Brian May told to butt out of the badger battle
Brian May told: butt out of badger battle
By MARTIN KIELTY
Queen guitarist Brian May has been told to stay out of a debate over badger culling – because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
And National Farmers’ Union spokesman Ian Johnson has labelled the musician’s comments as “well-intentioned” but “not-helpful.”
May has long been an advocate of banning the mass killing of badgers. He recently spoke out in the UK press, trying to prevent a cull due to take place in Somerset and Gloucester in September.
He called the move a “particularly nasty kind of Conservatism,” adding it was “being pursued on the pretext of ‘doing something’ about bovine TB” while no link had been proven between badgers and the killer cow disease.
As a result, he continued, the cull was “disgraceful, tragic and pointless.” He added: “Prime Minister David Cameron, Agriculture Minister Jim Paice and Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman cling to this appalling policy. One can only assume they are pandering to a powerful farming leadership who helped elect them.”
May insisted that even the NFU supported the argument that killing badgers would not solve the tuberculosis problem.
But NFU man Johnson tells This Is Cornwall: “I don’t know where he’s got that from. It’s rubbish.
“This is not political. It’s an animal welfare issue. He should not be politicising the problem. Brian May is a well-intentioned, very rich, misguided person. His comments do nothing to help a rational debate about the problem.”
If the guitarist wants to help, says Johnson, “he should be getting involved with the scourge of TB that affects not just cattle, but other species too.”
Johnson also railed against May’s assertion that all farmers want to bring back fox hunting. “These comments are not helpful. Brian May doesn’t realise that, before blood hunts were banned, there were lots of farmers who didn’t want the hunt going over their land because they didn’t agree with it.
Original article: link
Shows Brian has POWER
that they send out Political allies of president CLEG CAMERON acting as experts!
to try and belittle Brian's crusade against mass slaughter!
I might as well be talking to a wall here, but still:
Cameron is PRIME MINISTER, not PRESIDENT. Britain is a MONARCHY (they have a QUEEN, remember?), thus they don't HAVE a president. CLEGG is DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER. To my knowledge, there is no person called "Cleg Cameron".
qz08927 wrote:
Chimps for President and Prime Minister
Chimps are preferable to badgers as politicians. Badgers would spend all their time scratching around underground and eating worms. That's not much use when it comes to meeting foreign leaders or answering queries at Parliamentary Question Time. At least chimps can be dressed up and can hold a tea party. And if they don't like questions from MPs, they can always scratch their heads, make amusing noises, or just throw poo. Can a badger do any of those things? Get real.
Monkeys are apparently very likely to get infected with bovine TB, so chimps would probably not hesitate to kill all badgers if only one of them carried the bacteria...
Chimps are also known for biting each other and hitting one another with sticks. That might make politics more intelligible to, amongst others, British National Party voters and people used to the South Korean parliament.