Ragwort Nonsense from Hidden Valley Bushcraft

 Once again I am using this blog as an extension to Twitter to express my honest opinions. This one is serious, of course, in the miseducation of youth but it is also quite amusing. It is a classic example of how you can sound authoritative even when you actually don't know the subject well.

I am not going to post the video in question here because I don't believe in posting false information myself as it only makes things worse, but there is a catalogue of errors in this short film which show some quite serious lack of competence.

First of all let's start with the video's scary title.

"Top 10 Poisonous Plants in the UK | THIS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!"

If you are going to give advice on identifying plants the first really essential thing is to be able to identify the plants themselves first.

Things do not bode well with the bad spelling of Hemlock Water Dropwort as Dropwart .

But then  comes the bit where it starts to get amusing. We are treated to a long list of the qualities of Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladona) while Nick the presenter tells us how to identify the plant held in his gloved hand.

The big problem though is that the plant he is holding and talking about isn't Deadly Nightshade at all!

Here is a picture from the video.

Those of you who know your plants will recognise them as being similar to those of the Potato ( Solanum tuberosum) and in fact they belong to the Bittersweet plant ( Solanum dulcamera) This plant is poisonous as are the green plants and the fruit of the potato plant, but it has a very different appearance to the Deadly Nightshade.

Of course you can guess what is coming now, can't you? We move on to ragwort with the following picture.

This isn't ragwort! It is really obvious it isn't ragwort. It is nothing like ragwort! Ragwort has daisy like flowers that peel open.   It is very difficult to know precisely what it is from the video but my guess is that this is one of the larger Hawkweeds a Crepis species. The open flowers are more like dandelions than daisies.

Then we have to look at what he says about it, which is a complete jumble of nonsense.

The first of them is that he repeats a myth put about by the anti-ragwort campaign that has been analysed properly and found to have no basis in proper evidence. I have written about this skin myth before. He says,

"You can actually absorb it through your skin to make sure you're wearing gloves."

I've written about this myth so many times. The best thing I can so is point you to an article by two Dutch experts. Esther Hegt and Dr Pieter Pelser who is an Associate Professor at Canterbury University in New Zealand and whose PhD is actually on ragwort Ragwort poisoning through skin absorption. Fact or Fiction?

Regular readers will not at all surprised to find that the ultimate source is Professor Derek Knottenbelt who I have previously mentioned numerous times as a source of some really bonkers codswallop on the plant.

Then we get this set of garbled misunderstandings.  No one denies the plant is toxic but this kind of thing doesn't help conservation at all.

"This is also dangerous to livestock. Now what's interesting is it's not so much while it's wet and green like this but when it's been dried up and it's found its way into dried food for animals later on or the next year by dried weight it's more potent because it hasn't got the the moisture for the animal to be able to dilute break it down so much because this becomes really quite deadly".

This is nonsense. The simple fact is animals don't eat the fresh plant but they will eat it if it is dried in hay. It has nothing to do with dilution at all.

Lowther Forestry Ignorant & Incompetent Ragwort Nonsense

 As I regularly do I am once again expressing my honest opinions using this blog as an extension to twitter. It concerns a company called Lowther Forestry.

This company, Lowther Forestry, has a twitter account and they tweeted this.

" Lowther-Forestry

@LowtherForestry

Sunny day jobs checking of a disused quarry in the Yorkshire Dales National Park to ensure that there is no growth of Ragwort. #quarry #ragwort #clearance "

 

This quite properly attracted attention of conservationists.

Lowther Forestry's Twitter profile states.

 

"Providing a full range of landscaping, fencing and forestry solutions for over 40 years. Working with nature, technology and people. "

 

Conservationist Bill Ellson queried this asking:

L

Bill Ellson

@BillEllson

Replying to

@LowtherForestry

Why are you 'ensuring' that there is no growth of Ragwort?

 

And he got this incompetent and ignorant piece of false news in reply.

 

Lowther-Forestry

@LowtherForestry 

Replying to

@BillEllson

As it is harmful to grazing animals and an offence to allow it to seed on to neighbouring boundaries.

 

This of course is a piece of completely false and ignorant bunkum. It is just plainly wrong. 

 

Grazing animals avoid ragwort unless starved into eating it except things like sheep and goats which are so immune that it is difficult to poison them. and the law does not say it is an offence to allow ragwort to seed, that is just nonsense.

You can find what the law on ragwort says on my main website.

In response to a flurry of responses they posted this.

"

Lowther-Forestry

@LowtherForestry

Replying to

@Ragwort_horses

and

@BillEllson

We are just responding to the clients request on this one.

 

This isn't what they are doing they are not just responding to clients. They are also putting false information about one of our most ecologically important wildflowers on to the internet and passing it around. They are encouraging damage to the environment. They are also running down their own company's reputation!

 

Let's be honest about it. There is a biodiversity crisis on this planet. We are in the middle of what scientists call the 6th Great Extinction where the ecological systems of the earth are being damaged. Ultimately it will, if it continues, make the Covid 19 pandemic sound like a Sunday afternoon vicarage tea party. Encouraging it to continue and worsen its ultimate effects on human welfare is profoundly anti-social. Ragwort hysteria is a serious issue as it interferes with the process of restoring or rewilding habitats, which is one of the most important tools in countering the crisis.

 

Conservationist Roy Tindle put it well quoting Lowther Forestry's own profile back at them

 

Roy Tindle

@RoyTindle

Replying to

@LowtherForestry

"Working with nature"? Hardly if you are destroying native plants, like ragwort. Working against nature would be a more accurate description!

 

Sam Tiley more ragwort nonsense

I wrote a blog entry about this woman Sam Tiley (Samantha Victoria Tiley) a few days ago 

http://ragwort-hysteria.blogspot.com/2021/01/sam-tileys-poor-thinking-and-ragwort.html

Sam Tiley posted nonsense but she is still claiming that all the experts who told her she was wrong are crazy. This sounds like arrogant ignorance to me . She claimed that ragwort is poisonous to the touch. It is nonsense and is fully debunked in the earlier post. One little illustration.  Our UK ragwort used to have the scientific name Senecio jacobaea. It is now called Jacobaea vulgaris. (I quoted the professor who did this  work  in the previous posting debunking Sam Tiley's claim.) There  is another plant with the same toxins in it that used to be called Senecio grayi but it is now Brachyglotis grayi. It and hybrids with other Brachyglotis species are frequently planted in public places. I know of a housing  estate where it is planted in every garden. I think by the building company. It is planted in raised beds by the seats in a local town centre in the pedestrianised streets. One council even has it as a feature outside its headquarters. It,, as I said, contains the same toxins as ragwort. Would it be planted if those those toxins made plants toxic to the touch? Of course not!

It would appear from her recent tweet  that Sam Tiley is trying to ridicule me and is potentially inviting people to mock me. Before you do that just take care to check your facts. I am an accepted expert on this issue.  If  you want written proof you can google the details of this letter to the Daily Telegraph which I co-authored with the CEOs of several conservation organisations in the UK. Would a crazy person be allowed to do that? It isn't just ragwort, some years ago the US government asked me to peer review some completely unrelated ecological issue. They don't ask cranks!

This is an excerpt from a two page article about my work as a conservationist from Invertebrate Conservation News in 2011. This goes out to several thousand insect specialists in the UK.

"A significant blow for conservation was struck in June 2011, as a result of a set of complaints sent by Neil Jones to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about companies who were selling ragwort
control using dodgy facts and falsehoods.As a result, a load of misinformation was changed and taken down. This includes the awful leaflet that was produced by the British Horse Society and Warwickshire
Council. There was no question of asking them in this case. The ASA just told them get rid of it!"

Ragwort is a problem in hay everyone knows that, but it is subject to many urban myths and Sam Tiley  was, frankly, not knowledgable of smart  enough to know better. worst still she is so  ignorant and closed minded that she can't understand this when it is explained to her and abuses people  who question  and correct her. Oh and before you take to twitter as  Sam Tiley suggests, do note that I quoted three professors  in that  support of what I say. Do you know better than  them?

This is the reason I write my blog. Horsey people have swallowed nonsense and it damages conservation. It is a pity also that some ignore evidence and reason.

 

Sam Tiley's poor thinking and ragwort rubbish!

As I often do I am using this blog as an extension to twitter. It is in reply to a woman called Sam Tiley who according to her Facebook account, which bears the same photograph is, Samantha Victoria Tiley in full.

The BBC TV programme Countryfile showed a very brief picture of ragwort in an item mentioning the rewinding of a village which resulted in her tweeting something.

I'm including a picture of the entire interchange so that you can see the responses to Sam Tiley and so that you can see for yourselves that her responses are irrational.

 

As you can see Sam Tiley received a number of responses asking the quite reasonable question of where she, Sam Tiley, got her information.

Although I know this is nonsense. It is important for me as a conservationist to ask questions of this nature to people like Sam Tiley, because new sources of known hysterical myths can  bring with them useful new information. Since we know this stuff is nonsense and, as I will explain below, it harms nature conservation, more examples of nonsense are useful in persuading politicians that it is indeed nonsense. This is why I asked Sam Tiley the question.

It is a reasonable and sensible question to ask where someone gets their information from. However, Sam Tiley didn't get it. 

 

She had said something silly on line and was questioned and corrected over it.It certainly doesn't warrant  the kind of bad language that was in Sam Tiley's replies.

 

Let's deal with the substantive issue. Ragwort is not poisonous to the touch. As Esther Hegt the Dutch ragwort expert said in the twitter thread above, she debunked it years ago. Here it is http://www.ragwort.org.uk/component/content/article/7-i/13-ragwort-poisoning-through-skin-absorption-fact-or-fiction

You will note that the article is co-authored by Dr Pieter Pelser who is an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He is a world renowned academic expert on ragwort and its relatives. His PhD is actually on the plant.

 

The twitter nonsense from Sam Tiley didn't stop. In response to another twitter user  she posted this.

I've checked and the thread above was all Sam Tiley had received. I can see no barrage of abuse. None of it justifies the abusive adjective crazy. She has continued to make this false claim this but I really don't want to include all of her four letter insults.

The people who are concerned about the false information being disseminated about ragwort on-line are not crazy. 

Ragwort is one of the most ecologically important wildflowers. To quote Friends of the Earth in their Briefing Sheet Ragwort: Problem plant or scapegoat?

 

"Ragwort (was Senecio jacobaea now Jacobaea vulgaris) is an important wildflower for invertebrate wildlife:-35 insect species totally rely on Common ragwort for food including 7 moth and 7 beetle species;

 

 -Another 83 species are recorded as using Common ragwort often as a significant food source, with a further estimated 50 species of parasite in turn feeding on those;

-In addition to these 133 species, Common ragwort is a significant source of nectar for others including bee species that specialise in feeding on yellow Asteraceae (daisies) and many species of butterfly. 

-Government research shows that of over 7,000 plant species in Britain Common ragwort is the 7th most important nectar-producing plant."

 

They go on to say, quite correctly:-

 

" Common ragwort has been subjected to a campaign of “awareness raising” often involving distribution of a whole set of misunderstandings and falsehoods in which:

 -Ragwort has been blamed for animal deaths which were unproven or obviously not ragwort-related;

-Bad or irrelevant statistics and poor and biased surveys have been used to spread scare stories; and, 

-Ragwort has been falsely branded a threat to human health or to the countryside."

 

My twitter feed contains a number of academics agreeing with me. For example this one replying to me after I debunk a really bonkers claim from the same person who started the scare story about ragwort being poisonous to the touch. He is very  modest in just using his name without a title but he is a retired professor of ecology who has studied ragwort.

Here is the leading veterinary expert on ragwort  Professor Andy Durham the sound only video lasts less than 2 minutes but he says we should stop talking about it because ragwort poisoning is so rare.

 

 

 

 

In short Sam Tiley is wrong. The experts she has dealt with weren't abusive and certainly are not crazy. They are people who are knowledgeable about the subject. Scientific experts who know the subject and whose general stance is supported by major environmental organisations who are concerned about the dissemination of nonsense about one of our most ecologically important wildlife resources.

If you want a good example why nonsense such as this stuff damages conservation then read Isabella Tree's excellent book Wilding, where she describes that her important and famous nature conservation project at Knepp was nearly stopped by ragwort hysteria. I review it here.

 

The groundsel myth. It isn't better than ragwort!

This is one of my blog entries where someone has said something on twitter and it requires a longer response than can be posted on twitter.

It started with a very nice tweet.

    carl

    @carl90210_

    Potting up #ragwort for the cinnabar #moths and #solitarybees . I’m going         plant it all along the path in my lawn next spring, I’ll have a 9 metre ragwort         “hedge” ohh controversial #londonwildlifegarden #pollinators

In the replies was this tweet which contains a number of suspect claims.

Dunc

@FunktheDunc

 

Replying to

@carl90210_ and@lovely_plot

    maybe try Senecio vulgaris? same family, feeds the cinnabar moth and its             native too. Ragwort is a lovely plant but as you say controversial ( my                     daughter's pony died after ingesting ragwort )

 

Senecio vulgaris is groundsel and  the claim that his his daughter's pony was killed by ragwort is highly questionable. It is actually something that cannot be known scientifically.

Let's start out with this, "Cinnabar moths do well on groundsel" myth. It is a myth and we know the apparent source. Guess what? It is Professor Derek Knottenbelt again.Regular readers will know he is a source of a lot of the nonsense about ragwort.

Groundsel is a much smaller plant than ragwort. It can't support many caterpillars. It is also a more ephemeral plant. The issue about ragwort ISN'T the cinnabar moth it is all the other wildlife it supports. Groundsel is not a good nectar source. Ragwort is one of the best.

Some years ago there was an article in the Daily Post, a Welsh newspaper which said, 

 

        "Prof Derek Knottenbelt, of Liverpool University, believes everyone has a                 responsibility to tackle the “hooligan weed” – and said conservationists may             be wrongly sheltering the plant to protect the cinnabar moth.

        His own studies have shown populations of the rare moth have plummeted as     ragwort spraying has fallen, and suggests the moth feeds better on groundsel."

As I've said the moth isn't the issue,  but what studies? It is really annoying when a newspaper assumes because someone is  a professor they are supremely intelligent about everything and always know what they are talking about. He is NOT an expert on insect ecology!

I've already posted a debunk on my website here in my debunk of one of Knottenbelt's awful articles, which was full of errors!.

I will quote the debunk.

A research paper in the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata [3] studied the effects of three plants on the cinnabar moth. These were ragwort (S. jacobaea) groundsel (S. vulgaris) and coltsfoot (T. farfara) Here are the relevant results:-

Larval batches reared on S. jacobaea had significantly lower mortality (<1%) than those on either S. vulgaris (approx. 4%) or T. farfara (approx. 15%, which was also significantly greater than S. vulgaris)

So the caterpillars do better on ragwort. The paper goes on to talk about the egg laying preference of the adult moths.

Adults showed the same hierarchy of preference as the larvae, however they never oviposited on T. farfara.

This research clearly identifies ragwort as the best and most important foodplant. 

 Now let's deal with  the claim that a pony was killed by ingesting ragwort. First of all, the scientific literature is clear. Animals avoid the living plant unless they are cruelly starved into eating it.  Horses do get poisoned by eating contaminated hay but that is the responsibility of the hay maker and horse owner to deal with . It certainly isn't grounds for telling people not to grow the plant in a garden.

Secondly, it is well established that vets have been diagnosing any case of liver poisoning as ragwort poisoning without properly investigating. The British Horse Society once gave an account of a vet doing just that in their members magazine.

 In any case there is no test which can establish ragwort poisoning reliably. There are toxins that occur in mouldy food which cause exactly the same chemical damage. Their effects are indistinguishable.

Ragwort poisoning is actually rare.  Research by Professor Andy Durham showed that only a small minority of liver problems could fit the ragwort/mould catagory. He is the country's leading expert on this and he believes that we should stop talking about ragwort poisoning. Here is a short audio only video clip of him saying this. It is just 1 minute and 48 seconds long.

Ragwort Control Act - A falsehood enshrined in law.

 The Ragwort Control Act, is one of the most peculiar acts of parliament. It does almost nothing. All it does in essence it is explained in the first line of the Act.

The Minister may make a code of practice for the purpose of providing guidance on how to prevent the spread of ragwort (senecio jacobaea L.).

Anyone who knows how government works in the UK will know this power already existed and didn't need an act of parliament (and also the line is based on a falsehood.)

We got this peculiar law because of a fudge. The ironically misnamed John Greenway MP brought in anti-green private members bill sponsored by the British Horse Society (BHS) and the aim was to force the control of ragwort. The government didn't want to do that but there was so much pressure generated by the campaign that they had to do it. It was therefore fudged and a law that did very little was passed.

The BHS had been campaigning against ragwort with well-proven falsehoods for several years. In fact they admitted it in their 2001 newsletter!

To begin with it was difficult to get the media interested. Their first question was always ' how many horses die of ragwort poisoning every year?' The answer of course was we don't know. We couldn't even come up with an owner whose horse had died of ragwort poisonings- The necessary 'case study' that is so vital for any media story.

They then in effect used made up statistics and did a series of statistically bent surveys to establish that ragwort was a problem. These led to a series of commercial ads repeating their claims to be the subject of action by the Advertising Standards Authority.

 Coming back to the Ragwort Control Act itself, we can then see that falsehood in the line of that Act was the phrase, "the spread of ragwort."

As part of their campaign the BHS et al had been promoting the nonsensical idea that ragwort was spreading for several years and MPs got the idea that it was increasing like a triffid. 

We know about the attitudes of MPs in Parliament because there was an Early Day Motion (EDM) in Parliament. For those not familiar with what an EDM is, it is is a motion, expressed as a single sentence, tabled by Members of Parliament that formally calls for debate, "on an early day". In practice, they are rarely debated in the House and their main purpose is to draw attention to particular subjects of interest.

This was absolutely atrocious. It was factually inaccurate about ragwort poisoning. It was bizarrely wrong about the laws that applied and even the English was bad. You can read my full analysis here Ragwort Early Day Motion.

Just to show the awful start, . It said:.

That this House is concerned that 500 horses died from liver damage due to ragwort poisoning in 2001 and that 1000 deaths are predicted in 2002;

This was complete and total nonsense! There is no evidence at all to support it. Surely someone should have checked that a native wildflower with all the ecological checks on it wouldn't double in a year, which is what this implies.

This is how the falsehood that there was a "spread of ragwort" got applied to the Act. 

And where do you think they got those daft figures from? 

Well we do know who was going around saying it and regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to see that the name of Professor Derek Knottenbelt is associated with this claim. This is the man who claimed that ragwort was responsible for the decline of the cinnabar moth when ragwort is the moth's main natural food!

Was ragwort spreading? Did we need a Code of Practice enshrined in law to stop that spread? Of course it wasn't spreading! Some years later in 2007 there was a government survey of plants and it showed that during the period all this nonsense was being talked, and a falsehood placed in an Act of Parliament, ragwort had significantly declined.

I am unaware of any other law in the UK that was so badly processed as it got a falsehood written directly into the text!

We really need better critical thinking from our law makers.

Ragwort Toolkit British horse Society's shameful behaviour.

The ragwort season's upon us again and with it we have a surge of the usual anti-social behaviour encouraging ecological damage by exaggeration or telling plain untruths about the plant to scare people or force people in other ways to control the plant. It is one of our most ecologically important plants.

We are seeing tweets pointing people to their notorious Ragwort Toolkit. True to form the British Horse Society are telling an untruth about the law. They have form for this. The Advertising Standards Authority took action over their joint leaflet with Warwickshire Council some years ago, but it hasn't stopped them.

Let's get it straight. The Weeds act 1959 allows for orders to be made to control certain weeds. There is no obligation on the government to make orders and unless you are subject to an order there is no requirement to do anything.
It is crystal clear. I cover it on my website.

But the British Horse Society tell this falsehood in their  Ragwort Toolkit.

"Under the Weeds Act 1959, landowners and occupiers are obliged to control ragwort in risk areas."

That is obviously not true!

They tried some years ago to get the law changed with this in a Private Member's Bill in parliament, which originally said:-

 A relevant occupier must take all reasonable steps to remove ragwort from relevant land occupied by him and to prevent the growth or regrowth of ragwort on such land.

Parliament decided against this and this has not become a legal requirement.
The BHS's  tactic seems to be to keep telling people the law says what they wanted it to say, regardless of the truth and they are doing this via their Ragwort Toolkit.

The BHS's and their officers have a long history of putting out dodgy information. One of their specialisms seems to be the rigged survey.  I cover the story they used for one of them where they falsely portrayed that a vet could just turn up to see a horse and just diagnose ragwort poisoning on my website


Then there has been the man who has been their Scottish Chairman, Professor Derek Knottenbelt.  He claimed that it was a problem in South Africa. It isn't!
It took a lot of work, reading papers, and books, but eventually the experts in South Africa were able to tell me that it had never been recorded there!

I've also covered his awful article in a magazine. I document seventeen problems. Including his crazy, mad claim that ragwort is responsible for the decline of the Cinnabar Moth. It is its main natural foodplant!

Now let's get it straight. Being a professor doesn't make him right. Only the evidence does that. Also he isn't a moth scientist. It is blindingly obvious or he would not say such daft things about them.

It is not unknown for people to criticise me just for going against a professor. Well I am really entitled to do this. Nonsense is nonsense never mind who says it. I tend to view such people, on the evidence, as not the brightest and that is being kind about it.