BY NIGEL BEAN
Welcome to the ‘animal rights’ charity sector. Here’s the League Against Cruel Sports’ (LACS) story of selling misery to the British public….
We protect foxes but have not saved the life of one single fox
LACS has not had an easy ride. Eight high ranking officials upped sticks and left having seen through the organisation’s lies. These included CEO James Barrington. He has since become a strong advocate for the use of hunting hounds to manage the fox population. Like the previous seven he reasoned a ban would lead to more foxes being killed as other killing methods necessarily increased to compensate for those no longer killed by hunting.
Barrington described animal rights obsessives and their ‘don’t do it’ attitude as almost like ‘religious fundamentalism’, a description not lost on another defector, Miles Cooper, who went on to describe LACS as a cult, explaining that animal rights folk ‘never really understood what they were doing or why they were there’.
James Barrington & Miles Cooper were proven right, they did fail to save the life of a single fox and to add insult to injury it was their own scientific researcher that provided this information to the Scottish Government. This same LACS backed researcher, Dr Stephen Harris, was arguing in government hunting hearings over a decade previous that ‘we can ban hunting and the numbers of foxes would stay roughly the same’ – lies or miscalculations that helped persuade parliamentarians it’s OK to ban hunting without causing a negative effect on the fox population.
Never mind, we can create our own evidence using polling
Since losing the argument on fox numbers, which have gone through the roof and now plague towns and cities (there are over a hundred fox assassins operating in London alone these days), while fox numbers are markedly down in the countryside due to increased shooting, LACS have had to rely on the good old opinion poll to prop up their beleaguered theories. Look how they are quick to state that 85% of the UK population support a ban.
Of course we now know their polls were rigged, they use the much-ridiculed push polling technique to obtain their answers. Basically you can set up a respondent with a series of misleading questions before asking the main question – by the time this is asked you get the answer you want. They also use definitions in polls – that also adds significant bias towards reaching the result they want.
Use another definition and the majority of countryside folk support hunting as was seen by this Government inquiry poll in 2000:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/lies-damn-lies-and-hunting-polls/
50 million back us but we have severely dwindling LACS membership numbers
We worked out their membership numbers from their annual filed accounts:
It turns out the charity claiming 50 million people are on their side only have a tiny 4,734 paying members – even that number was down 15% on last year.
What went wrong?
During the eighties and nineties James Barrington can remember a paying membership of 38,000 members but just after the hunting ban came into force – around 2005 – the numbers crashed as the anti-hunting crowd presumed they had achieved their goal. Back then there was a genuine aim. Members felt satisfied in thinking they had achieved their target.
So what have LACS done to try to recover?
Just as Stonewall are in trouble with members for pushing trans ideology and dividing the gay community, so the anti-hunting minority at LACS are in trouble for going after a cause the British public don’t give two hoots about – shooting.
In its infinite wisdom, LACS turned on shooting in a desperate bid to bolster their membership, but this failed spectacularly, and their numbers remain miserably low. Possibly because most people have hit a pheasant whilst driving in the countryside and have recognised that they are some of the most brainless creatures on planet earth and make pigeons and chickens look bright. They love a bit of KFC so really don’t give a damn about grouse or pheasant shooting.
So we need a new target to boost membership.
So in a desperate bid to increase paying membership they turned their back on trail hunting by claiming it’s really fox hunting and by making out trail hunters are breaking the law every time they go out.
Hardly anyone is fooled by that deception. Only the mugs that stood by them after they had achieved their main aim of a ban. Do the maths – with a reported 4,700 paying members in 2010 and eleven years later we can work out their membership to be 4,734 despite their erroneous claims of ‘lawbreaking hunters’, its quite clear nobody is falling for their nonsense. Fortunately, Joe Public recognises a scam when he sees one.
Here’s Steve Grant from Countryman’s Weekly:
We are doomed.
So, LACS no longer have a cause, they lost the argument about fox numbers and have brought misery to many town and country foxes. They spend their days inciting hate and making Facebook users feel uncomfortable about animal cruelty which mostly doesn’t exist, so they feel emotionally blackmailed into parting with donations. And now – not for the first time – LACS are in real trouble with the Charity Commission, having jumped on the cancel culture bandwagon which is not befitting of a charity at all:
https://www.countryside-alliance.org/news/2021/5/league-against-cruel-sports-launch-shocking-campai
The letter states a string of appalling, baseless accusations about how the business is ‘complicit’ in the ‘brutal killing’ of wildlife. As such, Ms. Lawrence writes, the business should cease donations to the hunt’s auction to ‘protect your [the] business’s reputation’. It clearly gives the impression that failure to comply with LACS’s demands will result in the business being negatively impacted, because of further targeted campaigning by the charity orchestrated by the ‘Regional Campaigns Manager’.
With only lies and misery to sell, let’s hope LACS lose their charity status and run out of money soon.