Category: South West England

South West Eng­land

New UK Fracking License Areas Confirmed

Decem­ber 17th The UK gov­ern­ment has announced that rough­ly 60% of the UK is now avail­able to be licensed to frack­ing com­pa­nies.

Decem­ber 17th The UK gov­ern­ment has announced that rough­ly 60% of the UK is now avail­able to be licensed to frack­ing com­pa­nies. After a brief “con­sul­ta­tion” peri­od it is like­ly that the licens­es will be hand­ed out to frak­ing com­pa­nies in the first half of 2014. The licens­es would cov­er the exploita­tion of both shale oil and gas and coal bed methane (CBM).

The area is based on that cov­ered by a new­ly finalised Strate­gic Envi­ron­men­tal Assess­ment (PDF). Despite the name the doc­u­ment does not seem to be par­tic­u­lar­ly focused on the envi­ron­ment and does not address the long term impacts of issu­ing these poten­tial­ly 30 year long licens­es.

To extract the amounts of gas that com­pa­nies are brag­ging are in exist­ing license blocks would require tens of thou­sands of wells. If large addi­tion­al areas are licensed next year, the scale of threat will be much larg­er still. These devel­op­ments would dev­as­tate our remain­ing coun­try­side, indus­tri­al­is­ing huge areas with well pads, pipelines, com­pres­sor sta­tions and pro­cess­ing plants.

The real­i­ty of uncon­ven­tion­al gas is that it is very hard to extract. It is lit­er­al­ly scrap­ping the bot­tom of the fos­sil fuel bar­rel. Dense­ly packed wells must be drilled (up to 8 wells per square mile) over large areas, since each well indi­vid­ual wells does not pro­duce much gas and then only for a short time. Worse, frack­ing is not an iso­lat­ed tech­nol­o­gy but is part of a wider trend towards more extreme forms of ener­gy extrac­tion, which if not resist­ed could see even larg­er threats such as Under­ground Coal Gasi­fi­ca­tion (UCG) become wide­spread.

Right now the com­mu­ni­ty around Bar­ton Moss near Man­ches­ter is fight­ing the threat to their region posed by IGas Energy’s attempts to drill a Shale/CBM explo­ration well there. Across the coun­try com­mu­ni­ties are get­ting organ­ised to resist these threats, with around 70 anti-frack­ing groups already formed in the last two years, and that num­ber grow­ing fast.

A Victory for “People Power”

1st Decem­ber from Stop the Cull

1st Decem­ber from Stop the Cull

At lunchtime on the 29th of Novem­ber a moment in his­to­ry was cre­at­ed when the guardian released this sto­ry. Telling the world that final­ly the British gov­ern­ment had been beat­en into sub­mis­sion and called an ear­ly end to its wildlife mas­sacre it called a “bad­ger cull”.

The cull was always sold to the British pub­lic as a pilot to see if over a peri­od of 6 weeks, bad­gers could be killed “effec­tive­ly, safe­ly & humane­ly”. Toward the end of those 6 weeks we the pub­lic were told that the orig­i­nal pop­u­la­tion stud­ies had changed and the new pop­u­la­tion fig­ures were actu­al­ly much low­er, they refused to cred­it us the sabs with destroy­ing their Hair DNA pop­u­la­tion stud­ies and instead decid­ed to blame bad­gers for “mov­ing the goal­posts”. With mas­sive­ly reduced pop­u­la­tions (strange­ly David Heath had been com­plain­ing along with many farm­ers of pop­u­la­tion “explo­sions”) the tar­get to kill was made much eas­i­er for them to reach.

What they hadn’t planned on was the per­se­ver­ance, tenac­i­ty, endurance & crafti­ness of those opposed to the cull. Many expe­ri­enced hunt sabo­teurs walked the fields and wood­lands of the cull zones night after night, as did many oth­er peo­ple, these peo­ple just like sabs came from a wide vari­ety of back­grounds, teach­ers, graph­ic design­ers, care work­ers, the very rich, the retired and yes even the unem­ployed and stu­dents. A ded­i­cat­ed num­ber of  these peo­ple before the culls start­ed, going as far back as June last year had been sett sur­vey­ing the entire area, one of them “Jo Bad­ger” recent­ly passed away, her pass­ing has been a great loss to many of us. Their work was the foun­da­tion for all the defence of the bad­gers dur­ing the cull & it is these peo­ple who know how active setts are in cer­tain areas, find­ing the Hair DNA traps was an easy task for them.

With a total of over 500 sq Km’s sur­veyed, pro­tect­ing the bad­gers from free shoot­ers was a ques­tion of team work, whilst some peo­ple work­ing tire­less­ly with­in the law tra­versed hun­dreds of miles of foot­paths and report­ed in any sight­ings, Sab groups and peo­ple pre­pared to break minor tres­pass laws got clos­er to shoot­ers and often moved them on with noise. Sev­er­al weeks into the cull a small for­tune was spent on night vision equip­ment and the amount of shoot­ers being stopped increased rapid­ly. That equip­ment like the fuel in the tanks was gen­er­ous­ly donat­ed by sup­port­ers from across the coun­try, with­out their sup­port the cam­paign would have strug­gled great­ly and we would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to thank every­one who helped with fundrais­ing to get peo­ple to the zones.

When the 6 week culls end­ed and it was announced in Som­er­set that they hadn’t achieved their tar­gets we sighed with relief & pre­pared to focus just on Glouces­ter­shire for the final week, to our dis­may they announced exten­sions, in Som­er­set with the dras­ti­cal­ly reduced pop­u­la­tions they announced that they had to kill anoth­er 165 bad­gers over a three week peri­od. Hav­ing man­aged to kill over 100 a week dur­ing the 6 week cull peo­ple on the ground knew they had a lot of work to do to stop them reach­ing their tar­gets. With lit­tle or no hol­i­day time left to claim many peo­ple took unpaid leave from work, rela­tion­ships were strained and many peo­ple were suf­fer­ing with extreme fatigue. Still they did not give up, with the weight of know­ing that the culls would be rolled out if these suc­ceed­ed, peo­ple buck­led down to the work know­ing that tens of thou­sands of bad­gers lives were in the bal­ance. At the end of the 3 week exten­sion 90 bad­gers had been killed, mak­ing the Som­er­set cull and exten­sion a fail­ure.

The shoot­ers hav­ing failed at free shoot­ing ear­ly on had gone over heav­i­ly to cage trap­ping as a tried and test­ed method of killing large num­bers of bad­gers, when we knew this for sure, our efforts accord­ing­ly var­ied and we focussed as much resources as pos­si­ble at find­ing cage traps and “neu­tral­is­ing” them. In Som­er­set we nev­er found more than 3 cages on one sett. Mean­while in Glouces­ter­shire the fig­ures on the total killed came out, it was shock­ing­ly low at only 30% of the revised pop. fig­ure, Nat­ur­al Eng­land issued an exten­sion for 8 weeks with a tar­get of just 58% to achieve “dis­ease con­trol” the NFU didn’t mess about and prompt­ly put down hun­dreds of traps.

Protest cul­ture has for some years attrib­uted minor crim­i­nal dam­age done at night to “pix­ies”. Some peo­ple find this word annoy­ing, just as oth­er peo­ple don’t iden­ti­fy with the word “sab”. Seman­tics to one side, the cage traps were destroyed as fast as they went down, for the most part by very nor­mal peo­ple doing extra­or­di­nary work, through the day traps were found then by night they were destroyed, each one cost­ing approx £150. In just over 4 weeks near­ly 400 of these traps had been made use­less. With “free shoot­ing” being proven to be a method­ol­o­gy that didn’t work, cage trap­ping was under­tak­en to kill as many bad­gers as pos­si­ble. We the British pub­lic just weren’t hav­ing it.

Whilst we cel­e­brate the fail­ure of these bad­ger culls and the part we played in their down­fall, we mourn the loss of all the bad­gers that have been need­less­ly killed dur­ing this cull. We would ask any­one who thinks that killing bad­gers to stop the spread of bTB to spend a few min­utes watch­ing this video filmed just before the culls start­ed

We will con­tin­ue with our cam­paign, film­ing farm con­di­tions, sab­bing pheas­ant shoots, organ­is­ing boy­cotts, all the time build­ing our num­bers and reach on social media. The culls may con­tin­ue, but so will we.

As has been proven today, if you ignore the will of the peo­ple, the peo­ple will fight back, we are organ­ised, we have built teams of peo­ple who rely on each oth­er, our sup­port­ers know the meth­ods we use and are com­fort­able know­ing that we behave hon­ourably, we know how to dis­rupt culls, we are strong and we are many, and we will nev­er leave our bad­gers unde­fend­ed to be attacked by brutes and thugs.

NEVER

Badger Honour

14th Novem­ber  From schnews

Bad­ger killings in detail

14th Novem­ber  From schnews

Bad­ger killings in detail

When the Bad­ger Trust threat­ened Nat­ur­al Eng­land with legal action for extend­ing the bad­ger cull, Nat­ur­al Eng­land said the the claim was based on a fun­da­men­tal con­fu­sion, but can you blame them, when those involved in the cull have been so, well, con­fus­ing. Between the secre­cy, the lying, u‑turns and even the blam­ing of the bad­gers for not co-oper­at­ing with being shot. Schnews attempts to digest the bad­ger farce a lit­tle…

 

TRIGGER WARNING

The the­o­ry is that killing bad­gers will reduce TB in cat­tle by 16%. Pre­vi­ous tri­als used traps to catch the ani­mals before shoot­ing them, but this was vetoed as too expen­sive and too vul­ner­a­ble to dis­rup­tion. This time, they’ve gone for the econ­o­my ver­sion where the bad­gers are shot while free run­ning. Vac­ci­nat­ing bad­gers has been dis­missed by gov­ern­ment as too expen­sive though sev­er­al inde­pen­dent groups are vac­ci­nat­ing. The whole pol­i­cy ignores the real prob­lems around bovine TB, which you can read about here (SchNEWS 836)

One of the impor­tant cri­te­ria of the cull is that at least 70% of the bad­gers in a giv­en area must be killed, to min­imise the num­ber of dis­turbed sur­vivors roam­ing about spread­ing the dis­ease fur­ther afield — the so-called ‘per­tur­ba­tion’ effect.

The main prob­lem with this was pret­ty clear from the begin­ning; nobody knows how many bad­gers there in the first place. Pre­vi­ous data showed more about the dis­tri­b­u­tion of bad­ger enthu­si­asts than bad­gers.

In 2012, Defra post­poned the cull, using the excuse that the bad­ger pop­u­la­tion was far high­er than expect­ed. when their pop­u­la­tion esti­mate shot up sud­den­ly. This year, when half way through the process it was clear the cull was floun­der­ing, they revised the pop­u­la­tion esti­mate down – the famous ‘pesky bad­gers moved my goal­posts’ moment. In a sta­tis­ti­cal manip­u­la­tion wor­thy of any­body’s Five Year Plan, Pater­son­’s Polit­buro announced that 940 bad­gers amount­ed to 65% of the pop­u­la­tion (Unmo­lest­ed pop­u­la­tions of bad­gers have shown no sign of these wild oscil­la­tions in num­bers)

Stal­in Pater­son has been caught out fib­bing about more thasn the num­bers though. On 10th Octo­ber he stat­ed in par­lia­ment that ‘…some of the ani­mals we have shot have been des­per­ate­ly sick-in the final stages of dis­ease…’ Mark Jones vet and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Humane Soci­ety Inter­na­tion­al said: “As a vet I find Mr Paterson’s claim that bad­gers shot in the pilot culls were ‘des­per­ate­ly sick’ high­ly sus­pi­cious. I know of no evi­dence to back this up, indeed all the avail­able data sug­gests that even where bovine TB is rife among cat­tle, only a tiny pro­por­tion of bad­gers will be suf­fer­ing any symp­toms of the dis­ease. The fig­ure is per­haps as low as one in a hun­dred. As Mr Pater­son has refused to have the bad­ger car­cas­es test­ed for TB, he can­not pos­si­bly have any sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly cred­i­ble data to sup­port his asser­tion and nobody will be per­mit­ted to chal­lenge his claim because DEFRA is hav­ing all the bod­ies incin­er­at­ed”

In Som­er­set they have killed 940 bad­gers, which with the cur­rent pop­u­la­tion esti­mate of 1450 is 65%. But at one point they said the pop­u­la­tion was 4300, which meant they had to kill 3000 bad­gers. If we’ve got the maths right, 940 is only 22% of 4300. At the end of the orig­i­nal Glouces­ter peri­od, only 30% had been killed.

The Som­er­set cull has now stopped but the Glouces­ter cull zone has been grant­ed an eight week exten­sion.

 

Action against the cull

The sus­tained lev­el of resis­tance to the cull has been impres­sive, nev­er leav­ing shoot­ers to oper­ate in peace. Hun­dreds of peo­ple have been spend­ing their nights in the cull zones, often trav­el­ling long dis­tances. A sin­gle bad­ger killed is clear­ly one too many but the deter­mined work of so many has helped make the cull a fail­ure. What­ev­er the gov­ern­ment spin says, shoot­ers on the ground have been admit­ting there was ‘no point even turn­ing up most nights.’

SchNEWS spoke to a reg­u­lar trav­eller to the cull zones “One of the best things about the cull is how it has brought togeth­er such a diver­si­ty of peo­ple togeth­er for the sake of the bad­gers. There has been good co-oper­a­tion and accep­tance of dif­fer­ent tac­tics with those going on legal night patrols on foot­paths work­ing along­side those direct­ly sab­o­tag­ing the shoot­ers with noise and torch­es. Mean­while, the Bad­ger Trust have been fight­ing the cull in court and the likes of Bri­an May have been doing the media bit. There have been live­ly pro bad­ger march­es in towns all round the coun­try. Hunt sabo­teurs have report­ed an increase in sup­port since sab­o­tag­ing the cull.Those sorts of alliances and rad­i­cal­is­ing of the ani­mal lov­ing mid­dle eng­land could be a bit of an own goal for the shoot­ing lob­by.”

 

Info for Action

Polic­ing tac­tics in the two cull zones have been very dif­fer­ent but they haven’t in either case suceed­ed in dis­rupt­ing the sab­o­tage. Glouces­ter­shire polic­ing has been a lot more pro-active, more arrests and harass­ment of activists, than in Som­er­set.

“In terms of tac­tics, the hard­est part has gen­er­al­ly been find­ing the shoot­ers. Good sett sur­vey­ing before­hand, record­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing sight­ings and sheer num­bers of peo­ple out look­ing have all proved help­ful. The groups walk­ing foot­paths with torch­es have made cer­tain areas impos­si­ble to shoot in and noisy dis­rup­tion of shoots have stopped them as well. When cage traps are used you can squash them or cut them open with bolt cut­ters. The cull is still going on in Glouces­ter­shire so get on down there to prac­tice your trap destruc­tion skills.”

 

Next

The licences for these two cull zones last for four years, but oth­er pilot culls may be start­ed next year. Top of the list is Dorset. Culling has to stop over the win­ter but may start again in the spring.

An ‘inde­pen­dent pan­el’ is sup­posed to be eval­u­at­ing the evi­dence to decide if the tri­als are suc­cess­ful. Indi­ca­tions sug­gest that Owen ‘shoot the buz­zards’ Pater­son will not accept any thing but approval of the cull.

 

Support Spied Upon, a vital expose film telling the story of activists targeted by secret police

Dear Earth First!ers,

 

Dear Earth First!ers,

 

Due to its effec­tive use of cre­ative direct action tac­tics in recent decades, Earth First! has con­sis­tent­ly been a tar­get of state repres­sion and exces­sive police tac­tics. Now we are mak­ing a film with oth­er envi­ron­men­tal activists who have been tar­get­ed by under­cov­er police, with the goal of expos­ing these abu­sive repres­sion tac­tics.

 

“Spied Upon” is an inter­na­tion­al­ly made full-length doc­u­men­tary that uses the out­ing of for­mer UK under­cov­er cop Mark Kennedy as it’s start­ing point. Kennedy had begun his inter­na­tion­al oper­a­tion by tar­get­ing Earth First! in the UK in 2003, and had worked across Europe as well as for the FBI for sev­en-years before being out­ed by his unknow­ing activist girl­friend and her cir­cle of Not­ting­ham friends in 2010. Now this woman and a num­ber of oth­er women are suing police boss­es in the UK for what has been exposed as a reg­u­lar under­cov­er police tac­tic of dup­ing activist women into long-term rela­tion­ships. Spied Upon is work­ing with some of these women to sup­port them and help them have their sto­ry told.

 

Mark Kennedy turned pri­vate in 2010 and start­ed his own secu­ri­ty firm as well as say­ing that he was work­ing for Glob­al Open, a pri­vate secu­ri­ty firm known to tar­get ani­mal rights activists on behalf of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny clients. It appears as though that is exact­ly what Kennedy was doing when he went to Italy to spy on an ani­mal lib­er­a­tion gath­er­ing in the sum­mer of 2010. He even tried to strength­en his cred­i­bil­i­ty by say­ing he was an impor­tant Earth First! activist, see the video clip here we shot with Ital­ian activists who tell about when they were unknow­ing tar­gets of Kennedy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx38iZ14nc

 

State repres­sion has long fea­tured the use of under­cov­er police, but a less­er known use of under­cov­er tac­tics has been those used by pri­vate secu­ri­ty firms on behalf of pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions. These prac­tices con­strue an intense inva­sion of pri­va­cy that is not even allowed for state under­cov­er police, and this scan­dal needs to be exposed! We have also uncov­ered ille­gal col­lu­sion between pri­vate and state secu­ri­ty forces. This col­lu­sion is a key focus of the film Spied Upon, which we are also mak­ing as a tool that activists can use to high­light the cur­rent prob­lems envi­ron­men­tal groups face today.

 

We plan to release Spied Upon inter­na­tion­al­ly in 2014. How­ev­er, to do this, we need your sup­port to make this film hap­pen. Our film crew comes from grass­roots activism, and we are turn­ing to the grass­roots, mean­ing you, to seek fund­ing. Please take a look at our crowd­fund­ing web-site and teas­er video at Indiegogo, and take action to help us please by mak­ing a dona­tion if you sup­port our work: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/spied-upon

 

In sol­i­dar­i­ty,
The crew at Spied Upon

 

PS. Lots more info at: www.spiedupon.com

Gloucestershire Badger Cull Extended by 8 Weeks

badger_wx@body29th Octo­ber

badger_wx@body29th Octo­ber

Humane Society UK appalled & flabbergasted at “madness” of Gloucestershire badger cull 8 Week extension, risks spreading bTB

Lead­ing ani­mal wel­fare char­i­ty, Humane Soci­ety Inter­na­tion­al UK, is appalled by news that an eight week exten­sion to the Glouces­ter­shire bad­ger cull has been grant­ed by Nat­ur­al Eng­land. The char­i­ty warns that pro­long­ing the shoot­ing is the very worst thing the gov­ern­ment can do because it increas­es the risk of spread­ing bovine TB as bad­gers flee the area.

Per­tur­ba­tion dan­ger
The exten­sion of the killing peri­od in Glouces­ter­shire more than dou­bles the orig­i­nal six weeks to 14 weeks. The sem­i­nal Ran­domised Bad­ger Culling Tri­al high­light­ed the impor­tance of any cull to be done quick­ly because of the dan­ger of per­tur­ba­tion.

Fias­co
Mark Jones, Glouces­ter­shire res­i­dent and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of HSI UK said: “I am appalled & flab­ber­gast­ed that an eight week exten­sion has been grant­ed to DEFRA’s bad­ger killing fias­co in Glouces­ter­shire. By extend­ing culls here as well as in Som­er­set, the pilots are mov­ing even more dan­ger­ous­ly away from the rec­om­men­da­tions of the Ran­domised Bad­ger Culling Tri­al which were very clear – the longer you sub­ject bad­gers to this sort of dis­rup­tion, the greater the risk of wors­en­ing the spread of bovine TB among both bad­gers and cat­tle. It is utter­ly illog­i­cal to con­tin­ue with a pol­i­cy that has already proven such a dis­as­ter, and flies square­ly in the face of sound sci­en­tif­ic advice. Sure­ly some­body in Gov­ern­ment can put a stop to Owen Paterson’s bad­ger cull mad­ness before it’s too late.”

In Glouces­ter­shire 708 out of a tar­get 1,650 bad­gers have been killed. In Som­er­set 850 bad­gers out of a tar­get 1,020 have been shot.

HSI UK has also writ­ten to Owen Pater­son to ask him to explain him­self over unsub­stan­ti­at­ed claims he made last week about bad­ger suf­fer­ing. On 10th Octo­ber he stat­ed in a par­lia­men­tary answer to a ques­tion from Angela Smith MP that ‘…some of the ani­mals we have shot have been des­per­ate­ly sick-in the final stages of dis­ease…’.

No bTB tests on bad­ger car­cass­es
Mark Jones said: “As a vet I find Mr Paterson’s claim that bad­gers shot in the pilot culls were ‘des­per­ate­ly sick’ high­ly sus­pi­cious. I know of no evi­dence to back this up, indeed all the avail­able data sug­gests that even where bovine TB is rife among cat­tle, only a tiny pro­por­tion of bad­gers will be suf­fer­ing any symp­toms of the dis­ease. The fig­ure is per­haps as low as one in a hun­dred. As Mr Pater­son has refused to have the bad­ger car­cas­es test­ed for TB, he can­not pos­si­bly have any sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly cred­i­ble data to sup­port his asser­tion and nobody will be per­mit­ted to chal­lenge his claim because DEFRA is hav­ing all the bod­ies incin­er­at­ed. As usu­al, the Sec­re­tary of State is fond of mak­ing wild asser­tions with­out pro­vid­ing a shred of evi­dence to sup­port them but in doing so his own cred­i­bil­i­ty is crum­bling day by day. It is not ani­mal groups but the Gov­ern­ment this is caus­ing bad­gers to suf­fer. It is men armed with rifles and shot­guns tak­ing pot-shots at these ani­mals who are con­demn­ing many to a painful death and no amount of cre­ative account­ing by Mr Pater­son will change that.”

Shell PR event shut down in Oxford

the Shell booth

 

the Shell booth

 

23rd Octo­ber Shell set up a fair­ly large struc­ture in Broad St yes­ter­day, an plush enclosed unit with mez­za­nine floor and car­pet, to plug their lat­est PR/recruitment scheme. They were plan­ning to be there from 10am until 6pm, but things did­n’t go accord­ing to their plans.

A protest had been called, and around lunchtime peo­ple start­ed arriv­ing and giv­ing out leaflets. Ear­li­er the Shell PR peo­ple had been roam­ing around the street chat­ting to peo­ple and giv­ing out glossy bull­shit, but once pro­test­ers arrived they seemed to with­draw a bit more into their self-built shell. One per­son heck­led them enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly.

Then, about 12:45pm, anoth­er group arrived, went inside, grabbed hand­fuls of Shell pro­pa­gan­da, poured black oily stuff every­where, and wrote anti-Shell slo­gans on their white­board (in per­ma­nent mark­er, appar­ent­ly — it looked like they weren’t able to remove it!). I heard that the oily stuff even went all over their com­put­er giz­mos, pre­sum­ably caus­ing quite a bit of dam­age.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly as they were leav­ing they got chased and grabbed by secu­ri­ty, and despite a strug­gle were hand­ed over to the cops and arrest­ed. Mean­while Shell had appar­ent­ly had enough, as not long after­wards they packed up and went home.

The 3 arrest­ed peo­ple were released about 11 hours lat­er — all 3 had been giv­en cau­tions for crim­i­nal dam­age, and 2 also had fixed penal­ty notices (£90 each) for obstruc­tion. They all seemed fine with this out­come.

Here’s an arti­cle from some of the peo­ple that organ­ised the leaflet­ting ses­sion, explain­ing why they were there:
 http://tarfreetowns.org/news/oxford-is-saying-no-to-shells-whitewashing/
…it has some decent stuff in it but does­n’t men­tion the long­stand­ing strug­gle in Ross­port, Ire­land against Shel­l’s occu­pa­tion there, which for me per­son­al­ly was near the top of my mind when I went along to the protest:
http://shelltosea.com/

Shell have been tar­get­ed plen­ty of times before when try­ing to run grad­u­ate recruit­ment events in Oxford: http://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/2009/10/440301.html  http://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/2010/03/447286.html
(as have oth­er oil com­pa­nies), but this was the first time I know of that they’d had the gall to do an event on the street (usu­al­ly they are in some kind of plush hotel).

protesters with banners

Biased policing of the badger cull

West Mid­lands Hunt Sabs encounter with police 26/9/13

West Mid­lands Hunt Sabs encounter with police 26/9/13

Polic­ing of the bad­ger cull has been overblown and com­plete­ly biased. If you’re out dri­ving in the cull zone past a cer­tain time and are know to be against the cull your guar­an­teed to get pulled by police at least once that night, pos­si­bly your car searched and if your lucky you’ll end up with police fol­low­ing you around every­where you go. West Mid­lands Hunt Sabo­teurs have  filmed some of this behav­iour, the first video shows police telling peo­ple in the car that they will be fol­lowed every­where they go in the cull zone because of “intel­li­gence” they have.

The sec­ond video, the sec­ond day the group are being fol­lowed by police com­plete­ly rips apart the police’s rea­sons for fol­low­ing peo­ple around

Day 2 of police harass­ment 27/9/13

While the third video is a con­ver­sa­tion with police about what their opin­ions are of peo­ple out in the coun­try­side with firearms.

Day 2 of police harass­ment: Peo­ple & Firearms

The fourth video shows the police say­ing they will hand per­son­al details over to the Nation­al Farm­ers Union, com­plete­ly dis­re­gard­ing civ­il lib­er­ties and the Data Pro­tec­tion Act and fur­ther show­ing the biased nature of the polic­ing of the cull.

Police hand details over to NFU

 

Badger Cull Update: We’re Winning

24th Sep­tem­ber, Due to high num­bers of pro­tes­tors, patrol­ers and sabs the bad­ger cull is basi­cal­ly f**ked.

24th Sep­tem­ber, Due to high num­bers of pro­tes­tors, patrol­ers and sabs the bad­ger cull is basi­cal­ly f**ked.

To begin with the shoot­ers start­ed by lur­ing bad­gers out to sets buy bury­ing peanuts in ‘good shoot­ing spots’. this result­ed in all the peanuts being replaced with repel­lant thus hav­ing the oppo­site effect they want­ed.

Now they have moved to cage trap­ping, a much slow­er and more expen­sive form of killing bad­gers. Lets just say there are many things that can be done with theese expen­sive cages (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXmcc-skcdY)

Now we’ve learn’t that the shoot­ers are pulling out and stay­ing at home. This is because all the big sets are con­stant­ly pro­tect­ed and all they have left is the ‘slim pick­ing’ (and get­ting paid per bad­ger killed is’n’t pay­ing them enough to jus­ti­fy get­ting out of bed)

Some very good news from one of our spies in the farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty:
Dur­ing an NFU din­ner in Chel­tenham a cou­ple of nights ago, many farm­ers from with­in the cull zone were in atten­dance, moan­ing:
“the anti’s are bloody every­where and it makes the cull impos­si­ble”
“We wish we had nev­er heard of the bad­ger cull”
“it just does­n’t work, we haven’t killed any“
Best news of all was that one farmer was over­heard to say:
“Our con­trac­tor was sup­posed to come in this week, but he’s can­celled, he said “there’s no point in com­ing”

Now we have just learn’t that that out of all the hun­dreds of pro­test­ers out there the police have only arrest­ed 7 and all 7 of theese cas­es have been dropped!

We are half way through the cull, get down to the cull zones and lets end this nonsence once and for all

If your going to the Glous zone con­tact Three Coun­ties hunt Sabo­teurs

if your going to the som­er­set zone con­tact Som­er­set Against The Bad­ger Cull

If you cant make it to the zones please con­sid­er donat­ing some equip­ment to make us more effec­tive by click­ing this link http://www.amazon.co.uk/registry/wishlist/1A1V6TQIH6BBB

Badger Cull: Three Protesters Released without Charge

badgercull

23rd Sep­tem­ber, Three peo­ple believed to be bad­ger cull pro­test­ers who were arrest­ed in Glouces­ter­shire have been released with­out charge.

badgercull

23rd Sep­tem­ber, Three peo­ple believed to be bad­ger cull pro­test­ers who were arrest­ed in Glouces­ter­shire have been released with­out charge.

A woman, aged 52, from the Unit­ed States, was detained by offi­cers along with a 20-year-old man from Wal­sall and anoth­er woman, 26, from Croy­don.

They were arrest­ed on 19 Sep­tem­ber on sus­pi­cion of aggra­vat­ed tres­pass.

Four oth­er peo­ple were arrest­ed and bailed on sus­pi­cion of theft and aggra­vat­ed tres­pass ear­li­er this month.

About 5,000 bad­gers are to be shot in a six-week pilot in Glouces­ter­shire and Som­er­set in a bid to curb bovine TB.

Defra will not con­firm how many bad­gers have been shot so far dur­ing the pilot.

Those against the cull argue shoot­ing bad­gers is “inhu­mane” and will be inef­fec­tive.

28 Days Later: Please spread far and wide

Cuadzilla Balcome Rolling Blockade Red Version

Cuadzilla Balcome Rolling Blockade Red Version

A Rolling Block­ade of the Bal­combe frack­ing site, 1st Sep­tem­ber – 28th Sep­tem­ber

Frack­ing com­pa­ny Cuadrilla’s gov­ern­men­tal licence to drill in Bal­combe ends on Sep­tem­ber 28th. The gov­ern­ment may be allow­ing them to drill but they have no social licence from the peo­ple of Bal­combe to frack their land and threat­en their water sup­ply.  Nei­ther do they have any man­date to begin an entire wave of frack­ing across the coun­try. The vast major­i­ty of peo­ple in the UK want clean­er, green­er ener­gy.
After the upsurge of cli­mate activism at Reclaim the Pow­er in August, let’s make these last 28 days count. Let’s halt their work at Bal­combe, and also send a strong mes­sage to those want­i­ng to frack else­where.

A block­ade has been on-going at the drilling site, but trucks have still been get­ting through. Now it’s time to up the ante.

We invite groups from around the coun­try to come and play a part in a 28 day rolling block­ade.

Think cre­ative­ly and act respon­si­bly. Pick a week­day before Sep­tem­ber 28, gath­er friends and use­ful kit get your­selves to Bal­combe.

Frack­ing is stop­pable, anoth­er world is pos­si­ble.

* Peo­ple are remind­ed that this is a peace­ful block­ade and that the Bal­combe camp is alco­hol-free.

* For fur­ther infor­ma­tion please con­tact 28dayslater.balcombe@gmail.com

* Fol­low us on Twit­ter (@28_dayslater) and like us on Face­book (https://www.facebook.com/28dayslaterrollingblockade)