Imitation and Insincerity

It’s appropriate that officers in the Peak District see weaselling as part of their job. The word is the present participle of a verb, to weasel and has more than one meaning. Scrambling and wriggling among boulders usually in Derbyshire, and being ‘deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or withhold information’ (WordWebOnline)

Weasels could learn a lot from PDNPA weasellers.

Institutional hypocrisy has rarely been more evident than in the weaselling of the conservation establishment in the Peak District. I’ve suspected for years that in many ways they take their cue from the NFU and other countryside lobby groups. On the face of it the charities are in the opposite corner to the Countryside Alliance. But there are similarities. Both groups  seem to have resources and time to spare to put into crafty propaganda campaigns to control public perceptions; I sometimes wonder whether anything that might be called ‘real work’ actually goes on.  Their latest campaign against dog walking in the Eastern Moors leans heavily on dishonest marketing techniques. It also shows that it takes a long time for the penny to drop with some officials. Eventually they discovered that bossy notices alienate dog walkers. Last year they tried another tack, using jokey cartoons which were rightly rejected as childish and patronising, hence  counter-productive. So now they have chosen a strategy they consider more subtle, relying on a calculation that the dog walkers are not clever enough to see through them.

Now, if you read their publicity, after years of being anti-dog walkers, they are claiming they love dog walkers and that dog walking is a vital part of the landscape, an essential service to conservation. I don’t want to assume anything and certainly want to avoid vanity but these ideas were put forward by me several years ago in defence of dog walking against the determined threat from the grouse moor owners and the conservation industry. So do people change so quickly? No of course not. They are still the same. They still want to control dogs and their owners because they are obsessed with ground nesting birds and the totally artificial landscapes which they favour. They do after all kill foxes and deer and I’m sure control corvines as do gamekeepers.

They are still the same people with the same flawed attitudes and the same top-down agenda. Will they ever learn?