email received on Friday 3 February 2006
"Yesterday, Thursday, the Daily Mail (not my paper but drawn to my attention by a subversive friend in Derbyshire!) printed a full page advertisement by the RSPCA calling on people to register their protest at a badger cull saying that TB was a cattle to cattle disease and suggesting that it was the farmers' fault (as usual)
(Warmwell's pages on the RSPCA - written in more sorrow than anger - can be seen here. The pages in no way criticise the tremendous animal welfare work still done, by dedicated RSPCA staff, at grassroots level. What is alarming is the politicisation of the RSPCA in its upper echelons. NB Link mended and opens in a new window. Apologies )I have friends farming in Cornwall with a herd closed for the last 30 years going down with bTB time and time again - most of the cattle being inconclusives from the useless testing system.
Once you have actually had TB on your farm they take inconclusives and will not let you wait for another Test. A lifetime of breeding (as with foot and mouth) is going down the drain.
A vet friend in Staffordshire did a postmortem on a dead badger found in client's bull pen - its lungs and vital organs were a mass of abscesses and lesions and it must have died in agony - what sort of animal welfare is it that takes - (sometimes) healthy cattle and leaves sick badgers?
Why is the RSPCA so keen on keeping sick badgers alive when it refused point blank to be seen or heard when 10 million healthy livestock were being slaughtered in the most inhumane way during the Foot and Mouth epidemic?
I do hope people also remember that the RSPCA were caught out gambling Society money on the Stock Exchange and losing quite a lot of it.
A full page advertisement in the Daily Mail does not come cheap.
5 years of Warmwell and despite your efforts nothing gets any better - I am just older and more intolerant and grumpy!"