Hi Everyone
It has been a busy week for the whole team — we are ramping up our activity across the several strands of our legal campaign that we now have in place to do everything we can to give the Scottish wildcat population at the Clashindarroch a voice and help save it in the wild, where it belongs. This includes work to target the logging activity by the Forestry Agency (Forestry and Land Scotland), as well as planning separately to lodge our formal letter of objection to Scottish Ministers against the Vattenfall wind farm development (due this coming week). We will be sharing more updates during the course of this week as this work advances and as soon as we can legally do so.
In the meantime, we have been doing all we can also to avoid litigation, and have this matter dealt with sensibly by the Scottish Government. For that reason, you will remember we wrote to the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, last week (cc the Lord Advocate, as Scotland’s top law officer) asking the Government to sensibly intervene, to show leadership and uphold the environmental rule of law. On the very same day however, we received a letter from external private practice lawyers now acting for the agency. They have chosen to threaten Wildcat Haven with interdict and taking issue with our work at the forest. We are committed to health and safety and acting in a responsible manner when at site in the Clashindarroch (as you can see from our Facebook posts). Very disappointing that the Government wants to play this game and use tax payer funds to attempt to deflect attention from the real issues — complying with the laws designed to protect this iconic and critically endangered species.
This petition shows how much people care. We will not be deterred by these tactics and continue to do all we can to get the Government to respect the law and make sure the wildcats are not ignored because of vested interests. But your help is so important to make sure the Government know this issue isn’t going to go away quietly. So, please keep sharing the petition. We know the law is on our side to deal with these issues. It’s becoming clear to us and our legal team that the Government has simply banked on not being held to account. Their recent bullying tactics make us more determined than ever to win this campaign.
If you want to support our work you can either donate or adopt a wildcat at:
As usual thanks for your support.
The Wildcat Haven team