"I would not buy a copy of your book without reading what is in it and knowing what the conclusions are!"
That was the response on one wildlife group when I referred to findings in The Red Paper 2022 Canids - I wasn't even trying to sell the book but responding to someone who asked why I had stated that the red foxes we see today are not the original British (England, Scotland, Wales and island of Ireland) foxes of which there were three variations.
Firstly, if you go to the effort of pulling together what is now 48 years of research on foxes and present that work with every source and reference then back in the old days when we read books there would have been interest. Being asked to give all of the main points and conclusions is not something anyone does since it then makes buying the book in question pointless. There are so many modern examples from the 1980s on of quotes and facts from old sources that are neither accurate quotes nor 'facts' because copy and pasting from other inaccurate sources is standard now.
An example is the Wild Dog of Ennerdale or "Girt Dog of Ennerdale" which people (dubious fantasy promoters and grifters) are still saying might have been an early exotic escapee -a thylacine or tiger or even unknown British cat of some type. They all quote the original source of the account but what is reported shows that, even if they have a copy, they have never read it. There is a whole chapter on British wild dogs in my book which no one else has ever presented because it would mean weeks and months of endless archival research.
It took years for me to identify which type of fox had existed on Hong Kong before hunting made it extinct; something naturalists and museums there had been unable to do.
Every single source found in my research is in the book. Peer review is not possible unless someone checks every source and is aware of the three old variants. Zoological and natural history papers of the time are quoted as are people who were the top naturalists and specialists of their day.
All of this information I need to present in a casual post to someone who probably had no interest in reading anyway.
Secondly, how do you explain photographs? When I first started out I was young and believed every bit of dogma pushed my way by older naturalists. The Mountain fox was the equivalent of the beluga whale sized trout that the weekend fisherman had slip away from him. Tall tales and that was it as no naturalist had ever seen a mountain fox. Well, officially, the type had become extinct in the 1860s so only naturalists from the time had seen and written about them.
I found an illustration of a Mountain fox in a book from the 1800s. I chuckled as I knew how bad such artistic renditions could be -and we would never know what the fox actually really looked like. A few years ago we learnt that the fox in question was up for auction and the photographs showed that the artist had been amazingly accurate! And then the Extinct Fox and Wild cat Museum got the actual taxidermy (which took me days to recover from the shock of). How large was the Mountain fox? An adult coyote taxidermy was propped up next to it and the fox made it look dwarfish. The photographs tell the story better than a few words.
How do you explain that it took a lot of time to understand the names used for these Old foxes? Greyhound fox, mountain fox, Mastiff fox, Hill fox or even Cur fox? It took a lot of studying and work so that we now know what each type looked like and there is taxidermy to prove it (rare but if we do not have the actual specimen we have the photographs).
It is now believed that Western Europe also had an Old fox type with the red fox migrating from the east following human migrations.
Explain all of that in a quick post.
The problem is dogma. By the 1900s the Old foxes and wild cats were gone so what ever was about was "it". Teacher tells student Old foxes are a myth and red foxes are native. Student becomes teacher and passes along that information and so it goes ad infinitum. And book publishers have a vested interest in keeping that dogma going. Authors who are raised on red foxes write books and articles on the subject and earn money and publishers are not going to admit they got it all messed up. "The red fox in medieval Britain" is nonsense since they were not imported into the UK to replace rapidly becoming extinct foxes until the late 16th or 17th centuries.
All of this can be applied to wild cats. The 1860s was a time when hunting made species endangered or extinct. Deer, red squirrels and many others were imported from Europe to keep 'sport' alive. Why does UK species DNA match EU species DNA? Because that is where they were brought over from. The native Old foxes and Old wild cats became extinct -Scottish naturalists recorded that Scottish wild cats had become extinct around that time at a meeting in 1897.
Yes, we do have specimens of what would have been some of the last of the Old type wild cats.
Publishers would not touch my books through fear possibly (you can work out why yourselves). Noted publications in the UK will not even review the books -again, work it out for yourselves. The late David Bellamy called the original (2010) Red Paper "explosive". I think that the most tel;ling comment came from a naturalist who told me that my books were "heretical"!
I have spent a few hundred pounds sending copies to various experts and bodies and the response? Nothing. They will not even discuss the books. One gentleman in a Swiss museum that I contacted re. Old types in Europe declared himself an expert on red foxes for 30 years and that the museum collection of fox taxidermy was in the room behind him but that he had no intention of going and looking at them over a wild theory. He refused a copy of the book.
We cannot simply sweep the true history of wildlife out the door because we need to present a truthful picture of what once existed but was wiped out through human activity. We need to learn the lessons rather than dodge and lie; it seems when it comes to humans making species extinct in other parts of the world it is important but what was done in the UK....keep it locked away.
Peer review by -?
