We are still waiting for a planning application to come forward for Oxford City Council's proposals to build here. So let's reach 5000 signatures before the application goes in!
Developers like Oxford City Housing routinely apply to Natural England for licenses to remove badgers to another location, if the sett lies in the way of their plans. You’d think, with a name like ’Natural England’, this organisation would be on the side of wildlife. But this isn’t the case in practice: they’ve now become a rubber-stamping agency for unchecked development.
The result of relocation, as was seen recently in Oxford's Barton Mosaics development is that they often end up wandering onto unfamiliar roads and being killed.
As Chris Packham said in his BBC interview about Luna and the Iffley badger sett in Iffley: ''Badgers are territorial animals so if you uproot one group of badgers and you move them to another area and simply release them they will become immediately in conflict with the animals which are already resident there. And if there aren’t animals resident there it is probably because it is not a good place for badgers to live.’'
Of course we need more affordable housing for those in genuine need. Iffley is already set to take 94 new homes on the Iffley Mead site, just 200m away from the Horse Fields where the badgers live.
So local people are not NIMBY or against housing when they say DON’T build your 15 new millionaire homes, in our last, ancient field which already provides homes for wildlife.
Christ Packham again:
'We are at the stage now where we are close to taking a last stand for our wildlife. We have to make sure that the decision makers make the right decision
I would urge those campaigners to do everything they can to everything to win this fight because every creature counts and we have to stand up for them
Yes we need the houses but we need them in the right place, and I would argue that at this point in time that’s not on top of a badger sett. '
THANK YOU for your support and for spreading the word.