BY JOHN NASH
A small queef of excitement has crept into the Westminster Asylum, that island reserve where the rare creatures of Homo politicus vulgaris live in splendid and well-appointed isolation. A sub-species among them, H. politicus tetraodontiformicus, known as ‘Westminster Greenies’, are in a state of near hysteria. Fascinating and easily identified by their piscatorial aroma, they are related to the puffer and blow fishes, and they rather oddly inflate themselves with methane whenever a member of the public or a TV camera is nearby.
The Westminster Greenies are presently even more excited than a pre-school, tartrazine-fuelled birthday party because a v.v. important annual event is now happening for them. Culturally, they are an innocent but enchanting cargo cult who believe, like some uncontacted Melanesian tribe, that a magic ship will one day arrive in a form of divine intervention, bringing them fame and fortune, ushering in a paradise-like existence where they, isolated in their bubble house on the Thames, will, by the same magic, save the world’s wild animals, especially all the exotic, charismatic, photogenic and fluffy ones.
Dear Readers, brace yourself for a tiny impact – a ship of great promise has returned again this year, as it does every year, but again, it is not a divine intervention – it is the same old imposter, a freshly repainted ship of fools that is, as you read these very words, in London, ploughing without regard across the bows of His Majesty’s Ark of State, firing broadsides of excrement in all directions, all the time laying a bigger smokescreen than an electric Chinese 4 x 4 with its zero-pollution batteries on fire. The Greenies are already responding to the arrival, rapidly becoming euphoric as they inhale its methane with the enthusiasm of hippie crack at Glasto.
Behind the obvious childish excitement of flying excrement and green intoxicant, the ship, once called the SS Ponzi, but now renamed the CBTH, is a craft built entirely out of fairy dust by the hate-monger and crafty rodent Eddy Gonçalves. It is crewed by a motley collection of quixotic volunteers, all of whom have had their bullshit detectors surgically removed and thus become disassociated with reality, all of them actors in their own play. Their destination is a dreamlike wildlife Nirvana that doesn’t exist outside of human imagination as they sally forth on their adventures, tilting at more imaginary eco-windmills than even those of Mililoon and his great dash forward to the socialist mesolithic.
This flurry of activity has been triggered by two events. The first is the tenth anniversary of the death of Cecil the Lion, an old lion given a human name and made famous by the Greenie media, who was pushed out of the Hwange National Park by the 500 younger, more aggressive lions inside the park in a perfectly natural process proving that lions are doing very well there. He went onto an adjacent hunting ground and, like all other lions once outside the Park, was killed – being habituated to tourists, he wasn’t afraid of humans, and so, with senility and enfeeblement approaching and probable loss of the ability to hunt fast game, the resulting starvation might easily drive such a lion to become a stock raider or man-eater. He was not as lucky as the many others shot in the same way – although arrowed and escaped in the dark, but he spent only a few hours before being found in daylight and dispatched – other, less fortunate lions are snared and poisoned to die very slowly in agony.
But Greenies don’t let silly, insignificant things like facts get in their way – even in Parliamentary debates, verifiers found that more than half the statements made by Greenie MPs (otherwise known as watermelons) are actually more bent than a nine-bob note. So, the ship of fools sails on, flying a huge flag with Cecil on it.
The other trigger event is the coming annual attempt to Ban the Importation of Hunting Trophies, this time disgracefully introduced as a Private Member’s Bill by a Conservative MP, confirming just how much methane the Tories, once the party of Protect and Provide, have been snorting since Maggie kept them on the difficult path.
This ridiculous Bill is the stuff of gospel to the Greenies, who wander Westminster with blow up plastic animals and organic sandwich boards with pictures of elephants, saying ‘The end is nigh’. They are convinced that Africa’s wildlife is heading for a disastrous crash and they are the sole ejector seat to safety. Unfortunately for Africa’s wildlife, it is a Greenie equivalent of an ejector seat in a helicopter. It has a tiny design flaw.
The reason is clear – amnesia. We are a civilised nation of animal lovers, who never question where all the wildlife went on our own island. Nobody mentions that we killed most of it off a thousand years ago and built over it with towns and farmland in order to ensure a high standard of living compared to Africa. That’s why Africa has thundering herds of wildlife and we don’t. Our civilisation and its standard of living, not trophy hunters, has bumped off all the wildlife. In fact, around the world, the human standard of living is inversely proportional to the wildlife. It is therefore supremely ironic that the best fed, most civilised people are the biggest killers of nature, yet they alone, well fed and protected, can afford the luxury of concern for wildlife. In turn, they need a target for their concerns, so along comes wily Gonçalves the prophet on the poop of his galleon and sells them absolution in the shape of a fictional evil white hunter, crafted out of rocking horse dollop and spite, dressed in Victorian hunter garb to avoid modern truth, drenched in Colonial verbosity to conceal the smell of methane, and made big enough to hide the sins of our own high consumption.
But all of this concern is really about the believers’ concern and zeal, inside the zealots’ own heads, not in the reality of Africa nor of its wildlife or the people who live with it.
Eduardo Goncalves (on the left)
Africans too, want increased living standards – living standards that can be paid for in part by tourists, both photographic and hunting tourists, without destroying the wildlife. Photo-tourists go to the Great Parks, while hunters go to the rural areas, and without hunting, farming will replace the wild animals in rural areas – people have to eat. Where trophy hunting is legal and regulated in Southern Africa, the wildlife is safe and increasing because the harvest never exceeds the birth rate. It is about effective land use In Africa, not the anxieties of gullible urban civilians in the UK.
It is indeed a ship of fools – an empty vessel making a lot of noise – from the likes of Chris Tarrant, a man more acquainted with the Spirit of Scotland than the spirit of the wild, Dame Goodall (bless) who spent her whole life with monkeys, Dame Lumley who has run out of TV scripts and Gurkhas to save and has moved on to Africa’s wildlife, Chris Packham the extremist and fibber whose conservation efforts include a nice house carved out of the New Forest, sad old Fingerless Fiennes who once wandered the world as a posh and famous explorer but now spends his time sniffing Gonçalves’ saddle for meagre warmth and comfort, Maasai Senior Elder Boniface Mpario, who rules his tribe from his home in Waterlooville, Hampshire, actor Peter Egan whose experience with the rolling savannahs of Downton Abbey are legendary …the list goes on and on.
They have a significant campaign because that is all they do – campaign – they collect money to campaign more to collect more money to campaign more, and so on – it’s so easy….meanwhile, hunters go out hunting and pay to conserve large areas, while rural Africans are denied a voice.
And who will tell you the truth?
Don’t listen to me, a retired old bush-rat with neither eminence nor standing but a head full of wonderful memories. Instead, Dear Readers, I implore you to read reality in The Maverick, in Africa, where Ed Stoddard and Adam Hart, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire (who actually works on proper conservation ecology in southern Africa), have the testicular fortitude and honesty to tell the truth and reveal the real issues like adults.
And, thus equipped, ask your MP to be honest, to stand up for real conservation and the real rural people of Africa instead of pandering to a cult who have been led up the Khyber by the oily wolf Gonçalves, poncing about in sheep’s clothing, waving a collecting tin whose contents disappear from public eye even faster than truth at his lips.
The UK has enough problems without inflicting more misery on Africa.
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. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor.
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