NEW BHPS PETITION AGAINST A24 TRAP, PLEASE SIGN!

[Nic]

Hi Jan Marie

Answers to questions.
1. Yes they are on sale in the UK now.
2. BHPS are running the campaign.

Re. the tunnels. They are sold as an optional extra. Please see https://goodnaturetraps.co.uk/
Also see BHPS website about the campaign where it describes how the hedgehogs can become trapped in the tunnels etc.

[Nic]

Hi Catherine

I agree about the timing. I think the trouble was, it was necessary to wait until the petitions started up again after the general election and then whilst wanting to get it running again as soon as possible (because these traps are out there as we speak), to also make it that the BHPS regular mailing was included in the timescale.

I think it is unfortunate that we didn’t know it had restarted until Penny discovered it on 19th January, when it must, presumably have begun on 1st Feb as it finished on 1st June. I do think it might have been better to send the emails out much earlier, so that everyone had more time to campaign. But I suspect part of the problem is that there is very little personpower and a lot of things to be done.

But we are where we are and can only try to make the best of it. We could still get there, if everyone got at least 5 other people to sign and pass the message on. That, it seems, is the part that doesn’t seem to be getting through, other than to a small minority. That, I feel, is what we need to concentrate on.

[Penny]

Hi, Nic, Catherine, Hogmeister & Jan-Marie,

Sorry that your hog numbers are down Nic, hopefully with the weather warming up this week they will all return safely. Like you Catherine, I think most of ours have returned, there were three of them on the doorstep last night, although I am really struggling to work out who’s who. I hope that your 3-legged lady returns, at least you should have no problem in identifying her!

Re the petition, because the weather has been so bad of late (no change there then!) I have only managed (with help) to deliver around 500 leaflets. One of my friends has been putting up the posters in some very prominent places such as schools etc, but since we began, only 60 signatures have been added to the petition in our constituency which is very disappointing indeed. I don’t want to sound negative and now that the weather has finally picked up I will be out there delivering the remaining 2000 in the hope that some very well connected people on social media will then spread the word. The 38 Degrees petition has now reached over 183,000 and as far as I can tell, it has all been through social media. They send out very powerful emails to people from their vast database, designed to tug at the heartstrings and it obviously works incredibly well. But like you say Nic, if every member of Hedgehog Street made it their mission to get at least five other people to sign, we would reach that magic 100,000 figure, to trigger a debate in parliament, in no time at all. Apart from hopefully getting this horrendous trap withdrawn from sale, a debate in parliament would also help raise general awareness of our beloved hedgehogs plight and the many other perils that they face.

[Jan-Marie]

Wow Penny – your efforts are incredible!
Do we know what the number scores for the petition are looking like currently?
If we need to reached 100,000 – how many short are we?
There must be some more ways of getting the numbers up? I’ll have a chat with my teenage son, there may be some options in the modern World to further explore that our younger generation are looking at – its in their interests after all.

[Penny]

Hi Jan-Marie,

The number as we speak is only 29,914.

I know my teenage sons’ spend a lot of time on Youtube. We could do with a funny hedghog video with a write up mentioning the petition to go ‘viral’!

[Jan-Marie]

I’ve challenged my son to come up with something. He’s off to study rural land management and conservation this year at Cirencester, so be a good topic for him to follow up.
I’ve also just found Hugh Warwick’s (he of hedgehog expert fame) contact details and e-mailed him to see if he could support. Then I thought of another Hugh, Fearnley-Wittingstall, so he got an e-mail from me as well. He’s a good campaigner on various things – he may be interested in the development / building side of things and getting policies through Parliament?

[Penny]

Jan-Marie, that’s brilliant, perhaps the two hughs could work together, I am sure that they would make a great team.

I am starting to despair about the amount of new developments too. We live near a small town and every time I drive in now I could weep; what used to be farmers fields surrounded by trees and hedgerows, is now a scene of environmental vandalism! On both sides of the road on the way in, the trees and hedgerows have all been ripped up and replaced with metal fencing in readiness for the building of over a thousand new homes on Crown Estate land. Needless to say that any objection was futile, despite the fact that at rush hour the roads are already gridlocked! If this was just an isolated development then it wouldn’t seem so bad, but this is happening everywhere that you look, I have never witnessed new developments on green belt land on such a massive scale before, our wildlife needs somewhere to live too! 🙁

[Nic]

Hi Jan-Marie and Penny

Good work, both. But I agree it needs some of the youngsters to get going on social media and a film sounds a brilliant idea. Some of yours are quite funny, Penny, maybe you could adapt one? What I don’t understand is why the thunderclap didn’t have more effect – it certainly seemed to have many more than the target number supporting it, and had some big names/organisations involved, but didn’t produce as many signatures as I hoped.

I think you will find that Hugh Warwick already knows all about the trap – he has been quoted in media articles about it and also quoted at the beginning of the 38 degrees petition. Not sure about Hugh F-W. But I think BHPS have various celebrity contacts. It is unfortunate that some of the ‘celebrities’ who supported this petition first time round seem to have been concentrating on the other one. Whilst it would be really good if hedgehogs got more protection in general (and when the time’s up for this one, I will happily push to get for votes for that), splitting the vote doesn’t do anyone or anyhog any good.

I think the fact that we are beginning to get diverted onto building problems (and the almost non-existent starter homes I see amongst all these posh new houses, makes me really angry, too) illustrates the problems that the people working in the charities have. There is always another important thing that needs attention and If you are pulled in too many directions you can’t devote as much time to one thing.

I would encourage everyone to put all their energies into this petition for the remaining 6 or 7 weeks. There really isn’t much time left.

The good news is the petition has gone over 30,000 today.

[Nic]

Have just seen the 38 degree petition is now over 188,000!

[Catherine]

Best not to get me started about new developments!

Until about 4 years ago we rarely saw a hedgehog. Then one late summer evening we saw 2 searching for food underneath the bird feeder. That’s when we started feeding them (though I hold my hands up and confess that at that time I did give them mealworms. I haven’t done that for 3 years now). Anyway, the number of hogs began to increase and the reason became obvious – the building of around 600 dwellings about 1/2 mile away on what was 2 open fields. The building work is almost complete now and we thought that over time maybe the hogs would go back that way to what is now gardens but that doesn’t seem to be happening. It’s not difficult to see why – front gardens that are no more than hardstandings for cars and back gardens that are decked/patio-ed over and barricaded-up with concrete gravelboards at the bottom of fences and scarcely a hog-sized hole to be seen anywhere.

We’re lucky to see so many hogs when many don’t get to see even one but, sadly, it’s only because they’ve been pushed out of their homes and off their foraging grounds by people.

[Hogmeister]

Hi Penny and Jan-Marie,

Great work both and we need all avenues open to get the message out there to people about these awful traps and get them to sign the petition.

I have used our local on line community forum to put a post about these traps and asking people to sign the petition and it has now had almost 400 views in just over 2 weeks. This may not sound a lot but most posts typically only have between 50 & 100 views so it does show the interest in our hogs. How many people have actually signed the petition as a result these is no way of knowing but what I can say is we now have 27 more signatures in our consituency in the same time period so I like to think some hopefully have.

Hi Nic,

I had a look in to this ‘thunderclap’ business as this is all new to me. If I’m reading things correctly it seems it reached over 2 million social media users so, like you, its hard to understand why there wasn’t a better response to the campaign. Again, if I’m understanidng things correctly, it did get almost 1,300 signatures but not a great conversion rate.

With hedghog awareness week coming up soon I wonder if they could give it another go as part of raising the profile of hogs?

Anyway I see we are now closing in on 31,000 signatures but still a long way to go so everyone please keep signing.

I also see that we have added quite a few new hog champs as well recently which is great so welcome one and all and thank you for supporting our prickly friends,

[Nic]

Hi Hogmeister

I don’t really understand all the social media stuff either, but from what I could make out, the message was put on the twitter, or whatever, pages of the ‘supporters’ and the social reach is the number of people added together which each of those supporters have ‘following’ their various accounts. So I suppose if they didn’t happen to look at those places about that time they wouldn’t have seen it. It does seem strange, though that there were so few people who didn’t out of that many. I don’t know whether they’re planning on doing another thunderclap, or not.

I tried seeing if someone in our local hospital would put a poster up in their staff room, but apparently they didn’t have the appropriate facilities and the person declined to even take a leaflet for herself! Can’t win them all! Someone else in the hospital, more graciously, accepted one and showed interest. I do find that most people, if you explain the situation to them, are sympathetic.

The good news is that the 38 degrees petition had got to over 192,000 last time I looked, so should soon reach it’s target. That has surely got to have a big impact and maybe parliament will decide to debate the matter as a result of that – that would be good. We all, then, need to get writing to our MPs, as if it is ever debated in parliament, it will be them who will be influencing the outcome.

[Jan-Marie]

Hi Nic / Hogmeister,

I’m more than happy to contact my local MP on this (even though I have direct experience with how ineffective our local MP is).
Would it help if some generic wording could be generated for this purpose to encourage folks to use it readily and simply post it off? Might prop up the up take?

[Nic]

Hi Jan-Marie

I had wondered that and whether BHPS would do something like that, but sometimes it is counter-productive as they all realise they have virtually the same letter. Also, last year, I found one wasn’t enough. The initial reply seems to be the standard information that DEFRA give, similar to the reply to the petition. I ended up writing 3 letters, as various things in each of the previous ones needed countering. Then came the general election anyway!

But background knowledge of the trap and the situation has got to help. The BHPS site is a good place to start for background information and there has been loads of information on here. I have thought of trying to collect some of it together in links, but not sure how practical that would be. The thing we also need to remember is that the trap distributors (who, if you have seen their website will know) have been working on their own PR re. hedgehogs and may well have been following some of the discussion on the forum. We only have peoplepower (as well as what is right) and really need to use it. One important thing to point out to our MPs is the number of other people in their constituency who have signed the Petition. You can find out this on https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/206274
by pressing ‘show on a map’ on the petition site.

[Jan-Marie]

That’s an interesting map of information.
How very disappointing to see only a 0.06% uptake on this for signatures in my constitutency.
I’ll draft something for our local MP and see where my son was getting to with his school supporting this cause – could help improve our local uptake through the younger generation.

[Author]

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