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Article and some cracking others here. I hope he doesnt mind me copying it here but it's really worth a read. Papercase Wild Justice and how to deal with them Date: July 25, 2019Author: wildmattcross1 I was wrong and naive about Wild Justice. When Chris Packham went on Farming Today and said “This is about crime” I believed him. In fact, so far, Wild Justice has entirely been about ‘administrative law’ which sounds, and is, a lot less sexy than crime. Specifically it is about using a tactic called ‘lawfare’ (many thanks to Dr Mils Hills to introducing me to this term) against shooting. Essentially this is the use of repeated legal action in an attempt to disrupt, tie up resources and generally cause bother. I doubt they think they can land some sort of magic blow which will cause shooting to be banned, instead they intend to wear down our willingness and ability to fight. Their current legal challenge is a case in point. If they succeed it will actually be of very little significance, the Government and a small number of shooting operators may have to do some additional paper work. That’s it. Yet by the degree of flapping and squawking it has induced you would think shooting was teetering on the brink of some sort of catastrophe. That, more than anything else, is what they want. The key place they work is not in court or the press, but in the mind of the shooter. They want to panic and confuse you, they want to get you angry so you do stupid things like hang crows on gates, send threatening letters, or shout at people at game fairs, or say stupid things on facebook which earn the condemnation of influential journalists . They want to push you into a bunker where you deny obvious truths because admitting them is breaking with the team and where you refuse to change because ‘we mustn’t give them an inch’. The consequence of this is that we get locked in a cycle of nonsense and backwardness that makes us look ridiculous and that we can not sustain. They want to persuade you that our organisation are stupid or lazy so they can shear off chunks of their membership and weaken them. There are five things we need to do to defeat them; be calm, maintain our collective strength, develop an activist corps, make progress and behave ourselves . Calmness is essential, look at the detail of their challenges, not the grandstanding headlines. Both of their challenges have been far more limited than they first appeared and far easier to deal with. The first was seen off by a gigantic paperwork exercise by DEFRA, the second will probably be dealt with the same way. Hardly a cause for panic. Shooting has a number of powerful, well organised lobby groups. I am an ordinary member of one of those; BASC. I am just that an ordinary member, I have no role advocating for them. It doesn’t matter which organisation you choose to join or support, but stick with them. Small groups like Wild Justice can make large organisations look foolish and slow to react, that is inherent to the way different sizes of organisations work. But those big organisations have the resources and expertise to deal with their legal challenges, no-one else does. Should any of these challenges ever come to court those resources will tell. Wild Justice would love to have a load of members lose faith and desert, thereby reducing the resources of those organisations. Imagine it like an Iranian speedboat and a Royal Navy frigate. The speedboat can dart about and cause chaos, before the crew of the frigate even gets her heading in the right direction. But when it comes to the crunch the frigate will win. Unless, of course, half her crew has jumped over board in terror convinced that their captain is useless and that their ship will be sunk. REPORT THIS AD Alongside those organisations we need our own corps of activists. People who can move as fast in their decision making as Wild Justice and who can take the risks that big organisations can not. A hatful of smart activists could cripple Wild Justice by using the law against them in the same way they have used it against us. And wouldn’t it be just brilliant if Pro-shooting activists decided to challenge wildlife criminals in the way anti-shooting activist have done while being clear they were doing it to protect and preserve shooting. It is essential shooting does not get locked into a mindset of opposing every thing Wild Justice say – just because they say it. We must tackle our own problems and continue to change as society changes. Obviously the last of the wildlife crime associated with shooting must be stamped out, if you have read this blog before you will know what I think about that. We must own that problem, deal with it and take it away from our critics. Denying it, trying to hide from it or flat lying about it are what has got us into this mess. It’s time to confront and tackle some very uncomfortable truths. The storm shortly to come on this will be far worse than anything we have seen so far. The question is whether senior leaders in shooting have the courage to do what needs to be done. It’s not just about crime. Where our actions are environmentally harmful we must change them and where the environmental affect is unknown we must study it and act on the basis of the science. If we don’t, we will simply hand Wild Justice another set of sticks with which to beat us. The important thing is to preserve shooting as an opportunity for human fulfillment and environmental benefit, not to pickle it exactly as it is now. Finally a plea; behave. Just behave. When wild Justice brought their general licence challenge we had them, they were on the ropes getting pummeled . In the media the were the people who let crows kill lambs and pigeons decimate crops. But then some fool decided to hang a couple of Jackdaws on Chris Packham’s gate and that gave him all the space he needed to change the discussion from one about he harm he had done to one about how he was being bullied by meanies. It was a stupid, pointless own goal. Don’t do stupid things like that.