So far, animal rights campaigners on the RSPCA council have been successfully opposed by others who don't want to alienate potential donors and the charity’s patron, the Queen, a lifelong horse racing fan.
GUY ADAMS: ‘Jane Tredgett is a veteran animal rights activist and a committed vegan… For example, she has circulated a host of petitions, targeting (among other things) restaurant chains that allegedly serve eggs from caged hens, London Fashion Week for allowing fur on its catwalks, the government of India (where monkeys are supposedly culled), rabbit farms and circuses that use wild animals. ‘What an awful world we live in,’ she once declared.
‘We destroy everything we touch and kill any animal for any reason as and when we see fit. Humans are most definitely the real vermin.’ Such views are, of course, widely held by more “fanatical” proponents of the animal rights agenda. They view almost any interaction between man and beast, from farming to medical research, the pet trade and even horse riding, as a legitimate target for righteous, occasionally violent indignation.
Tredgett, who works in executive training, has a very influential role in our public life. For the outspoken vegan with a penchant for banning things has, for almost 18 years, held a seat on the ruling Council of Trustees for one of Britain’s wealthiest charities, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). Currently, she is vice-chairman of the organisation, which has 1,750 employees and an annual budget of nearly £130 million.
In this role, she and other trustees are responsible for the charity’s leadership and meet to decide policy, strategy and the allocation of its funds. All of which leads us to why Tredgett has made headlines after being identified as one of a cabal of ‘radical animal rights campaigners’ on the council who are accused of pushing for the RSPCA to devote its resources to outlawing two of Britain’s most popular sports: angling and horse racing…
So far, “radical” animal rights campaigners on the council have been successfully opposed by moderate members who are anxious not to alienate other RSPCA members, potential donors and the charity’s patron, the Queen, a lifelong racing fan… To appreciate the potential implications, one need only look at the RSPCA’s national council members, whose numbers won’t be affected, who sit alongside Tredgett.
For example, Daniel Lyons, a vegan academic from Yorkshire, has sat on the council since 2015… He once described falling animal populations as ‘genocide’, has called for pet owners to be forced to sit exams, believes animals should be represented in Parliament and is a former director of the radical campaign group Uncaged, which sought to ban foie gras and liberate animals from laboratories.
Then there is Margaret Baker, a badger enthusiast from Somerset who once circulated a petition to ban halal slaughter (the method Muslims use to kill animals by slitting their throats), saying: ‘The world has moved on. It is no longer necessary to inflict suffering in order to get food.’ She has called for animal abuse to be ‘as punishable’ as child abuse, and for police dogs to be given similar legal status to officers.
Jo Piccioni, a Norfolk-based supporter of a sanctuary for animals ‘rescued from the farming industry’, played a key role in helping to persuade the RSPCA to withdraw from Crufts because of concerns over pedigree dog breeding, while David Thomas, an animal rights lawyer, is a member of the anti-horse racing lobby group Animal Aid…
Joining them on the committee are Jose Parry, a sociologist who has lobbied for a public memorial to anti-vivisection campaigners, Terry Pavey, a former editor of TV Times who has written that he is ‘totally against the pet trade in all areas’, and Christina Tomlinson, a member of PETA, the extremist pro-vegan lobby group which wants to ban not just horse racing but all forms of horse riding (because ‘horses deserve to live as nature intended’)…
Tredgett’s other official supporters, incidentally, included Peta Watson-Smith, a vegan who wants to ban the Grand National and once likened farming to the Holocaust, telling an interviewer: ‘I don’t think people always appreciate what is the holocaust going on behind closed doors. You talk about the Jews. This probably sounds like animal rights, but if you recognise animals as sentient beings, why are we treating them so abysmally on farms?’…
So how is it now considering whether to seek a ban on angling, a pursuit enjoyed by four million Britons who work tirelessly to conserve fish stocks and maintain the nation’s rivers and lakes? It is because of the dominance of the charity’s ruling council by hardliners such as Tredgett — the result of almost half a century of ‘entryism’. This is when an organised group, often with extreme views, join a mainstream organisation to take control, subvert policies and expand their influence’. SOURCE
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