Great title folks, don’t you think? The language of animal rights thrown right back in the faces of this government department that ever since Zac Goldsmith appeared morphed into the Ministry of Animal Rights.
And we have another puffin-gate on our hands folks, this time though, its elephant-gate. As usual it involves Zac Goldsmith, DEFRA and the Daily Telegraph’s Helen Horton along with ABTA, the leading travel agents association, although I would have thought their hands would be full with Thomas Cook. Alas animal rights fundamentalism will always put animals before human suffering and misery.
The story can be found below, but here is a big hint to Helen Horton as a journalist you could at least get a comment from the other side to give a balanced view. But oh no, what we get is rants from three well known animal rights groups and their biggest supporter Zac Goldsmith.
Are you sure you want to be associated to this farce ABTA?
So I’m going to even this fake news story up with some truth. By sheer chance Professor Ted Friend wrote to me in May and told me of his visit to Zimbabwe to assist in business workshops which had the purpose of finding a business model that would combat the wealthy western animal rights groups over elephant rides.
These animal rights groups have infiltrated their own western governments in the form of NGOs (IFAW etc.) and now use politicians (Zac Goldsmith) to bully the poorer African nations and their people.
This is what he wrote, so the only other option is to euthanize the Elephants, YES DEFRA SUPPORT ELEPHANT MURDER
“I was in Zimbabwe for 2 weeks a few weeks ago for a similar issue on elephants – fantastic adventure. Had to ask some of the Brits to speak slower because they were butchering the Queens English so much I could not understand them.
Starting 20 years ago when there was a major culling of elephants at their parks because of over population, people with land agreed to rescue some of the very young elephants that were not shot. Some of those elephants were bottle-raised and still the private guys take in the occasional baby whose Mum was poached. Training those elephants from when they were young to give rides was very easy – just like starting a young horse. Giving tourists elephant rides out into the bush to see the game and the occasional wild elephant generated money to pay for the care of the elephants and the elephants seem to enjoy the walks. But now our activist friends have labelled riding elephants as the number 1 cruellest thing a tourist can do. Operations like Shearwater (google them), I stayed at an old hunting lodge property where they keep their rescued elephants and give rides, also have white water rafting, bungee jumping (not my cup of tea), safaris using vehicles, helicopter rides, etc., for tourists. But the activists are pressuring British booking agents not to book anything with any operation that is giving elephant rides, and the diverse operations with elephants rides are in trouble.
So, we had a 3 day workshop trying to help get southern Africa operators organized and form an animal welfare assurance and certification program. They can’t turn their elephants back to the wild because there are too many elephants and their tame ones will head to the nearest town and raid gardens. IF the assurance scheme and distancing themselves from their elephants by making their elephant operation into a non-profit with a different name does not work, I could see where, as a business, it would be best to just euthanize your elephants. These elephant ride places also employ a huge number of locals, in a country with 80% unemployment. AT least 3 handlers follow the herd around 24/7 to move them to fresh grazing and defend them from wild elephants that come through.”