BY CSM STAFF WRITER

The Charity Commission have certainly not helped the countryside with their apparent willingness to permit every extremist animal rights group to claim charity status.

It’s natural for these fundraising groups to seek out mainstream credibility and to appear at least half decent to the outside world. With charity status they claim respectability and tax free income. They are more likely to get consulted by the press and bandwagon-seeking politicians. Their ideology may well be batshit but being a charity makes people think twice. Are they somehow less loopy than they actually seem?

Back on planet reality, let’s face it, there have been some terrible mistakes of judgement by the Charity Commission over recent years…

Who would have thought the sleazy IFAW with their one million pound bung into Labour’s coffers for a ban on hunting would ever become a charity?

”I will try to dress it up as a registration/tribunal system, but the truth at the heart of it is a ban on hunting. I have done what I was asked to do, PAL and IFAW. You gave me £1 million and I am now banning hunting, despite 407,000 people on the streets. Thank you for the £1 million, and I am giving you what you asked for. Moreover, I will not only give you what you want, but I will set up in the bill that you should become a recognised animal welfare group.”

The League Against Cruel Sports also donated to the Labour Party. They have lost eight high ranking officials – all claiming the welfare of foxes suffers as a result of a hunting ban. Extraordinarily, they were handed charity status too.

“In the past decade, the league has lost two chief executives, two chairmen, one treasurer and one regional head. All of them concluded that an effective ban would lead to the slaughter of foxes by farmers with guns who no longer wanted to keep them alive for the hunts to chase. I cannot think of another protest group that has seen so many of its officers go over to the other side. It is as if senior staff of Greenpeace regularly joined the board of Texaco”

Those eight so stand out. They were active around hunting and could see for themselves the realities of necessary fox control and management. They realised they were supporting a self-defeating cause at LACS.

Richard Course was one official that changed his mind. He said later to a government inquiry in 2000:

“How the fox is located is totally irrelevant to animal welfare consideration. It took me ten years to realize that irrefutable fact – others will never realize it because bigotry, prejudice, narrow mindedness, class animosity and ignorance blind people to the truth”

By no coincidence the League now choose folk with absolutely no experience of hunting as their figureheads and spokespeople. These drones get their paycheck as long as they spout the narrative.

So perhaps the Charity Commission or the latest LACS mouthpiece can explain to the public how exactly their charity fulfills its charitable objects?

“1.1 THE CHARITY’S OBJECTS (“THE OBJECTS”) ARE: 1.1.1 THE PREVENTION OF ALL FORMS OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS; 1.1.2 THE ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION GENERALLY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE CARE AND PROTECTION OF ANIMALS, ECOLOGY, NATURAL HISTORY, CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES; 1.1.3 THE CONSERVATION, PRESERVATION, PROTECTION AND RESTORATION FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT OF THE NATURAL RESOURCES, NATURAL BEAUTY AND ANIMAL AND PLANT LIFE OF THE WORLD AND LANDS AND BUILDINGS OF BEAUTY, HISTORIC INTEREST OR OF ECOLOGICAL OR SCIENTIFIC IMPORTANCE AND, AS REGARDS LANDS, FOR THE PRESERVATION, AS FAR AS PRACTICABLE, OF THEIR NATURAL ASPECT, FEATURES AND ANIMAL AND PLANT LIFE”

How does LACS feel these days about dodgy old Terry Hill (type Terry Hill or Spike Stocker into the magazine search bar above) hobbling around the Scottish countryside with a camera trying to catch out huntsmen going about their legal business of killing foxes for farmers?

The more you read their spiel the more risible it becomes. But for those who love the countryside and scratch a living from it, it’s far more understandable to not laugh but weep.

What has Terry Hill claiming “there are no guns present” to shoot a fox – when video shows there are three present – got to do with, “THE CONSERVATION, PRESERVATION, PROTECTION AND RESTORATION FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT OF THE NATURAL RESOURCES, NATURAL BEAUTY AND ANIMAL AND PLANT LIFE OF THE WORLD AND LANDS AND BUILDINGS OF BEAUTY” ?

What a load of old baloney.

And if you think that’s bad, who in God’s name at the Charity Commission rubber stamped HOWL, the Hunt Saboteurs’ magazine, as a worthy charitable cause?

Sabs are thugs who go around the countryside deliberately disrupting perfectly legal activities and smashing up perfectly legal traps put down on government advice. HOWL then glorifies their illegal activities in their charity magazine. This beggars belief! In leaflets inserted into their magazine they show readers how to copycat their terrorizing activities:

And what about the perfectly legal activity – and income generator for UK Plc – of shooting grouse? Again, another loose insert in the HOWL charity magazine explains the joys of wasting someone’s hard-earned £1,000. In what way is that a charitable cause?

Writing that the Kernow hunt sabs had “a smashing time this summer”, along with social media commentary stating “Cages will be destroyed in their hundreds…” is like giving charity status to the marauding gangs of football thugs that once tore up city centres, smashed windows, wrecked bars and fought vicious running battles with rivals. Tax free balaclavas anyone?

All this must be particularly galling for the peaceable Countryside Alliance as they were refused charity status back in 2017. The Commission commented back then:

“Certain purposes of the Alliance relate to preserving, protecting and promoting the heritage and practice of activities related to wildlife, the countryside and wildlife management including hunting, shooting and fishing together with the management of the natural environment; and the advancement of rural community life. These do not fall within a description of purpose which is recognised in law as being a purpose which may be charitable.”

Apparently, wearing black uniforms, terrorizing women and children, smashing up cages and traps, threatening, bullying and intimidating folk on social media and being all-round scumbags, falls into the description of a ‘purpose’ recognized in law as being that which may be charitable? 

Are you really sure about that, Charity Commission?

Thanks to the efforts of good country people, finally there is recognition that things have reached a point beyond lunacy. Presenter activists, sab charities, convicted felons running crowdfunders … finally the tide is turning after many years of increasing fraud and fakery. Finally, there are those with a loud voice, the right connections and many supporters speaking up for countrysiders against these dangerous meddlers. May those who stand in their way be scythed down by common sense and true science. Let the countryside roar be heard across the land once again.