ragwort is mentioned in several of the standard textbooks on this matter.
[ As mentioned in the edit above I have discovered an article written by Professor Derek Knottenbelt In an article in a magazine called Country Illustrated which was written in 2004 he wrote:-
Insects have adapted to food sources for billions of years, and it is patronising to think that elimination or at least reduction of ragwort will result in a catastrophic fall in moth numbers—it did not happen before, when ragwort was under control. The cinnebar[sic] moth has in fact become more rare as ragwort has increased. There is strong evidence that too much ragwort, far from being vital to the moth, may be responsible for its decline.
So it does rather seem to confirm that the quote in the book WAS an accurate reflection of his views. It also should be pointed out that insects have not been present on earth for billions of years but only a matter of hundreds of millions of years and of course given all the time it takes for evolution to happen a species cannot just adapt instantly to another food plant. Surely anyone with a basic knowledge of ecology would realise that animals die out and even become extinct due to habitat destruction?]
