Bored and Boring

These cows should be given compassonate leave. They're obviously miserable. They stand around without being able to think of anything to do. We know they shouldn't be here. After all this is supposed to be a nature reserve and these are farm livestock. Anyway who wants to see such depressing looking creatures obviously from over-exploited stock with no minds of their own. A nature reserve should be, well, natural, with wildlife that you wouldn't normally see on a farm, animals that are alert and independent intent on survival.

Centuries of breeding have created these dull-witted animals that can't think for themselves being totally dependent on humans, lumpish and vacuous. Could anyone imagine a fox, a badger, weasel, deer etc, with such a dim expressionless face? Nobody's saying that they don't have a place somewhere, and there are fields all over the country, thousands of them dominating the countryside where you might say they look as if they belong. There's enough, more than, countryside for cows and sheep. Here's one place we had the chance to reserve somewhere for the animals that lived here before they came.

So why are they here? The answer is money, money again. Someone in the cash strapped conservation industry has worked out that if they forget the fact that this place is supposed to be for people and wildlife they can call it agricultural land and rake in farm subsidies. And they have also worked out that with a bit of imagination - not much is needed - they can persuade the most gullible sections of the local community - plenty of these -  that the cows serve some sort of useful purpose; nonsense of course but we live in an age when confidence trickery abounds. The effort needed for anyone of average thinking power to believe this is considerable so the success depends on the people being either lazy or far too busy to have time to work out what's going on. And the piles of public money necessary to service this cow regime must astonish anyone who does work it out. And all for beasts that shouldn't be here at all!

Amen.

So why do things like this happen? Why are there so many cock-ups in Britain? A recent newspaper article pointed to the answer: from large-scale projects down, there is simply not enough deliberation; things happen with minimal scrutiny.