A date for your diary: on Saturday 22 June there will be a big march for wildlife in London. You'll remember that Chris Packham has organised such marches before and there were plans for one last year which had to be cancelled because of industrial action on the railways. This time, Chris is very much involved again but the march is promoted by scores of other wildlife and environmental groups, including, of course, Wild Justice. See you there? - click here for more details.
Woodcock: the results of the 2023 national Woodcock survey have just been revealed and confirm large declines in the population in almost all parts of Britain in the past 20 years. There were surprising big declines in Scotland and although there were some unexpected increases in England since 2013, the 20-year picture is still of decline. See our blog for more details - click here.
The governments in Whitehall, Cardiff and Edinburgh need to move to limit the shooting season of Woodcock as called for by the Wild Justice petition which was debated in the UK parliament last year. We are still waiting for action.
Badger culls: we are meeting our legal team and our friends and colleagues in the Badger Trust later today to review further action.
News on local legal challenges:
- Bad news for Whitewebbs Park campaigners: Wild Justice contributed to this legal challenge about the future of a park in London. The legal case was unsuccessful but the campaigners are considering an appeal. We say 'Well done for taking a stand! We know what it feels like to lose a case but you did well to get as far as you did. Few judicial reviews are successful but, often, even the cases you lose help make things better.'.
- Good news for Wellingborough tree campaigners: a grassroots group in Wellingborough have been successful in their legal challenge against the felling of trees which had tree protection orders - click here. We didn't support this challenge, even though one of us passes the trees in question most weeks, because it didn't meet some of the criteria we set for support. But congratulations to Wellingborough Walks Action Group and their legal team - enjoy the victory!
Wild Justice has supported, in a small way, legal cases taken by other groups, including small local campaigners. We know how scary and time-consuming such cases can be and so we are keen to help with practical advice (not legal advice - we aren't lawyers) and small amounts of funding and publicity about legal challenges.
We've written a blog about how we can help, when we might help and what you need to do to get our help - click here.
A business credit card: Wild Justice sometimes has to spend money and there are some one-off and some regular expenditures where that requires a debit, credit or charge card. We're pretty happy with our bank, Triodos Bank, because it does a good job and it has very good environmental and ethical credentials - that's why we chose it. However, it doesn't provide business debit/credit/charge cards and we've been looking around to get one.
At the moment we use a credit card of one of the directors but that isn't a very good option as we now have three part-time employees and they each may need to spend Wild Justice money now and again. And some of our payments, for example to support crowdfunders, are sometimes of several thousand pounds.
We wondered whether any of you have any wise advice?
...and finally, there will be a general election on 4 July: watch this space...you will definitely hear from us through the general election campaign.
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