From top: One of 23 buzzards found dead in County Cork, the largest poisoning of birds of prey in the country; Dan Boyle

This week we learned that twenty three buzzards had been poisoned by some person or persons.

When I heard this news it made me feel quite angry. Then I checked myself.

Am I this angry about COVID? Does the existence and persitence of homelessness move me in the same way?

Of course they do. This got me thinking further. Why was I whatabouting myself?

One of the biggest negatives that has come about, in a world where communications are increasingly conducted through social media, has been the avoidance of context or proportionality.

Greens/environmentalists/animal welfare activists regularly get reacted to when they try to raise issues of concern. For some it seems to invoke a whole series of questions they think rhetorical.

Greens particularly get criticised for antropomorphising animals. Sometimes the criticism goes deeper with claims that environmentalists become superantropomorphic by investing in animals qualities that make them more important than humans.

Some may do but that is far from being a fair criticism. Their importance is a mutal importance which is shared with us humans. It is the reason why Greens bang on so much about biodiversity.

The planet we share with other living things works best when nature is balanced and in harmony.

The natural world evolves to achieve ecological balance, sometimes quite brutally. That we have a biodiversity crisis at all is solely down to human interventions.

Often wilfully and certainly indifferent to consequential effects, meeting what we have defined as our needs, we have been the overwhelming source of inputs towards creating the biodiversity crisis.

Someone has decided that the existence of these buzzards was inimical to their well being. They chose to act illegally not only in what they chose to do, but also in how they chose to do so.

The poison chosen, carbofuran, should not be in anyone’s possession. When used with such reckless abandon it threatens all life forms.

I suspect those who undertook this action care little of its effect. They may even think themselves clever that their quarry, being birds, would die at locations distant from where the poison was laid.

They are also most probably very smug, secure in a knowledge that resources to effectively prosecute do not exist.

It was a local farmer who found many of the dead birds. He found the manner of their deaths to have been offensive. He, it was, who informed the authorities of what had happened.

His being offended, his natural display of disgust, is a reminder of the difference between agriculture and agribusiness.  Where your preoccupations centre around yield, the environment in which you operate can easily be seen as an impediment in achieving a somewhat flawed efficiency.

We need to challenge the thinking of some that nature is an enemy.

More importantly we need to acknowlege the cultural aspect of life in agriculture, recognise that for what it is and have it economically rewarded.

However offended I am by the actions of the poisoners, I take greater heart from the disgust of the farmer who has helped bring this cruelty to light.

To rewrite the old song The Farmers and The Greens can be friends.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Pic via Irish Raptor Study Group