Off the Leash

"Talk to your candidates...find out if they really care."

A conversation with powerhouse campaigner Saffron Gloyne, who has been selected to represent the Animal Welfare Party in the May local elections. Saffron is one of thirteen candidates in Croydon’s Addiscombe West ward where three seats are available. According to the Animal Welfare Party's website, Saffron will focus her campaign on standing up against wildlife crime in Croydon, championing the borough’s ability to become a nationwide leader in the battle against single-use plastic, and opposing cruel duckling & chick hatching projects in the borough’s schools. 

She says of standing as a candidate for the Animal Welfare Party “This felt like a natural progression for me. In order to effect widespread, tangible progress and improve conditions for the animals and people in our community, there needs to be a voice in the council speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves. I hope to galvanise the local community and the council in making choices that benefit all of us and ensure the future of our environment.”

• Animal Welfare Party Website and Twitter feed
• Animal Welfare Party Candidates 2022
• Saffron Gloyne Twitter feed
• Jane Smith (elected Animal Welfare Party councillor) Twitter feed
• Charlie Moores Twitter feed 

 I woke up this morning to a thrush’s liquid song cascading from the top of an oak tree about 100m away. Phrase after phrase, loud and clear. Not the repetitive song of a Song Thrush, nor the more mellow conversation of a Blackbird, but the melodious outpouring of a Mistle Thrush. Perched, typically, in the open, bold as brass, daring the local Sparrowhawk to interrupt, swept up in the power of his own remarkable voice as it bounced around off the stone walls of our home.

During lockdown I bought a parabolic reflector for moments just like this, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wandering around recording bird songs and layering them together. Common species (at least around here), including Blackbird, Song Thrush, Robin, Greenfinch, Chaffinch, Great and Blue Tits, Nuthatch, and Wren. I’ve caught snippets of the drumming of a Great Spotted Woodpecker, the first Chiffchaff of the spring, a pair of Wood Pigeons sitting in the sun, our local Rooks flying overhead. I even went out on a frosty morning and caught a barking Roe Deer echoing through a piece of woodland I can see from my window. And now was a perfect time to record that beautiful Mistle Thrush.

The result is only short (less than six minutes) and to be honest no one morning sounds exactly like this, but forgive me for any ‘audio licence’ because I hope - as it does for me - this brief dawn chorus transports you to somewhere soothing, a place of abundance, and far, far from the headlines.

Dominic Dyer speaking at a PETA UK reception, where to quote PETA, “MPs had the opportunity to see and feel the world’s first faux bear fur, a fabric that has been expertly created by luxury faux furrier ECOPEL to replace the bearskins used to make the Queen’s Guard’s caps” 

Dominic and I have discussed this issue in numerous podcasts before (eg Shortcast #53 Dominic Dyer | Bear Hats and Ben Wallace ), but essentially – exactly as that quote from PETA explains – the Ministry of Defence have been asked to replace the bearskin ‘caps’ made from Canadian-slaughtered Black Bears worn by the Queen’s Guards. The MoD came up with five ‘conditions’ that needed to be met before they would even discuss replacing ‘tradition’ with an animal-rights sourced faux-fur no matter how environmentally sound it is. 

• Petition: Replace the real bearskins used for the Queen’s Guard’s caps with faux fur

A slightly truncated Off the Leash Podcast this time around, as Charlie Moores and Dominic Dyer focus on why they’ve been saying ‘Off the leash Podcasts is dead, long live Off the Leash’  this week (Charlie posted a shortcast explaining about the upcoming changes earlier this week, but we wanted to discuss it at more length),' we outline upcoming events this week, including a Parliamentary reception organised by PETA UK as part of the ongoing campaign against the fur caps worn by the Queen's Guards; and we name our Heroes and Villains of the week (this time lauding PC Claire Dinsdale QPM and slating the cabal of interests that have sidelined her and the investigation in Dorset into the death of a young White-tailed Eagle from the Isle of Wight reintroduction project).

• Shortcast #82 Charlie Moores | Off the Leash Podcasts is dead, long live Off the Leash
• PETA UK  Stop Bear Slaughter: PETA Unveils Faux-Fur Queen’s Guard Cap
• PC Claire Dinsdale Twitter feed
• The Guardian   Disbanding of Dorset wildlife crime team puts birds of prey ‘at risk’
• Raptor Persecution UK  Chris Packham submits FoI requests to Dorset Police & the Crime Commissioner

“Off the Leash Podcasts is dead, long live Off the Leash”. Okay, that’s a little over-dramatic, but I was looking for a way to get people’s attention and referencing regnal succession and using a phrasal template seemed like a good idea…

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. We are coming up to the first anniversary of Off the Leash Podcasts (or OTL) – we launched our podcast trailer on April 30th 2021 - and while things have been going really well (we’ve had almost 40k downloads now), we’ve decided things need changing a little. A bit of ‘reframing’.

Why? Because we’ve noticed a problem. Actually, a ‘problem’ and a couple of ‘opportunities’...

Long story short, we’ve learned a lot over the last twelve months, but we need to reframe our work, cut out a layer. So we’re going to close the Off the Leash Twitter and Instagram accounts, and shut down the website. We’re moving to Substack. From the end of this month we’ll be just on Substack and we’ll be promoting it via our personal social media accounts.

We’re not completely throwing the OTL baby out with the bathwater though. We’re keeping the ‘off the leash’ name for the new platform because it perfectly sums up the attitude we want to bring to our work, but from now on, everything goes via Substack

Off the Leash Podcasts is dead, but long live Off the Leash. 

• Charlie Moores and Dominic Dyer on Substack https://offtheleash.substack.com/

A conversation between Charlie Moores and Duncan McNair, founder of Save the Asian Elephants or STAE.

Duncan is a prominent corporate litigation lawyer and was Chair of the highly-influential 2013 McNair Inquiry and Report which was commissioned by the RSPCA and called for greater commitment to higher welfare standards for farmed animals. Its recommendations were unanimously approved by the Council of Trustees of the RSPCA the month after the Report’s publication and resulted in the RSPCA Assured Scheme. 

More recently Duncan has been regularly invited to address All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Animal Welfare and on Endangered Species regarding the plight of Asian elephants In 2016 he addressed a large audience at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on STAE’s policies, a presentation described by the Chairman as “dramatic and shocking.” 

In 2017 Duncan was part of a small, key group representing 220 charities and MPs in presenting a letter to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street demanding abolition of the UK ivory trade. A proposed ban was announced the same year. In 2018, Duncan and STAE launched a petition on Change.org to End the Cruel Treatment of Elephants in India which now has over 1 million signatures and is still being signed today…

All of which might lead to us thinking that the remaining populations of Asian Elephants are now safe, ivory imports are banned, and the cruel ‘breaking’ of these highly intelligent and gentle animals so that tourists can ride them has ended…

The world doesn’t work in such a linear fashion unfortunately, and Asian elephants continue to decline – they are classified as Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have declined by an estimated 50 per cent over the past 75 years, and the remaining 20,000 to 40,000 Asian elephants left in the wild are restricted to just 15% of their original range. 

Ivory and elephant welfare are very different issues of course, but again it’s not particularly good news. Here in the UK, the Ivory Bill which received Royal Assent back in 2018 has been held up numerous times and doesn’t come into force until June this year and the government has now paused progress of its much-lauded Animals Abroad Bill which was intended to include both bans on the trade in hunting trophies that threaten the conservation status of species abroad AND the domestic sale and advertising of experiences overseas like elephant rides. Why paused? Well, while the Bill had reached the inquiry stage where it would be scrutinised, the Inquiry Committee has decided that scrutiny cannot continue until the Bill has been published by the Government and the Government are not able to confirm a date of publication. In other words, at the moment it is deadlocked and going nowhere…

Which is incredibly frustrating for STAE, and led to Duncan and a coalition of campaigners including Claire Bass of HSI and Ian Redmond publishing a letter in The Guardian on the 1st of April which began “We are concerned by reports of the government abandoning its manifesto commitments to an Animals Abroad Bill”.

• Save the Asian Elephants Website and Twitter feed 
• Gov.uk  Animals Abroad Bill 
• The Guardian  (Letters)  The British government must lead the way on animal welfare (01 April 22)
• Change.org  End the Cruel Treatment of Elephants in India 
• Lonely Planet  

In this episode of The Off the Leash Podcast, Charlie Moores and Dominic Dyer look at Dorset Police’s baffling and frankly bizarre decision to halt an investigation into the poisoning of a White-tailed Eagle found dead on a Dorset shooting estate; at an FOI request from Wiltshire Hunt Sabs that found that an astonishing 53 police officers chaperoned the notorious Avon Vale Hunt at one meet in Wiltshire in early March but still couldn’t see assaults on sabs taking place in front of them; and we will look briefly at a rather clever suggestion put forward by Wild Justice about the shooting of Woodcocks.  We also name our Heroes and Villains (which once again features the divisive and unrepresentative Countryside Alliance)

But we begin with a look at newly-released figures from Defra which state that at least 33,687 badgers were slaughtered in 2021 as part of its ongoing campaign to appease the dairy industry; petition updates; and Dominic's thoughts on how shifting government priorities might see the Animals Abroad Bill shelved...

• Badger Trust |  Badger Trust outraged as latest cull figures reveal record proportion killed by inhumane shooting
• Off the Leash |  Interview #23 Tom Langton and Dr Mark Jones | Badger Culling Research
• The Guardian |  Cabinet row as plan to ban fur and foie gras trade scrapped by PM
• Raptor Persecution UK |  Poisoned eagle in Dorset had 7 x lethal dose rodenticide in its liver
• Wild Mammal Persecution UK |  The Rule of Law
• Off the Leash | Interview# 22 Wiltshire Hunt Sabs March 2022 
• Wiltshire Hunt Sabs FOI Tweet
• Wild Justice |  We ask for changes to the Woodcock shooting season
• Off the Leash | Shortcast #59 Charlie Moores  Ban the Shooting of Woodcocks 
• The National | North Wales PCC accused of ‘prejudice’ over hunting review

“Badger culling is not going to work as a method of controlling disease in cattle and should be abandoned immediately and permanently.” Dr Mark Jones., Born Free Foundation

Charlie Moores in conversation with Tom Langton, a conservation ecologist with involvement in High Court judicial review of decisions surrounding badger culling policy in England, and veterinarian Dr Mark Jones, Head of Policy at Born Free.

In mid-March, open-access research by Tom, Mark, and Dr Iain McGill - a veterinarian and Director of the Prion Group – was published in Vet Record, a peer-reviewed medical journal in the field of veterinary medicine.

Titled “Analysis of the impact of badger culling on bovine tuberculosis in cattle in the high-risk area of England, 2009–2020”, the research found that “Analyses based on Defra published data using a variety of statistical methodologies did not suggest that badger culling affected herd bTB incidence or prevalence over the study period. In 9 of 10 counties, bTB incidence peaked and began to fall before badger culling commenced.” and concluded that “This examination of government data obtained over a wide area and a long time period failed to identify a meaningful effect of badger culling on bTB in English cattle herds.”

In other words, bovine TB was already starting to fall before the government-sanctioned slaughter of a protected species had begun, and that the deaths of more than 140,000 badgers has had little effect on how much bovine TB is in England’s dairy herds.

• “Analysis of the impact of badger culling on bovine tuberculosis in cattle in the high-risk area of England, 2009–2020  Vet Record Volume 190, Issue 6  (open access research)
• Born Free Foundation Website  and Facebook page 
• Born Free Foundation  Twitter feed
• Born Free Foundation Badger Culling
•  Badger Trust  New scientific study reveals that badger culling has had no effect in reducing bovine TB in cattle (18 March 22)
• The Badger Crowd on Twitter 
  
  

An uplifting and beautifully told shortcast about snares by Animals Asia's Ryan Marcel Sucaet - part of Off the Leash's series of shortcasts supporting Animal Aid’s petition to make the use of free-running snares illegal.

Ryan Marcel Sucaet is the Bear & Vet Team Director at the Chengdu Bear Rescue Centre.

• Animal Aid petition  Make the use of free-running snares illegal for trapping wildlife (Deadline 9th May 2022)   
• Animal Aid Website and Twitter feed
• Animals Asia Website and Twitter feed
• Animals Asia Bear Sanctuaries
• Animals Asia Three-legged bear released into the wild spotted alive and well on camera (09 Jan 2018)
• Off the Leash  Interview #17 Jill Robinson | Animals Asia

Shortcasts are short standalone audio comments and statements from conservationists, campaigners, charities, authors and members of our audience. If it needs to be said – say it here!


A shortcast by Edith from Staffordshire Wounded Badger Patrol, a group of volunteers who work to protect badgers in the Staffordshire badger cull zone.
"It's definitely worth doing - it's satisfying to know that we're out there protecting badgers."   

•  Wounded Badger Patrol - Staffordshire  Facebook page 
• Wounded Badger Patrol - Staffordshire Instagram feed
•  Wounded Badger Patrol - Staffordshire  Twitter feed
• Biddulph News  A night with Staffordshire's wounded badger patrol  (23 Sept 21)