BY JOHN NASH & DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

An excerpt from Nash & Wightman’s ‘Dear Townies’ (Western, 2024).

Animal Rights organisations like PETA are powerfully supported by actors and celebrities, occupations that are situated far to the left, female side of the cave, just about as far from the doorway and ‘outdoor’ reality as you can get.

It is ironic, and not a little hypocritical, that the entertainment industry (and that includes influencers and celebrities), the very epitome of vast, frivolous (inessential to human survival) consumption of resources taken from Nature at great cost to the animal world, should be so pious about Nature whose largesse they fritter away.

There is surely a connection and the one that we suspect glues them all together is displaced guilt. 

The involvement of the highly popular entertainment industry, an industry founded on pretence, provides a further pointer to understanding much public support for animal rights.

People’s public persona is a performance, and people like to show (perform) that they care about animals, even whilst consuming animals’ lives in vast numbers.

Animal rights may be an interesting philosophical exercise, but in the real world, the whole concept requires an enormous amount of theatre to hide the fact that it is all in the mind. 

In reality, all across the animal (and plant) kingdom, competitors kill each other, a state of affairs that might impinge somewhat on the peace and happiness of the losers involved, but the fact is that by killing and eating other animals, predators actually take their prey into ownership, a state reflected in the modern use of the term ‘owned’ as in ‘watch as this antelope is owned by a lion.’ 

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Even when the competition is less dramatic – the competition for land, water or light – winners get to own the resource, while losers lose it, often resulting in losing their lives, too.

It is hardly surprising – Townies, living deep in the Human Cave of Civilisation, have no idea how ‘outside’ Nature works, an empty knowledge space that is easily filled by charlatans and their willing actors and entertainers who are skilled at dramatic theatricals. Often UK Farming Ministers and those working in environmental bodies have grown up, live and work in towns and cities.

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Unlike other service industries, the entertainment industry is largely irrelevant to human survival and, being irrelevant, yearns strongly for a more important role.

Desire for importance and ability to act come together in the public display of virtue that is animal rights. It has no basis in reality, so it is an act, and one for which actors are superbly equipped. Together they suffer collectively from a weird kind of Munchausen’s eco-victim by proxy, attracting attention by breast-beating about fictitious wildlife dilemmas invented by eco-chuggers.

It is little wonder that eco-chuggers, celebrities, and the entertainment industry are such cozy bedfellows. They need each other but few are anything to do with wildlife.

The same can be said for many TV wildlife ‘experts’. They are first and foremost actors – performers, not scientists, part of the entertainment industry.

Wildlife as entertainment, with its anthropomorphic, soap opera story lines and sanitised predation, does not represent the reality of life in the wild.

This entertaining fiction makes rural life, real conservation, and animal husbandry very difficult to understand for Townies. It is, however, the only wildlife information that most of them ever receive. 

Wherever you look behind the facade of big animal welfare, you find a hideout filled with miscreants, truth benders and some of the thickest-skinned hypocrites in human imagination.

The Countryside saw through the lot of them years ago, principally because rural people have no choice but to confront and cope with the realities of Nature and to work with animals in the real world.

Alas, often unknowingly, Townies are the eco-chuggers’ paying audience. Little do Townies know how the eco-chuggers are causing the Countryside an awful lot of damage with their propaganda, much of it blatantly anti-farming and certainly anti-field sports.

‘Dear Townies’ by John Nash and Dominic Wightman can be acquired on Amazon here.