What do we mean by "Empowering people to protect British wildlife"?

Putting a good idea into action

Yesterday Protect the Wild launched our Substack. Remarkably - and we can’t thank everyone enough - less than 24 hours later we find ourselves with over 1300 subscribers. That - as we explain below - is potentially a ‘very good thing’ indeed…

As we wrote in our launch post, we’ve been thinking about opening a Substack for a while. Apart from the fact that it is incredibly easy to use and its features are evolving all the time, Substack is where readers are. We’ve been putting out plenty of content on our website, but we’ve come to realise that instead of asking readers to visit us we could actually just as easily be going out and visiting them here instead.

We’d also found that our news and opinion pieces were not doing as well on some social media sites as they had been doing just six months ago. Giants like Facebook and Twitter have changed their algorithms and made once impactful campaign tools utterly dependent on advertising spend. That’s their right, but it’s not a game we feel comfortable playing with our supporters’ donations.

At the same time, we’ve been developing a resource we’ve called Protectors of the Wild. ‘Protectors’ is a rolling project to help us all become ‘eyes in the field’ by learning how to recognise, record, and report wildlife crime and wildlife persecution.

We’ve long felt that it’s not enough simply saying to someone, “Seen a wildlife crime? Please report it”. We all need more information than that to feel confident enough to get involved, so we’ve tried to explain what is and what isn’t a crime, what details the authorities might need about a crime scene, and who to report it to.

We’re adding and updating all the time, but (so far) we’ve written thirty-five Protectors pages covering everything from the Hunting Act 2004, the CRoW Act 2000, and the Animal Welfare Act 2006 to legislation on snares and cage traps, and laws protecting foxes, badgers, and birds of prey. And we’ve arranged the information as FAQs - more than 400 of them! The sort of practical questions we would want answering if we were ‘eyes in the field’ and witnessed hunting or shooting or found a blocked badger sett or a dead Buzzard and wondered if what we were seeing was illegal or not.

The information is as comprehensive as we can make it, and laid out in responsive/mobile-friendly pages. And of course absolutely free to anyone who wants to see them. We’re delighted to say the feedback has been really encouraging.

So far, so good. ‘Protectors’ is subtitled ‘putting eyes in the field’ though. So the next step is to actually - you know - put those ‘eyes in the field’. Which brings us back to Substack and our wonderful subscribers…

Over the last twelve months Protect the Wild has been quietly giving out small equipment grants, usually for video cameras or body or trail cams. We’ve given them to monitors and sab groups. We’ve also funded undercover investigations. Both have been successful, and we want to carry on doing it. But not quite in the same way. We think we’ve come up with a much better model, one that (your author takes a deep breath) combines ‘getting out there’ with ‘investigating’, utilises the work we’ve put into Protectors, puts ‘eyes in the field’, and really does justify our claim of ‘empowering people to protect British wildlife’.

Pictured are the brilliant Roaming Sab Squad (now merged with Manchester Hunt Sabs) with their vehicle bought by Protect the Wild in 2022.

How can we do all that? Well, we’re envisioning a sort of ‘virtuous circle’…

Putting ‘eyes in the field’ is kind of what we’ve been doing already (minus the Substack element of course), but there is a key difference to the way we want this to work - which is where the ‘virtuous circle’ bit comes in.

While all our content here on Substack will be free (we’re not going to paywall anything), should you feel like supporting us all paid subscriptions will be ringfenced in our equipment fund. In other words, all the money we receive from Substack will be used to buy equipment to put ‘eyes in the field’.

Now, while we’ve of course always been extremely careful where we give equipment, we’ve never asked for anything more in return than a paragraph for our website. Very hands-off, in other words. But we’re going to change that slightly. We will continue to fund individuals or groups (especially where they don’t have funding coming in from other associations or larger organisations) but we’d like something back.

We’re not looking for a formal relationship or any sort of say in how anyone organises themselves, but in return for our support we will ask that they in effect offer support to other groups by helping us to build subscriber numbers here. They can do that simply by providing us with material we can post. Footage they’ve captured with the cameras we’ve given them, perhaps, or in the field reports. Telling us in their own words what it’s like to be on the front line of wildlife protection.

The more we can work with the groups we fund the more we will be able to demonstrate the impact our equipment has on putting ‘eyes in the field’ and ‘empowering people to protect British wildlife’, and (we hope) the more that readers and supporters will want to join in.

It’s really pretty simple, but then good ideas usually are. And we here at Protect the Wild really do think this is a good idea.

There are countless stories to be told by ordinary people going out and doing extraordinary things to protect wildlife. They are sometimes inspiring, sometimes frustrating - and sometimes heartbreaking. But they need to be told. That’s how we make change. So we will be working as hard as we can to ensure that they are told right here.

• We’ll be putting up more information on all of this on our website next week. To be honest we’ve been taken slightly by surprise at just how fast our Substack has taken off. Instead of the quiet weekend we’d planned, we’ll be busy working out details and how best to present the ‘virtuous circle’ concept to grant applicants as soon as possible - though (hopefully) we’ve made a good start right here this morning…