How Protect the Wild fought for wildlife in 2024

As 2024 draws to a close, Protect the Wild is reflecting on our work over the last year. We campaigned hard to secure the change that Britain's brilliant but beleaguered wildlife so desperately needs. While achieving an end to the persecution of wild animals is most definitely a work in progress, we wanted to share some of our campaigning highlights from the last 12 months.

As you can see, Protect the Wild left few stones unturned in 2024. Our campaigns and initiatives have helped to support the good guys, call out the bad guys, shine a light on the forgotten victims of wildlife persecution, and ramp up the pressure on policymakers to do the right thing by wild beings we are blessed to share this country with.

Support for Protectors of the Wild

In 2023, we started an Equipment Fund to provide much needed equipment to unfunded and unsupported groups that protect wildlife on the ground. Building on the success of this endeavour, in 2024 we expanded our efforts to help the people who dedicate so much of their lives to protecting wildlife from hunts, shoots, and culls. For instance, we amplify the work done by wildlife protectors as part of this support network. Protect the Wild operates across several different platforms, including our website, Substack, Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Due to deliberately spreading ourselves wide, our posts are seen by millions of people every month. This means that we can amplify the work and struggles of groups striving to protect wildlife to a very large audience.

To provide just one example: days before Christmas, the South Thames Hunt Sabs were brutally attacked by members of Hursley Hambledon Hunt. During the attack, the sab group had items stolen, including a body cam that Protect the Wild had donated to its members just months earlier. We posted about the shocking incident and drew attention to a fundraiser set up by the sabs to help them get back on their feet. By amplifying the group's situation, Protect the Wild helped the sabs to quickly bounce back from the attack and exceed their fundraising goal.

We also launched a mental health initiative in December as part of the support network to assist wildlife protectors in dealing with the physically and mentally taxing work they do. In our Protect the Mind initiative, we've partnered with Dr. Ishani Rao – an NHS GP and urgent care doctor specialising in climate change, plant-based lifestyle medicine and mental health – to provide tools and resources to those protecting wildlife. Within this initiative, Ishani has delivered sessions on key mental health topics for wildlife activists in a series of pre-recorded videos. We will also be running some live and interactive sessions with Ishani in 2025.

Shining a light on blood businesses

Businesses that provide support to wildlife persecutors were also firmly in Protect the Wild's sights in 2024. We campaigned for The Newt in Somerset hotel to disassociate itself from fox hunting by ceasing to host the notorious Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt on its land. Emily Estate owns the high profile hotel business as well as other properties and land in the county. Although the business claims to have a "deep respect for the land, the locality and all creatures living on it," it has deep links to the BSV, which is a hunt routinely implicated in animal cruelty and illegal activity.

We distributed tens of thousands of leaflets across Somerset as part of this campaign and over 14,000 people signed our petition to the Newt. We also took the fight to the Royal Horticultural Society's (RHS) Chelsea Flower Show in May, which counted the luxury hotel business as its headline sponsor. We called on the RHS to cut its association with the Newt and secured over 10,000 signatures for our petition on the issue. Protect the Wild's Rob Pownall led a week-long demonstration outside the flower show itself, spreading the message to thousands of visitors at the event.

Protect the Wild also called on another high profile estate to stop hosting hunts: the Knepp Estate. This icon of rewilding has long hosted the Crawley & Horsham Hunt, as Protect the Wild revealed in deep dive reporting about the ties between the estate and hunting. Within days of our reporting on the subject, Knepp revealed that it was suspending access to the Crawley & Horsham Hunt.

Securing wins like this are incredibly important as hunts rely on the support of landowners and businesses to engage in their cruel pastime. This is why we also launched our bloodbusiness.info directory in 2024, a database which lists businesses that in one way or another support hunting with dogs and/or the shooting of birds or mammals. The directory exists to help pro-wildlife people choose where they spend their money based on their personal preferences. It is a database that is growing all the time, with over 800 businesses listed currently.

The forgotten victims of hunting

Protect the Wild also launched a campaign in 2024 to shine a light on hounds, who are hunting's forgotten victims, and cut through the lies that hunts tell about them.

Hounds are frequently injured and killed due to their exploitation by hunts, with very few of them making it past the age of five or six, despite having a life expectancy of around fourteen. Hunts are, however, trying to hoodwink people into believing that an end to hunting would spell disaster for hounds and their welfare because, they say, the dogs are difficult to rehome.

To counter this false narrative, Protect the Wild’s launched the Rehome the Hounds campaign in October, which showcases rescued foxhounds who are living their best lives in homes. Through the stories of Negan and Maggie, and their human companion Lily, the campaign shows that hunts are characterising hounds as difficult to rehome for their own benefit, not for the good of the dogs, as these canines can thrive in domestic environments.

As part of this campaign, Protect the Wild has called on hunts to - finally - show some compassion towards the hounds in their care by ceasing breeding and putting a strategy in place to rehome existing dogs.

Crunch time for wildlife

2024 brought a new government to power, one that has seemingly recognised trail hunting for the smokescreen it is. In its manifesto, the government promised voters that it would ban the practice, which provides cover for hunts to continue pursuing and killing wild animals while claiming to be following an artificially laid trail.

However, the public is still waiting for the government to honour its pledge, and Protect the Wild devoted energy in 2024 to holding politicians to their word. We published an open letter calling on the government to take action to end the hunting of wildlife once and for all, which was signed by several celebrities, including Dame Judy Dench, Sir Mark Rylance, Ricky Gervais, and Peter Egan. Meanwhile, the Protect the Wild petition demanding a proper ban on all hunting with hounds surpassed 163,000 signatures by the close of the year.

Rob also headed to the Labour Party conference in September to demand change for wildlife. For the duration of the conference, he positioned himself outside the venue, engaging with as many people as possible to ensure the government's promises on wildlife were at the forefront of their minds during the event.

Rob was joined at the conference by the animal rights activist Betty Badger. Alongside hunting, the badger cull is an issue that they raised during the event, as Labour characterised the cull as "ineffective" in its manifesto and vowed to end this mass slaughter of the beloved mammals. However, the government has not yet made good on this promise either. Indeed, rather than ending the cull, the government has expanded it and in a truly outrageous move, it now says it may continue the cull for the duration of its 5-year term in office.

Protect the Wild worked to bring an end to the cull throughout 2024. We released a series of animations that illustrated the cruelty and futility of the cull in the lead up to the July general election. We also syndicated posts produced by the Badger Crowd, a coalition of wildlife-focused experts that tirelessly stands up for badgers, to amplify its insights to a wide audience.

After securing thousands of signatures for a petition that called on the government to end the cull, Rob tried to hand it over to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in August to make it clear to officials that the public expected them to stay true to their word. Ludicrously, DEFRA refused to take possession of the petition that day. But Protect the Wild also participated in the National Day of Action Against the Cull in early September and delivered it then instead.

In November, we also launched a parliamentary petition on the issue to ensure that the government is forced to answer for its inaction. We have secured over 35,000 signatures so far, which means the government must respond in writing to the petition. If we can get to 100,000 signatures, the petition could be debated in parliament. So please, share this petition far and wide!

With the government dragging its heels on safeguarding wildlife from hunting and culling, and the shooting industry continuing to murder millions of birds each year in Britain for fun, we will be fighting as furiously for wildlife in 2025 as we did this past year.

None of our work would be possible without the backing and support of people across the country who – like us – believe that wild animals have the right to live free from persecution and fight to make that a reality. We are immensely grateful for your support and wish you (and Britain's glorious wildlife) a happy new year!

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