On Sat, 6 Nov 2010 11:15:43 +0000, Sacha wrote:

On 2010-11-06 10:56:51 +0000, "Bob Hobden" said:



Angus wrote (huge snip)


The Grey Squirrel
Native by birth - Condemned by origin

Basically Angus you are being a troll and you know it.
The grey squirrel was only ever here as an introduction by man, it was
never native to the UK or even Europe. Our native squirrel is the Red
and whilst there have been some introductions of Reds from elsewhere it
is still a native species just like the Buzzard, the European Wolf, the
European Beaver, the European Lynx..... All only not here now due to
the stupidity of man.

What is more, his trolling is being encouraged by another whose aim in
life is to spoil this newsgroup for everyone else. Two of a kind!

No. I most definitely refute that. What I do is examine
"conservation" organisations' raison d'etre and where I think there is
something amiss I seek to expose it. That's not trolling.

Iindividual animals bornand bred in this country are as native are as
native by birth as we are, and when a grey squirrel is smashed over
the head, one is not abusing a species but an individual animal.

There's no firm evidence of the red
squirrel being "native" in accordance with the conservationists'
criterion. Indeed, the first mention of a squirrel in Britain was by
St Hugh of Lincoln was in the thirteenth century and so far, despite
considerable researching, I can find no record of indigenous squirrel
fur being used during the middle-ages

It is probably more credible that Eurasian Reds were brought here from
Europe in the late middle-ages to counter the wildly fluctuating
prices of squirrel furs for the Baltics and Russia that were mainly
distributed from Brugges, than the conservationists' unsubstantiated
claim that they have been here continuously from the last ice age.

It was possibly an entrepreneurial move to grow our own fur which
backfired because the better quality furs came from the colder
regions. Many millions of squirrel furs were imported to Britain
during the middle-ages.