Charles: Tree-hugging and those pesky Grey Squirrels

It is a little difficult for many to reconcile the picture of Prince Charles the “Conservationist” with Prince Charles the “Dalek” . . . . . . Exterminate . . . . . . exterminate, well you get the picture.  Yet we live in a world where the delicate balance of our eco-systems are at war with man, and man’s strokes of sheer genius in pursuit of greater excellence often leaves us just plain gasping for air.

Grey Squirrels, that “cute” factor is right up there with all and every animated Disney animal character ever lucky enough to make it on screen but, and this is a biggie, Grey Squirrels aren’t. Cute that is. They are in fact vermin and the reason they are disease carrying deafforestation ambassadors is because they just plain don’t belong there! Some budding mensa candidate decided they would look just loveryly in the garden and imported them to populate said garden, now known as Desolation Downs.

Much the same thing happened with possums in New Zealand, where the only good one is road-kill, and in Australia they are cute and protected and they belong!

Charles is telling us a few home truths. And it seems he is more than ready to front the unpalatable truth. Being a tree-hugger means making some hard choices, and if we don’t try and redress the balance there really wont be an awful lot of trees left to hug!

To read more about Prince Charles’s opinion about the environment in general and grey squirrels in particular, see this thread.

Filed under The United Kingdom
Tagged Animals, Environment, The Prince of Wales.