BY JOHN NASH

“AT XMAS…. SICK KILLING TRADE. Reindeer horror. A Scots firm has sparked fury by selling sick reindeer shooting hunts as Christmas approaches” fulminated the Mirror with a front-page spread together with some other rags on the 18th of December. Goodness gracious.  For many people, this is the season of goodwill, so this is awful. Poor Rudolph shot dead at Christmas!

Except that he wasn’t. 

Someone is peeing on the Christmas presents, folks.

Behind the smell of mince-pies, there is suddenly the distinct aroma of porky-pies and more than a whiff of Portuguese rodent. This whole “Xmas” angle was apparently cooked up by the Mirror Group’s political halfwit and animal rights (AR) gimp, Ben Gaze but it has the dabs of his guru, the UK’s AR-soul-in-Chief, Eduardo Gonçalves, all over it. They work closer together than Packham and his butt-plug Tingay, with Gonçalves churning out “exclusive” hatred faster than Goebbels on Ketamine, and the Mirror feting Gonçalves with awards like its 2019 Animal Hero Award (I kid you not).  Gaze’s ability as “Deputy Political Editor” in this case appears limited to signing Gonçalves’ voids with his own spittle-flecked crayons.  This is a recycled non-story – it was about Iceland last time around.

This non-story provides a textbook example of the worst kind of spiteful hatemongering. The way these propagandists hoodwink UK animal lovers for their own ends provides a stark warning to all hard-working Countryfolk just how low these AR souls are prepared to go to throw you under the wheels of their shabby bandwagon dirt-cart. Why such naked hatred is allowed to continue in a UK gutter newspaper is a mystery. IPSO, the Press Standards old boys club, is obviously hibernating in a deep midwinter embrace with Companies House and the fundraising ombudsman.

The worst propaganda oozes out of one outfall. The CAMPAIGN TO BAN TROPHY HUNTING LTD, Company Number 12200178 which was dissolved on 21 December 2021 without much in the way of financial detail, replaced by the usefully similar BAN TROPHY HUNTING, Company Number 13604179 – Incorporated on 6 September 2021 (whose less than transparent Article of Association No.50 says nobody has the right to examine the company books). It has recently reported late in turn, again without any financials because it is self-declared as “dormant”. Dormant it might be, but entirely coincidentally of course, the similarly named BANTROPHYHUNTING.ORG is still busy operating out of the same Sheldon Street Address, asking for and receiving donations “since launching in 2018”. The Tax man has been informed. Happy Christmas, Mr Gonçalves and a spectacular 2024 to you when you’ll have more headlines than you know what to do with.

In case you missed the unsubtle connection between Christmas and reindeer in the front-page story, “Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting member and explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes” helpfully added (in a strangely Portuguese accent, his lips not moving) “If we needed proof of just how evil trophy hunters really are, then this is surely it. This is the most un-British thing I have ever heard of. These cowards are happy to ruin the spirit of Christmas for children everywhere. For a British company to be profiting from this disgrace is beyond appalling. We need a complete ban on this sick industry.”

“Un-British?” “Cowards?” “Ruin Christmas for children?” “Evil disgrace?” “Sick industry?”  Please pause for a truth break, Dear Readers – you see, the actual hunting season for reindeer in Norway lasts for twenty days around late August, nowhere near Christmas. The only thing trying to “ruin the spirit of Christmas for children” is the Mirror. The hunts are discreetly advertised on the website of a very professional outfitter. No child would be aware of a hunt without the Mirror splashing its fake news all over the UK – you have to be over 18 to hunt big game in Norway.    

As for “un-British”, we shoot 350,000 deer in the UK annually, 60x the Norwegian reindeer harvest. “Cowardly” it is certainly not – hunters are warned that it will be a particularly strenuous test. “Evil disgrace” doesn’t apply either – hunting is a perfectly normal human activity and has been for hundreds of thousands of years. Deer culls are organised by such august bodies as the RSPB, reindeer culls are similarly vital. All the reindeer are eaten. It is all Government supervised, permit and quota regulated and legal.  

“Sick industry?” Hunting is simply hunting. There are still millions of hunters worldwide, over a million shooters in the UK and 39,000 hunters in Norway alone. Who is sick? Look in the mirror, Sir Fingerless Frostbite – you are a very silly boy, allowing your once-fine explorer name to be used by charlatans for this kind of hatemongering, this anti-social and divisive drivel. 

Some facts:

There are more than 7 million reindeer in the world and 250,000 in Norway. You couldn’t imagine a more closely regulated traditional industry. The actual hunt being offered comes after 8 years of prohibition in a particular hunting area.  Now, because of that, reindeer numbers must be managed – in the past decade, 80,000 arctic reindeer starved during two bad winters. The number of reindeer hunted yearly in Norway is subject to quotas determined by the Norwegian authorities, based on the state of the wild reindeer population. That number has been under 10,000 every year since the 1980s, and for the 2021-2022 season it was 5641. As the Norwegians themselves put it, “Due to constant reductions in wild reindeer habitats, we must regulate the number of animals. This is done so the reindeer have enough food throughout the year, and to avoid disease”. The cull is done for the good of the reindeer, not that Ben Gaze and the Perfidious Prince of Propaganda could care less – you see, they are political animals, city boys, gobsters – this story is urban political deceit and profit for these AR souls.  

It has absolutely nothing to do with reindeer other than a trophy rack to hang the non-story on. But it does have a bit to do with a donkey – a willing donkey. To reinforce the political angle, Sir Ranulph apparently added, entirely unprompted, his jaw moving woodenly, operated from above by strings from a Portuguese hand, “It’s time the Government got on with the ban they promised to deliver in 2019. British trophy hunters are laughing at the delays and the blocking of the ban”.  

Trophy hunters aren’t laughing, Sir Ranulph – they’re throwing up, listening to you and that deceitful Portuguese runt, together with Ben Gaze and the rest of your little APPG skunkworks of rule-breaking, tin-shaking AR charlatans who had the barefaced cheek to set up inside our Parliament building.  Like everything else these rodents do, it broke several rules and wasted thousands of hours of valuable Parliamentary time as it fed a constant stream of terminological inexactitudes into Parliamentary debates before it was cleaned out and the place disinfected. According to the Register of All-Party Parliamentary Groups [as at 17 November 2021] the APPG in question had the coincidental name Banning Trophy Hunting, listed none other than one Eduardo Gonçalves as its Public Enquiry Point, and Shelton Street London as its contact address. 

Sound familiar?

It does to the tax man.

The same pest control was applied to the stupid bill that tried to ban the importation of hunting trophies of more than 5000 species that have never been trophy hunted, including corals and jellyfish, thought up by the same deceitful twerps. That Bill, to Ban the Importation of Hunting Trophies, is now refusing to die, attempting to tread the same path as the Fox Hunting ban before it. 

A million-pound bung, anyone?

We now know that the Fox hunting ban, a total disaster for foxes, was the result of a million-pound AR bung to the Labour Party, confirmed this week by the Dark Lord Peter Mandelson.  More than a few people are now wondering where the little brown envelopes are sliding this time round.  

Thank goodness sanity and truth prevailed in September when the Lords stamped on this nasty little cockroach of a Bill.  Sanity and truth are two much more precious and endangered creatures than reindeer but they are sadly becoming extinct in the UK too, stabbed to death by the poison pens of AR souls like the Mirror Group’s Ben Gaze and the nasty, hate-mongering toxic dwarf Gonçalves, riding rings around decency until he gets that knock on his door.   

John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.