davestocker
Well-known member
As one of the protagonists in the pre-election Labour bashing spree, I?m delighted to make your acquaintance, Kevin. But first, who are you? A Labour apparatchik cruising specialist forums? An angler who?s a Labour activist? My personal details are on my FM member profile, but details about you are scant.
Anyhow, to business; the Angling charter may well be a fine piece of work. It looks like Labour?s policy makers went to angling?s governing/representative bodies and said ?give us your wish list?, and lo! the Charter was born. I have no problem with that, nor its contents.
My fascination is in the politics around mans? relationship with animals, and included in that is where animal issues fit within established party politics. I do not believe that Labour has joined-up thinking on this issue. Here are three questions for any Labour politician who claim that our sport is safe with them in the long term.
1) Why is it morally wrong to recreationally hunt foxes, a pest species that needs controlling one way or another, but not morally wrong to repeatedly hook, play, land and return fish, which are neither pests, nor for the most part, required for food. Whatever the arguments about fish and pain, I can?t believe that being caught is the best thing that happens to a fish in a day.
2) Early in Labour?s first term, the Government banned the farming of fur, not on animal welfare grounds (all Labour would have needed to do was to legislate on the details of husbandry to make fur farming uneconomic, were animal welfare the issue) but on moral grounds. We no more need meat to survive, than we need to wear fur. What logic is at work here? And if you ban one allegedly abusive animal activity on moral grounds, what?s to stop you banning others?
3) It its attempt to dishonestly ban hunting by the back door by means of the duplicitous Alun Michael?s so-called compromise Bill that would have allegedly licensed some hunting, the Minister created the twin tests of ?cruelty and utility?. Was it not Labour?s own Martin Salter MP who pointed out that angling would fail these tests, were they ever applied to the sport? Where is the consistency here?
My election posting touched on the emotional territory that helps shape our political allegiances. Do you deny that words like ?liberation? and ?rights? tend to come from the lexicon of the left? OK the animal people have appropriated them, but I?ll bet the words push buttons for those on the Left, way more than they do for those on the Right. And look at the USA where those in the firing line of animal rights activism are starting to agressively fight back. Most of the fight is being driven by organisations we in the UK would identify with the Republican Right.
A thought; our relationship with animals is so compromised, not least because whilst we don?t need to eat them, we do (in their millions), that the only intellectually clear position is to exclude animals from our moral universe. Perhaps morality should be exclusively human-centred. Hard, I know, but it has the advantage of honesty and clarity.
Anyhow, to business; the Angling charter may well be a fine piece of work. It looks like Labour?s policy makers went to angling?s governing/representative bodies and said ?give us your wish list?, and lo! the Charter was born. I have no problem with that, nor its contents.
My fascination is in the politics around mans? relationship with animals, and included in that is where animal issues fit within established party politics. I do not believe that Labour has joined-up thinking on this issue. Here are three questions for any Labour politician who claim that our sport is safe with them in the long term.
1) Why is it morally wrong to recreationally hunt foxes, a pest species that needs controlling one way or another, but not morally wrong to repeatedly hook, play, land and return fish, which are neither pests, nor for the most part, required for food. Whatever the arguments about fish and pain, I can?t believe that being caught is the best thing that happens to a fish in a day.
2) Early in Labour?s first term, the Government banned the farming of fur, not on animal welfare grounds (all Labour would have needed to do was to legislate on the details of husbandry to make fur farming uneconomic, were animal welfare the issue) but on moral grounds. We no more need meat to survive, than we need to wear fur. What logic is at work here? And if you ban one allegedly abusive animal activity on moral grounds, what?s to stop you banning others?
3) It its attempt to dishonestly ban hunting by the back door by means of the duplicitous Alun Michael?s so-called compromise Bill that would have allegedly licensed some hunting, the Minister created the twin tests of ?cruelty and utility?. Was it not Labour?s own Martin Salter MP who pointed out that angling would fail these tests, were they ever applied to the sport? Where is the consistency here?
My election posting touched on the emotional territory that helps shape our political allegiances. Do you deny that words like ?liberation? and ?rights? tend to come from the lexicon of the left? OK the animal people have appropriated them, but I?ll bet the words push buttons for those on the Left, way more than they do for those on the Right. And look at the USA where those in the firing line of animal rights activism are starting to agressively fight back. Most of the fight is being driven by organisations we in the UK would identify with the Republican Right.
A thought; our relationship with animals is so compromised, not least because whilst we don?t need to eat them, we do (in their millions), that the only intellectually clear position is to exclude animals from our moral universe. Perhaps morality should be exclusively human-centred. Hard, I know, but it has the advantage of honesty and clarity.