About

Please note that we shuttered this website in October 2021 and are now concentrating all our efforts on Off the Leash Podcasts.

We will not now be updating the site or posting or answering any comments. We have been asked to leave the site online for reference purposes, which we are doing.

Our story

In September 2018, broadcaster and naturalist Chris Packham launched ‘A People’s Manifesto for Wildlife‘ at an event in London.

The Manifesto had been compiled because of Chris’s feeling that the destruction of wildlife and the environment had become normalised. On his website he wrote that, “It’s time to wake up. We must rouse ourselves from this complacent stupor, because we are presiding over an ecological apocalypse and precipitating a mass extinction in our own backyard. But – vitally – it is not too late. There is hope we can hold to, and there is action we can take.“

To promote the Manifesto on social media, Chris – and of course many of the supporters of the ideas it held – used the hashtag #waronwildlife.

In the summer of 2019 a small group of us met in Poole, Dorset close to Lush Ltd’s HQ. We wondered whether it was time to resurrect the hashtag and sentiments behind the manifesto. The location was important, as Lush had been working on numerous recycling and regeneration projects for many years and had a strong tradition of supporting ethical campaigns and organisations. The company, for example, is well-known for its strong stance against cosmetic testing and animal cruelty in laboratories and annually awards the £250,000 Lush Prize (a global prize fund to support initiatives to end or replace animal testing).

We felt that a team supported by Lush could enhance and expand on the strong principles embedded in the company by creating a focus on the ethical issues surrounding wildlife. We could use the concept of a ‘war on wildlife’ as a ‘container’ for the work several of us were already doing producing podcasts, videos, and articles to highlight our conservation/animal welfare/animal rights concerns.

The War on Wildlife Project was launched a few weeks later.

Our work

The War on Wildlife Project exists to help tackle what we see as the ‘war on wildlife’. This is a very broad term of course, but humanity’s impact on the planet and its wildlife is broad. We take a largely ethically-based approach – we consider exploitation and abuse of wildlife (especially for so-called ‘entertainment’ or ‘sport’) to be wrong. Protection must include compassion. For us the individual animal matters as much as the population. Animals are sentient beings and our treatment of them must include a recognition of that. In many areas we subscribe to the Compassionate Conservation view which says, “First Do No harm, Individuals Matter, Value All Wildlife, and Peaceful Coexistence”.

While the war is global, we’re a very small UK-based team and do therefore tend to write and react to stories and articles from close to home.

We feel that tackling the war requires information, for us to challenge the status quo, and to be willing to see things through a different lens. Not everyone will agree with our analysis or comment, but we hope that our thinking will strike a chord, inspire debate, and – hopefully – action.

When we set up we intended to run events and fund campaigns – if/when the Covid-19 pandemic is controlled we hope to focus on those intentions again.

Please note that we can also offer help or advice with external websites, sound recordings (as we did with Bob Berzin’s ‘Snared’ audiobook), and podcasts. We wouldn’t normally charge a fee for that work if it comes under our remit to ‘help tackle the war on wildlife’.

Our website

Our website features original analysis and comment as well as publishing press-releases we think will be of interest to readers.

As you can see from our Tag Cloud we discuss many subjects, from hunting and shooting to pesticides and habitat loss. Shortcuts to examples of some of our primary concerns can be found via the following links:

Badger Cull – /tag/badger-cull/
Fox Hunting – /tag/fox-hunting/
Grouse Moors – /tag/grouse-moors/
Hunting Office webinars – /tag/hunting-office-webinars
Language Matters campaign – /tag/language-matters/
Raptor Persecution – /tag/raptor-persecution/
Shooting – /tag/shooting/
Trail Hunting – /tag/trail-hunting/
Wildlife Crime – /tag/wildlife-crime/

The site is updated most days and we want it to be a ‘hub’, a place to discuss solutions to the ‘war on wildlife’ and support each other in that effort. It is also intended to provide a platform for like-minded individuals and organisations. Somewhere that activists tackling poaching could share their work with volunteers counting moths and butterflies, where animal rights people could ‘meet’ the scientists working to remove pesticides from general use, where whale and dolphin supporters could interact with hunt monitors and botanists.

Campaigns

Our site was originally intended to be a campaign tool: however, lockdown and travel restrictions have slowed that work down. Nevertheless we do what we can to start campaigns of our own and on behalf of individuals or groups that have contacted us and asked to use The War on Wildlife Project as a ‘no strings attached’ launch pad.

Language Matters – a War on Wildlife Project campaign looking at the importance of language and how it impacts our treatment of wildlife.
Birders for Ethical Conservation – an external campaign working to stop the RSPB and other wildlife charities carrying out ‘lethal predator control’.
Snares – promoting the #SnareAware campaign (supported by our own posts) to halt the use of snares in the UK

Guest posts

We work on the principle that outcomes (like changing opinions or bringing a different perspective to our readers) are always more important than who gets the credit! The War on Wildlife Project is not just ‘ours’ it’s intended to be ‘all of ours’, so we welcome issue-relevant guest posts (and in fact some of our guest posts are the most widely read articles on the site!).

You can find all our guest posts in one place by clicking in the header or here.

We are all for free speech and forthright opinion, but we do have legal responsibilities so stipulate some fairly standard conditions:

We reserve the right to turn down or not publish contributions.
We reserve the right to offer suggestions and/or to edit contributions for content/accuracy etc.
We will not publish any material that condones acts of violence or condones criminal damage.
We will not publish hate speech or abusive or unfounded attacks on individuals.

If you would like to contribute a guest post please contact us using the form in the footer of this site. We prefer posts to be sent to us in Word format (or similar) with separate images. Please include relevant links and a short bio we can use to introduce the post. If you’d like edits made after publishing we will do our best to help. And of course, a guest post remains the copyright of the author: should an author want a post removing we will take it down as soon as possible.

Anonymity: We fully understand and fully respect that some authors may not want to be identifiable. There may be many reasons: an employer may hold different views; they have a fear of harassment, of physical harm, or damage to property. We don’t make a judgement call on anonymity: if a guest wants their name or other means of identification (affiliation with an organisation perhaps) withheld from public view we will always respect that. However, please understand that as publishers we need to be certain – and be able to check – that what is being written is accurate and true. Therefore we can not publish a post that is submitted by an author that we have no way at all of communicating with.

Subscribing to our website

The War on Wildlife Project is not a membership organisation, but if you would be interested in hearing about new posts on our site we can send you daily email updates via Mailchimp. We have a ‘Subscribe’ button in the header. We ask for a minimum of information: your first name, an email address, and permission to send you the update email (which is scheduled to be sent at 13:00 UK time).

There is no joining fee or charge of any sort. and our emails will always be advert-free.

We are fully GDPR compliant, and we will never share your details with anyone else (and that includes sponsors).
No more than one email will be sent per day, and we will never send you anything other than update emails.
You can unsubscribe at any time with a single click.

Comments

We welcome comments from readers on our posts and podcasts. They’re valuable contributions and discussion points. However, not unexpectedly our content and opinion can act as a ‘trigger’ for certain commentators and lobbyists. Therefore all comments will be moderated and edited (or deleted) if necessary.

Much as we write above in ‘Guest Posts’, we are all for free speech and forthright opinion but we do have legal responsibilities so stipulate some fairly standard conditions. As a general rule we will not publish comments that contain threatening language or abusive or unfounded attacks on named individuals or groups of individuals. If you’re unhappy with how we’ve edited your comment, tell us and we’ll take the comment down.

Contact us

Please use the contact form in the footer of the website. Messages go to a secure UK server that hosts the website and will be answered as soon as possible (though if you’re spamming or trolling your message will be deleted and not answered). We treat all messages as absolutely confidential and will never pass information on unless specifically asked to or given permission to.

Our team

The War On Wildlife Project and website is managed by a small online team coordinated by Charlie Moores. Charlie is a life-long birdwatcher and ‘nature nut’. He co-founded the campaigning group Birders Against Wildlife Crime and is a former trustee of the League Against Cruel Sports. He began podcasting under the banner Talking Naturally and has been working with Lush since 2015.