There’s a great article in today’s Telegraph that reports that Scottish landowners have complained about an RSPB cartoon strip, which they claim portrays landowners as cartoon villains.
The Telegraph reports that the cartoon strip appears in the RSPB’s Bird Life magazine for children and features a man in green boots and a country jacket putting out poisoned bait to kill protected birds of prey. It also features police vehicles arriving on a dawn raid and an RSPB investigator staking out the scene.
Douglas McAdam, chief executive of Scottish Land and Estates (an organisation that claims to represent 2,500 landowners in Scotland), has apparently written a letter of complaint to the RSPB and copied it to the Scottish Environment Minister. The Telegraph reports that McAdam refused to comment to them on the issue, but The Telegraph claims to have seen a copy of the letter and their subsequent article includes some interesting alleged quotes from McAdam. There’s also a response from an RSPB spokesperson who suggests the cartoon was based on a real incident last year.
Perhaps someone should ask McAdam and co. what sort of image would have been more acceptable to them? Or perhaps they’d rather that the topic wasn’t raised at all? Brush it all under the carpet and pretend that raptors aren’t illegally poisoned in Scotland?
Article in The Telegraph here
Raptor Persecution UK 
Im sure these people would have no problem with a cartoon of a conservationist wearing sandals with long hair and a beard..equally a caricature.Sense of humour bypass?
I looked in my kids’ latest copy of Birdlife but found no such cartoon. Must be in an older edition, so this matter has been around for a while. So why raise it now? Could it be because of recent publicity about historic persecution on a famous estate? Or, maybe, ahead of the publication of RSPB’s report today. Surely Not!
Not so much a lack of sense humour as a serious lack of substance with which to practice the dark art of low politicking.
I trust the new generation of politicians in Scotland will see this nonsense for what it is.