Nature

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust uses a method of keeping cattle in a location without fencing them in. I asked what no fence grazing is and got this reply. Before I start, I want to say that I am very aware that criticism is easy and it may be that the experience of herds with nofence is entirely positive. But I worry that it is otherwise.

The explanation of nofence is on the website at nofence. A cow is pictured with a collar with a box hanging from its neck.

Nofence trains the animals to turn around on audio. When the animal crosses the Nofence boundary, the collar starts playing an audio warning. The audio warning is a scale of tones, which starts at a low pitch and rises gradually as the animal moves through the boundary zone. If the whole scale has been played, a mild, but effective electric pulse will be given.

So there is it – a shock is delivered to an animal if it ignores the boundary. I prefer the idea of a fence, and I wonder what cows prefer. A fence you can see. It requires no translation from rising tones to a shock that comes from around its neck. How is it to make sense of anything other than that a rising tone spells an unpleasant experience?

One of the advantages touted by the system is that the boundaries can be moved easily. And if they are then a cow cannot reliably relate the rising tone to specific landmarks or its position in the landscape. Imagine being in a field and someone switches the no-go zone. I don’t know.

In a Buddhist monastery in Nepal a group of seven or eight young monks were making a sand mandala. The mandala was in three levels, a large base level several feet across; another smaller level raised on support legs; and then a third, smaller level above that. I cannot remember what the bases were made of, perhaps thin sheets of wood or metal. But I remember the process they used to make the pattern on the mandala.

The monks were lying down around the mandala, each working on a part of the pattern. Each monk had a small tool that he used to release fine coloured sand in a precise manner. As they moved their tools along, the monks ‘drew or painted’ the sand on the bases, to make one highly detailed pattern in many colours. Mandalas follow an established pattern, which means that the monks are not designing it from scratch, but rather ‘painting by numbers’ as it were, but in sand.

The tool each of them used to release coloured sand was in two parts – a long, slim conical tube and a rod.

The sand was released from the conical tube, which was about a foot long. The coloured sand was loaded into the wide end, and came out of the narrow end. But the hole at the narrow end was extremely tiny. It was so tiny that a monk could ‘draw’ a fine line if he wanted, as he moved the tube along.

The hole was so tiny that the sand did not fall out of the narrow end of the tube under its own power of gravity. It had to be coaxed out of the tube, and for that the monks used rods several inches long. The conical tubes were smooth on the outside except for one section where the surface was made into small ridges and grooves running at right angles to the length of the tube. Together the ridges made a tiny staircase from the bottom to the top of the tool. The monks rubbed the rods gently back and forth over the ridges, and that coaxed the sand out of the tubes so that they were painting with sand.

Now, having got this far you may be wondering why I am devoting so much time to describing the process. Well, first the process is very painstaking and detailed. It takes effort, concentration, and patience to paint the design in sand and to fill in areas of colour with sand coming out of such a tiny hole in the end of the tube.

It is obvious that it would take days to finish. I can’t really remember the speed at which they were working, but maybe it would take them a week to complete it.

And the monks are working very close to one another and have to be aware of each other’s feet and legs and arms or they risk jerking or crashing into one another or the mandala and upsetting the pattern.

In order to make a sand mandala, the monks have to work together. If there was resentment, pride, superiority, or any sense of inequality in the mind of any one of them, it would set up tension. I think that would translate to the work and could be seen in the quality of the work. Pretty soon there’d be an accident and someone would knock against the design. I am sure the monks were all aware of that.

A mandala represents a truth, and its meaning is bound up in Buddhist teachings. Sand mandalas are ceremoniously thrown away, and that impermanence is essential to the purpose of their creation. So what the monks are working on inevitably brings about contemplation of themselves. The process of creating the mandala builds the ability of the monks to form a brotherly relationship. Someone could look at the building of good relationships as incidental to the creation of the mandala, or they could look at it as the very purpose for which the work was done.

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How many pheasants and partridges do you think are shot in the UK every year? The number might surprise you.

Animal Aid says that every year, around sixty million pheasants and partridges are bred to be shot.

WildJustice says that 43 million pheasants and 9 million Red-legged partridges are raised and released to be shot.

The pheasant shooting season in Great Britain runs from the 1st October – 1st February, and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 1st February.

The pheasant shooting season in Northern Ireland runs from the 1st October – 31st January and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 31st January.

Let’s approximate and say there are equal numbers shot in Britain and Ireland. The numbers are probably not the same, but let’s split the difference and say the season overall runs from 15 September to 31 January – that’s 138 days.

Let’s say that all the birds raised are shot and that an equal number are shot each day during the season – so that’s 430,000 birds shot per day.

Is that number accurate? Let’s see approach it from another direction, starting with how many people shoot pheasants.

The Game Shooting Census and Shoot Owner Census is run by GunsOnPegs and Strutt & Parker. For their report in 2018 they surveyed 652 shoot across the UK. From that they extrapolated to the total number of shoots and arrived at 9,000 shoots and 1,724 birds shot per shoot. So they did it for us and it’s an easy calculation:

Fifteen-and-a-half million birds shot each year during the 138 days of the shooting season.

Isn’t that incredible? People paying to line up and have pheasants and partridges herded towards them, and then shooting them when the birds take the air. I mean, if you could hear all the shoots over the UK, the sound of guns must be almost continuous for 138 days.

Lead Shot

Moving on from the shooting, let’s look at the amount of lead shot that is used.

Let’s suppose that every shot bags a bird. It’s unlikely, but let’s go with that.

GunsOnPegs quotes the recommendations from ElyHawk cartridge maker. For a 12 bore shotgun they recommend the 30g No.6 and the 32g No.5.

A pellet of No.6 weighs 1.6 g. So in 30g there are 18 or 19 pellets. Let’s say 18. A pellet of No.7 weighs 1.28g. So in 32g there are 25 pellets.

Let’s assume that the shooters use 30g No. 6 and 32g No. 7 equally, and split the difference between 18.5 and 25, and say 22.

So with 15,500,000 birds, that’s 341 million pellets of lead, some of which land up in the pheasants and partridges and a lot of it that ends up on the ground.

When lead comes in contact with moist air it becomes reactive. And especially so when the soil is acidic, as most farmland soil is. And even a moment’s thought will show the danger, because lead is forbidden to be used in water pipes.

Each year, more lead lies on the ground to be absorbed into the ground and the ground water, to be absorbed by birds, animals, and humans.

Lead is a cumulative poison that affects the neurological system. Children absorb a larger amount of lead per unit body weight and are more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults. Lead causes a lower IQ, behavioural changes and concentration disorders