When you hear the word 'Biodiversity' reach for your Browning

The London Telegraph ^ | October 24, 2010 | James Delingpole

[2ndDivisionVet]

This column comes to you from sunny Rajasthan, India, where I have taken my family to look for leopards (and crocodiles and monkeys and black buck…).

As you can imagine taking the kids somewhere so exotic at half term is costing me an arm and a leg I can ill afford. But I want them to share with me the almost matchless pleasure of seeing big cats (or big anything else: sharks are good too; and bears; and elephants…) in their native habitat. Being amid unspoilt nature, whether it’s walking in the Welsh or Scottish hills or going on safari in Africa or India, is what makes me truly happy, and I’m sure this will rub off on my miserable, ungrateful, ‘urrggh it’s spicy we hate spicy food isn’t there a Pizza Hut round here?’ kids eventually too.

Why am I telling you this? Well partly in response to the unutterable fatuousness of some of the comments I got last week below my post on ‘Biodiversity.‘ Some of the pillocks who chipped in their tuppeny happeny’s worth seemed to imagine that the world divides into two kinds of people:

Lovely, cuddly-wuddly, caring, WWF and Greenpeace types who want to save nature.

and

Hateful climate-change-denying, biodiversity-loathing types who want to destroy it.

Uh, no. With respect, morons, that is not how things work. When I attack the concept of ‘Biodiversity’ – and note the inverted commas, that’s kind of key – I’m not voting, as the eco-fascist would-be suicide bomber James Lee so touchingly put it, against “The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.”

[cripplecreek]

I love biodiversity because even I can get tired of venison all the time.

[july4thfreedomfoundation]

Calling someone a pillock, by the way, is the same a calling someone a jerk. It fits to a “T” in this story.

[Hatter6]

There is only so much you can do. Over 99% of all species that are known to have existed are now extinct, as are the majority of nations and businesses that ever existed. It is rare for the neutral to get upset if a business goes bust. Even if more species are dying out now due to human activity, so what? We win.

We are under no obligation to sustain loser species, though it may be beneficial to do so, for nutritional purposes, or even for entertainment and education purposes.

I am sure lions don’t lie awake at night worrying about the fate of the antelope.