Hat tip to the inimitable JuliaM on Twitter for highlighting the case of the escaped Eurasian lynx, which Ceredigion County Council decided to have whacked without any kind of due process:
Oh dear, are you getting a backlash? Good! https://t.co/B6Az35Udj0
— JuliaM (@AmbushPredator) November 12, 2017
Heaven forfend that we have a wild lynx marauding around Ceredigion, won't someone please think of the children? Ceredigion certainly did:
Despite exhaustive multi agency efforts to recapture the class A animal, the multi-agency group responding to the incident received additional advice late on Friday afternoon, 10 November, from a specialist veterinary surgeon that the risk to public well-being had increased from moderate to severe due to the continued failure of the Wild Animal Kingdom to recapture the lynx.Severe? Severe?
Look, the Eurasian lynx isn't a small creature - fully grown males weigh up to 30kg - but that's still only the median weight for a 9 year old girl. There have been no recorded fatal attacks on humans by lynxes since records began. In the Bay Area we have bobcats which grow to about half the size of a lynx, and they wander through gardens all the time without anyone batting an eye.
We even have 37kg mountain lions wandering the streets of San Francisco which just get tranquilized and returned to the wild. One imagines that the greatest danger in such a mountain lion attacking a San Francisco resident would be to the mountain lion. Even when a child is actually attacked by a lion, the authorities will tranq lions before checking to see if they were the actual attacker, and any innocent lion is let go.
Ceredigion County Council are a bunch of cat-murdering weasels who are more concerned about PR than about the welfare of a beautiful animal.
