Thursday 14 March 2013

Playground Thinking

The irresponsible academic who got himself into the news last week must have been very pleased with the media coverage he received. Many more people now know his name and he will have earned the grateful thanks of the farmers who like to take a pot shot at anything that moves. A link to his university profile is here.
I was most impressed by the quote from him in the Daily Mail:
‘There have been no accidents yet but it’s only a matter of time. These are large animals with sharp antlers. If you had one cornered in a school playing field, it could be nasty.’ 
Can anyone take this man seriously? Frankly somebody writing or saying this kind of stuff needs to be taken aside by more experienced academics and told that silly scare comments like this do no service to genuine research and scholarship which is what I thought universities were supposed to be doing.

I've heard much more sensible comments made inside school playgrounds by those a lot younger than Dr Dolman. His comments should be put alongside his encouragement of landowners to shoot deer whenever they get the chance. He must realise how much damage can be done by those firing these powerful guns in the countryside not knowing who or what  is passing nearby. I would feel safer in a school playing field than out on a public footpath alongside land where the farmer is fond of using his gun on wildlife. One wonders if Dr. D. was funded by certain lobbyists for the land management and gun trading  interests.

I will repeat again: there are those around in various parts of the country some not far from here who will be encouraged to take guns out even onto public land by the coverage of Dr Dolman's reckless comments.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello i sent you a comment last week just to follow it up i can not give you my name because of my job but i can tell you the national trust want to take control of blacka moor it is a place where to red deer go and it is a handy place to cull the stags

Rob said...

Actually most of the UK shooting organisations and online forums were soundly against the cull plan.