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

Scottish Horse feeding ragwort hysteria

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.

Balance science & poor thinking on ragwort

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.

Norman Tebbit on your bike for ragwort research!

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.

Vandal damages rare fen ragwort

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.

This blog is largely about Common Ragwort but today I want to go back to the first ever posting I made.
Fen Ragwort a protected plant is not immune 


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!

Botanist Brian Laney has taken a photograph

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.

Common ragwort is poisonous but the fuss is largely made up. See this blog entry.
See this entry on my website for one example amoung many of how horsey organisations created hysteria
The poisoning is all about risk to animals See this entry to see how attrociously bad Defra's maths is.  (A 16year old school child studying statistics should be better!)