Richard Adams Watership Down exposed.

Animal rights activists are accused of inciting violence against celebrities
By Paul Kelbie, Scotland Correspondent
02 March 2004

https://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_brit…sp?story=497004

Animal rights activists have posted the names, home addresses, and telephone numbers of more than 100 famous people on a website inciting fellow activists to carry out firebomb attacks.

The celebrities, who include Billy Connolly, Harry Enfield, and Jeremy Irons, have been targeted because of their support for hunting, shooting, or fishing. Special Branch officers are understood to have been in contact with a number of people on the list warning them of the dangers.

Under the headline “Celebrity Bloodsports Scum”, the website, posted by a previously unknown group of activists calling themselves Badgers Unknown, calls the celebrities “twisted perverts and walking advertisements for eugenics”.

Yesterday a spokesman for the Countryside Alliance – the senior figures of which have also been identified – labeled the suspects believed to be behind the hate list as “vicious and dangerous people”.

The alliance has been monitoring the site, which hints at violence and death threats, for a few weeks. It has already succeeded in having it pulled from one internet service provider only to see it pop up elsewhere. A previous version of the site also contained veiled threats and incitement to violence against the celebrities named. “These people don’t live in fireproof houses. They’re not immortal,” it read.

Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, heads the alphabetical list, which gives his home address and private telephone number because he is known to be a keen angler. Other celebrities named include Sting, Ian Botham, Jeremy Clarkson, Roger Daltrey, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Jackie Stewart, and Raymond Blanc. The Right Rev Peter Price, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and the Right Rev John Oliver, Bishop of Hereford, are also on the hate list although it does not associate them with any specific blood sport.

“We don’t know who put this site up but we can have a fair guess,” said a spokesman for the Countryside Alliance. “The same sort of people who were involved in the Huntingdon Life Sciences campaign, which was against people’s homes, their families, and extended families, are behind this.”

Yesterday none of the established animal rights groups such as the Animal Liberation Front or the Hunt Saboteurs Association admitted to knowing anything about who was behind the campaign, despite their own sites being advertised by Badgers Unknown. The actor Bernard Cribbins, an enthusiastic angler, was also among those listed on the site. “I am surprised that I’m on the list. It’s extraordinary. I shall have to contact the local police and see what they know about it,” he said yesterday.

Another celebrity named was Billy Connolly, whose 15-acre Highland estate in Strathdon, Aberdeenshire, has its own trout loch. Two years ago, Connolly angered animal activists when he turned up at his local Highland Games wearing a badger’s head on his sporran. Amid fears that the secluded house and grounds could be attacked, a spokesman for Grampian Police said last night that they were well aware of the website and its contents. “We are monitoring the situation,’ he said but refused to comment on any security arrangements.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the force was also aware of the website but was unable to comment on any Special Branch intelligence operations.

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Eventually, these idiots are going to really kill someone.
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The life you live is a product of the choices you make.

This is from an observation I found on Richard Adams in 1986 but can see it is really a ghost that is coming to roost on his porch now.

Donnie Mac Leod
Active Member

The piece above notes this point.

QUOTE
Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, heads the alphabetical list, which gives his home address and private telephone number, because he is known to be a keen angler. ”

Let us bring this tidbit of news into perspective!

I have here, some excerpts from an “OUT OF TOWN,” interview with the Author & CBC interviewer Alex Herscovici, July 1986 with regards to “Richard Adams,” the author of “Watership Down” and an original mover and shaker in the early A/R movement of Brittain.

Article.

“Richard Adams is a British children’s writer who wages a concerted one-man media campaign against the fur trade in England. Here is an example of his style: ‘.The bell has tolled for the luxury fur industry, a contemptible business constituting a major moral stigma upon the face of Western civilization. While the trade endures, this society is not really entitled to any sense of collective self-respect.

The furriers themselves, however, are no more to be blamed than prostitutes{which is what they are: to prostitute being ‘to surrender to infamous use’}. There remains a demand, so these men supply it, being the sort of people who could not make so much money in any decent way.” {from: Out of Town, July 1986}

Richard Adams has also told Canadian Journalist John Goddard that it would give him great pleasure “to pump six bullets into a furrier”.

All this moral bluster requires some reflection…..According to A 1986 edition of “Who’s Who’,Mr. Adams, recreations include country pursuits and fly fishing”.

Mr.Adams also apparently accepts the need to control wildlife populations. From the Isle of Mann, where he has taken up residence to deprive the British Tax collector of the proceeds from his children’s story about rabbits. Adams told a London SUNDAY TIMES reporter that he approved of a proposed cull of some 60,000 rabbits:

Quote of Richard Adams: “One must be realistic. It’s one thing to write a fantasy about rabbits, but they are a pest in real life and have to be kept down. There is no doubt that rabbits can do an awful lot of harm on a property and they mustn’t be allowed to get out of hand. The rabbits themselves almost accept this. People have always clobbered rabbits and they always will. Watership down {Adams’s book}makes this perfectly clear..”

Wonder how is it that Mr.Adams accepts the killing of rabbits on his island tax haven, but not the taking of muskrats and beaver? Why should other wildlife managers be classed as demons? The old double standard maybe?

Mr. Alan Herscovici author of Second Nature The Animal-Rights wanted to know the answers to this double standard. Mr. Herscovici, worked a three-part series for CBC radio Ideas, on the Animal Rights movement in 1986. He was scheduled to appear with Mr. Adams at an interview for the Boston Globe in April 1986. When he asked Mr. Adams about the conflict in the author’s interests, Mr. Adams walked out of the interview. He then refused to do appear on television the following day in New York with Mr. Herscovici.

Quoting: Mr. Herscovici, after the failed attempt to interview MR Adams. He noted: “Mr.Adams Attitude towards the fur trade is riddled with illogic and contradictions”. “

What is important is, are the politicians, the decision makers, the fashion companies and the retailers on board with this, especially the local and national policy makers?

Until this happens, it is like throwing a ball into the wind. The wind being the massive animal rights machinery that has the ear of the policy makers with its lies and mis-information.

Is there any sign that headway is being made to counter the argument? Until the public, and more importantly the politicians become aware of it and start believing it, the fur industry will not make any headway against the animal rights bandwagon.

It’s a circular conundrum at the moment. The politicians believe that they should pursue anti-fur policies because that is the feeling of their public, and the public believe that anti fur is the correct ethos because that is what they are being bombarded with, and their politicians are following an anti fur ethos.

How can this circle be broken?