As with most new technologies, however, our enthusiasm for the benefits blinded us for sometime to the downsides. - Dave Goulson

‘Normal’ is different for every generation.

Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control.

So far are we from fully appreciating the dire plight of the natural world that it is still regarded as a perfectly normal, acceptable hobby to kill animals for fun. Thirty-five million pheasants are reared and released each year in the UK alone, so that a small number of people can enjoy blasting away at these naïve, semi-tame animals. There are simply too many of us (and soon to be many more) for it to be acceptable to carry on killing animals for amusement. We need to somehow persuade everyone to treat our environment with respect, to teach children growing up that littering, killing, polluting, are just not socially acceptable. How can we do that when the supposedly great and the good slaughter pheasants and grouse just for weekend entertainment?