Beefing about the RSPB

Ian 'Beefy' Botham has gone public with strong criticism of the RSPB.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2805710/RSPB-spends-quarter-cash-saving-birds-Sir-Ian-Botham-leads-landowners-blast-charity.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-vampire-squid-rspb-attacked-by-other-conservationists-for-misusing-funds-9814685.html 

Much of what he's said I've said myself, sometimes here on this blog. But I'm suspicious of his motives. Is he sincere in regretting that the RSPB has shot foxes on its reserves? Choosing between Ian Botham and the RSPB on conservation matters is not a choice I'd like to make. I would have thought some experience of ducks was about the limit of his understanding of conservation.

But the RSPB, like the Wildlife Trusts, has not helped its cause. It's opened itself up to the criticism by adopting practices more suitable to a multinational outfit bent on empire building and self promotion than to a charity promoting simple aims. Its bureaucracy has become too detached from its membership. It is a behemoth and like all such is prone to want to control all in sight, in their case not just the birds, their habitats and their predators but the whole debate about wildlife and landscape. Its size is its main problem. Size leads to centralised decision making, a reliance on self promotion through a regular diet of press releases and domination of the media.

Nevertheless you can usually see where the RSPB is coming from most of the time which can't be said for the devious media manipulators on the other side. And there is another side, one which now seems to have enrolled Botham. And that other side is at least as well resourced and partisan comprising the Countryside Alliance, Field magazine and the numerous 'country-sports' semi-aristocratic and poseur hangers on of the shooting lobby. These people like to think of themselves as the inheritors of a tradition whose heyday was 19^th century England when it was the expected thing for well-to-do and leisured gentlemen to spend their time either gambling or shooting while the lower classes made them wealthy by working long hours in the mills and mines of northern England.

What seems to have sparked off the present fight back by those for whom wildlife is there to shoot  is the campaign the RSPB has finally got round to waging against the killing of birds of prey by gamekeepers employed by wealthy shooting estates. I sensed a reluctance to do this among the RSPB establishment, aware that the 'R' in their charter comes with terms and conditions. They are supposed to take no position on the shooting of game birds. But that's not seen by many grass roots members as excluding them from campaigning against the shooting and poisoning of predators; the same predators which sometimes feed their families on these game birds under the mistaken impression that humans don't have a monopoly.