Should I report Liz Jones to the police for calling for me to be murdered? It’s a tricky one. On the one hand, as everyone has said to me since she set about me in her Sunday newspaper column, nobody listens to her. Nobody cares that she singled me out for her particularly whacky brand of resentful bile, simply because I wrote a piece in The Spectator last week questioning the idea of re-releasing lynx into the countryside. Or rather as my friend, a veteran PR agent, said: ‘No one listens to the crazy bag lady.’ This is all very well, but if I had called for her to be killed, or anyone else in the animal rights lobby, can you imagine the furore?
An advocate of traditional rural ways of life would not be allowed to get away with hate speech of any kind. But of course that’s the point. The animal rights lobby calls people who go legal trail hunting ‘nasty’. But if you want to know what truly ‘nasty’ is, then you need to engage with those people who claim they want to defend all animals at all costs – including predators and vermin – from people who advocate managing nature and not allowing the natural environment to descend into total chaos. These wild and wacky people want blood.
In her column in the Mail on Sunday, Ms Jones took umbrage at my piece in this magazine for pointing out that there are serious problems with the idea of ‘re-wilding’ – re-releasing predators like lynx and wolves back into the British countryside where they have not existed for many centuries.
I pointed out that in today’s agricultural landscape lynx would kill farm animals and livestock, and possibly make a walk in the country a little daunting for humans. I pointed out that when one escaped from a zoo this year, it set about eating lambs.
Ms Jones said my piece was ‘particularly ignorant’, adding: ‘I can never understand the bemoaning of the premature death of a lamb when its fate may be to be driven hundreds of miles to Turkey to be ritually slaughtered.’ Well, dear, you might like to concentrate on opposing live exports and halal slaughter both here and in Turkey then. And while you may not like lamb, it is how millions of humans feed themselves so we can’t donate it all to the lynx, can we?
But the last line of her piece is the real problem: ‘It’s humans who should be culled. Not cats.’ Taken together with the headline of the article, which makes clear she wants to see ‘ignorant’ people culled, her meaning is clear. Liz Jones wants me dead. I’m not sure whether to be appalled or flattered.
To try to make some sense of the lunacy, she is a cat lover. And she conflates my opposition to setting loose wild Eurasian lynx with a hatred of cats generally. This is stupid, because I am on record as being a cat lover and have kept pet cats all my life. I got my beloved tabby from the same charity she got hers, Celia Hammond.
I once emailed Ms Jones with my best wishes after she reported that one of her cats was dying. I actually felt sorry for her. She sounded utterly lost and clueless. I gave her a tip on veterinary treatment I thought might save its life, as my cat had suffered the same illness, and recovered after my vet carried out a successful surgical procedure. She never replied. Her cat died, sadly.
Yesterday, I emailed her telling her that I thought most of what she wrote was utter drivel but I had never said so until now because, as I write occasionally for the Mail on Sunday, I always took the view that it would be bad manners as she and I were on the same side. So far no reply to that either.
My piece on re-wilding had nothing to do with domestic cats and everything to do with preventing predators running amok. But anyone half way sensible can see that. Misconstruction is standard for the animal rights lobby. They don’t care about facts, or libel, or even laws preventing incitement to murder. They just believe that all animals should never be controlled or questioned, even to the point of not criticising a lynx. Anyone who does question whether an animal should be left to run riot deserves to be slaughtered.
The real lunacy is this: I did not advocate killing a single cat, or lynx. It’s the re-wilding loons who want to see animals torn limb from limb. But don’t take it from me. Here is my piece, defending the principle of managing nature… And here is Chris Packham, the BBC wildlife presenter, waxing lyrical about how exciting it will be when we can watch lynx ripping deer to pieces.
‘A curtain of snow flurries blur the view down through the twisted trees. Vicious cold further contorts the clarity of the scene. But there we can see a Roebucks legs, broken and frozen, sticking in the air. ..The nation waits. Nothing moves. On sofas and chairs, at kitchen sinks, and in bars across Britain, millions of people hold their breath for the first live view of a wild Lynx in the UK for more than 800 years. Is this fantasy or could it be a natural history programme 2030? Well, in fact it could be 2020. The remote camera pans the grey form as it tracks towards its kill. It stops and lifts its head, showing us those curiously pointed ear tufts and a pair of sharp eyes squinting through the sleet. Yes, it’s a lynx! Wow! Can you imagine?’
Wow. Packham says ‘wow’ at the thought of watching a deer being ripped to pieces live on TV. And yet Ms Jones calls me ignorant.
The hypocrisy of the animal rights brigade in this country has reached absurd levels. We have now lost all sight of any kind of ambition we might once have had to restore proportionality and common sense to our national debate about animals and their place in our world.
And so as much as I want to hoot with laughter at Ms Jones, I am trying to be slightly serious. All I know for sure is that if this had been the other way round, and I had called for an opponent in this debate to be killed, Ms Jones or Packham or some other humourless animal rights activist would have reported me to the police.
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