My cats aren't a danger to wildlife... but the power-crazed RSPB is

By Liz Jones
Last updated at 11:48 PM on 22nd January 2011

There is a worldwide peanut shortage. I know this because, since the start of the cold snap before Christmas, I have been unable to purchase my usual great big sacks for the wild birds in my garden.

I’ve had to improvise – buying seed and extra consignments of fat balls. I love watching the birds from my office window: a green woodpecker, many types of finch, a robin, a great big fat blackbird and a heartbreakingly cheerful song thrush.

I feed anything that comes into my garden: pheasants, crows and grey squirrels, who enjoy hazelnuts still in their shell. My first task every frosty morning is to fill all the various containers before the birds, highly intelligent creatures, start tapping on my kitchen window. I have a blackbird who waits at my back door to be let in, and won’t go away until he has had breakfast. He particularly loves carrot cake from Costa Coffee.

And so I read with interest last week that wild birds in the UK are in decline. The number of farmland birds is half that of

40 years ago. There have been dramatic falls, too, in woodland birds such as the lesser spotted woodpecker, the tawny owl and the wood warbler.

These startling figures were churned out by the RSPB, a hugely rich, powerful organisation – the most potent conservation group in this country.

Those of us who love wild birds give this charity money, we buy its products (while fat balls are 12p each in the Pound Store, the RSPB sells them for 29p), we identify birds by using the little thumbnails on its website and we follow its advice for looking after birds in winter.

But the RSPB had the cheek to write to me, telling me my cats are ‘decimating’ the local bird population when, in fact, the wearing of radio collars means they haven’t killed anything in two years.

The RSPB person had read something I wrote about taking in feral cats rescued from the Olympic site and the letter warned me to keep them indoors during nesting. What they should be doing is investing in a free neutering programme to reduce the cat population.

Persecution: RSPB condoned the cull on the Scottish islands of Uist and Benbecula

I believe the RSPB has lost sight of its job, which is to protect birds. It was set up in 1889 by a group of women concerned about the large numbers of birds slaughtered to provide feathers for hats.

Now, it fetishises the rare while it is happy for the many to be persecuted. It has persuaded successive Governments that species conservation is about bird conservation only.

So it has backed or initiated mass culls including the Lundy rats (these rodents are genuinely a rare species but the RSPB justified its actions by saying the rats were not native – as they were only introduced 400 years ago!)

The RSPB accused and convicted the rats of causing the decline of the puffin and the Manx shearwater. In fact, the birds’ decline was due to the overfishing of sand eels, used in feed for fish farms.

The RSPB also orchestrated the slaughter of thousands of ruddy ducks (first brought to this country in the Forties by Sir Peter Scott) to stop them travelling to Spain to cross-breed with the rare white-headed duck.

The RSPB is peopled by pure-breed fascists who think nothing of annihilating a species for their own elitist reasons.

What makes me particularly angry is that the RSPB (what does Royal stand for anyway these days?

They hunt, they shoot, they wear fur) does not take a stance against the thousands of birds raised intensively in cages and sheds to feed the shooting industry.

Nor does it object to the other animals and birds – the members of the crow family, weasels, stoats and foxes – killed to protect this ‘sport’.

Even the hedgehog, the animal so beloved by the British public, is persecuted. The RSPB condoned the cull on the Scottish islands of Uist and Benbecula.

And the Shooting Times listed the hedgehog as among Britain’s 30 most wanted pests, a ‘voracious predator’.

I don’t understand why my heritage is being destroyed by people who shoot for pleasure or profit.

I also don’t pretend to understand our attitude towards wild animals. I am, by law, not allowed up in my loft, or to enter the space above my stables, because of roosting bats.

But farmers, even on Sundays and Christmas Day, can slaughter indigenous creatures with impunity. And by the way, does the RSPB campaign on behalf of chickens? They have feathers! Does it hell.

Like New Labour, so many of the large organisations set up to protect animals and our countryside have become dizzy with power. They have their own view of ecological harmony which the common, the unphotogenic, are just not part of.

When I rang up Natural England for advice about my bat population, I became embroiled in ecological survey fees, bat licence fees and costly building work. When all this was over, the woman at the end of the phone barked at me: ‘Don’t, whatever you do, go near your ponds . . . you might have newts!’