Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar Vett welcoming you to another episode of Vet Chat. And I'm really thrilled today to have Professor Dave Gulson on the line. Dave has been doing fantastic work as professor of biology at the University of Sussex on all things insects.
I thoroughly enjoyed over the summer reading his book Silent Earth, which he very kindly er signed for me. And as a result of that, I've managed to get a piece of land to actually put a community orchard onto, David. So not only are your books interesting to read, but actually they force people to take action.
So er thank you so much for for being the catalyst. That's, that's the idea. It's fantastic to hear that I've made a difference, even if it's, you know, a small bit of land or whatever it might be.
Every little bit helps. Well, I know that the stat that often gets thrown around is since the war or just pre-war, we've lost 97% of our wildflower meadows, which I think was several million acres, so, half an acre probably isn't gonna make a huge difference, but as you say, every little helps, doesn't it? Absolutely, yeah, we, we, we had 7 million acres in 1930 and 97% is the figure that seems to be bandied around.
So yeah, it was down near all of all of our wildflower meadows went, but we can recreate them, you know, it can be done on big scales, small scales. We recently did some research with citizen science work with gardeners. Asking them to create 2 by 2 metre square wildflower patches in their gardens, and then we quantified how many insects there were in their gardens over the next two years, and there was a, you know, big increase in numbers of hoverflies, butterflies, bumblebees, and so on in the gardens with these patches.
So it doesn't need to be a huge area to do some good. And I think it's significant, often having read some articles that biodiversity is often stronger in urban areas than in rural areas because of course if people are avoiding using some of the pesticides and herbicides. The garden network actually makes up a huge area of hectares, doesn't it?
At 400,000 is roughly the rough estimate, so there's about 22 million gardens in the UK. And yeah, for some creatures, I mean, my specialty are actually is bumblebees and We found 20 years ago now that if you put a bumblebee nest in a garden, it grows much faster than if you put a bumblebee nest in in under a hedge in a farmer's field, because basically farmland isn't very friendly. There are hardly any flowers.
There are lots of pesticides used, whereas in urban areas, even if some gardens, you know, may be pretty hopeless, plastic lawns or whatever. The bees can, can explore hundreds of gardens from their nest, and they're bound to find a patch of flowers somewhere. And many gardeners don't use much in the way of chemical inputs or none at all.
So, so yeah, the, the evidence is, is pretty clear that for at least for some of the more adaptable of our wildlife, urban areas are pretty good places, but of course they could be better, you know, if we could get everybody. Filling their gardens with wild flowers and not spraying pesticides, that would really help. I, I think we've, we have quite a lot of people listen to this from the veterinary community and obviously further afield, and I'd love people perhaps to go onto our Facebook page or LinkedIn and explain to me what is the attraction of plastic grass.
I, I would like to understand what that is, Dave. I, I don't know if you're, I presume you're not a big fan of plastic grass, as you've just said. You would presume correctly, yes, I cannot, cannot stand the stuff.
I, I even saw and took a photograph and posted it on Twitter of a plastic hedge. Believe it or not, you can buy plastic hedges to complement your plastic lawn. I mean, it's awful, you know, the plastic, it's essentially manufactured.
It uses loads of fossil fuels. It's all going to end up in a landfill site within 5 or 10 years because you can't recycle that because it looks scruffy. Cos it's start it gets dirty, it fills up with cat poo and God knows what else, .
And of course it melted in, in the, it melted in the heat wave, which . Maybe serves them right. I don't know, we might get some plastic grass lovers now hitting on the site, but I, I, I can cope with that.
Yeah, I, I, horrifically, I read a survey recently which suggested that 8% of gardens have at least some plastic grass in them these days. But, but I was pleased to see that 12% of gardens have a wildflower meadow, so we're, we're, we're slightly edging it. Yeah, we need to, we need to do more.
I, I do love my wildflower meadow at home, it's a very small patch of garden, but, The number of insects you see in it are amazing, and of course we can encourage, I, I did look, I'm, I'm not stalking you, Dave, honestly, but I did look at your very intricate and fancy earwig nest that you stick up in trees as well. You got very excited about that. I mean, you're not just Mr.
Bumblebee, you are Mr. Earwig as well, I think. If anyone wants to know how to make an earwig hotel or a bee hotel or any number of other silly things for wildlife, then then my YouTube channel has practical tips as to how to do it.
But yeah, earwigs are great. I'm a big fan of earwigs. And they did very well in that in that nest in that video that I did see.
I can't remember the channel, is it just Dave Gulson or what's the channel that I don't know, go into YouTube and type my name, you'll ear wigs and something will pop up, . Obviously, you know, we've lost all these wildflower meadows and I, I think it's great, you know, I was at a practise, Old hall vets who won our green vets of the Year a a month or so ago up in the Lake District and saw, you know, some of the cool things they're doing with a patch of land, I know, . Katrina McIntyre's up in in er Scotland and and she's sort of just let a field go back to, you know, without any wildflower sowing and she's got or orchids on the, on the orchids, not orchid orchards, orchids on on the grass that are coming back.
So there's a lot of things that are dormant in there that if we actually give them a chance, if we don't cut our lawns, amazing things start to happen, don't they, and we, we cut out obviously use of fertiliser and the like. Yeah, I mean, many of us have got basically a wildflower meadow already in our garden. We're just mowing it so nothing ever gets to flower, but I just over to my left I can see my lawn, and I don't cut it very often at all, only about 3 times a year, and it's full of, you know, there's red clover, white clover, speedwell, buttercups, dandelions, daisies, self feel, all sorts of lovely flowers.
Nothing very, I haven't got any orchids. I'm really envious. A friend of mine has a small front garden and they live in the middle of Tunbridge Wells, and they stopped mowing it because I've been badgering them to stop mowing it.
And in one year they had a whole bunch of orchids came up. I no idea whether they were always there or whether they've seeded themselves or whatever, but I'm really envious of those. But yeah, you know, it's surprising what turns up and.
So you know, if, if, I often say if rather than getting the, you know, the mower out of the shed, get a deck chair and make yourself a GMT and sit down and enjoy the flowers and the bees. Well, and it's great to hear the noise, you know, we get a lot on . We have blackberry brambles within the hedge and I'm, I'm not terribly tidy, so I let them grow until the neighbours really complain and I maybe chop back a tiny bit.
And that hum of the honey bee is delightful to hear, isn't it? Well, I'm, I would, I probably a lot of that hum is also Bumbles and hovers as well, yeah, but yes, yes, the sound of insect life, you know, all those busy insects buzzing about is, is, it's, it should be part of spring and summer in this country, and it it makes me really sad when I can't hear it. Well, it's the silent earth, as you said, isn't it?
Well, yeah, the title of my book, depressing me. Obviously we're recording this at the moment with with COP 27. We're so pleased that Mr.
Sunak decided he did have time to go. That was a good thing. I don't know whether it was because Mr.
Johnson was going or whether enough of us complained that made him go, or maybe he just got down and did a hard weekends of work and then he felt he could go, but whatever it was, it's great he's he's there. Obviously COP does do sustainability conferences, but we, we do seem a bit obsessed. With carbon Do you think that some of the policies that have come out, you know, the stewardship schemes, ELM scheme.
Should we be hopeful. Of government involvement or, or has it just been a disappointment for too long that perhaps we need to just crack on as individuals and businesses and charities and associations? Yeah, oh crikey, there's about 5 questions snuck in there.
So, no, no, that's fine, . So I do think biodiversity is a bit overlooked that, you know, that we have these sort of twin crises, climate change and biodiversity loss, and they, they're obviously interwoven, but many of the causes of one of the causes of the other, and many of the solutions are common to both as well, I think. But it seems like climate gets the bulk of politicians' attention at the moment.
. But as for what we should do, I mean, clearly governments are not acting fast enough on either issue. You know, we've failed almost every country in the world's failed to meet all of its targets that were agreed in Paris, and you know, realistically we're going to go to at least 2 degrees warming, aren't we? I think you'd be hugely optimistic to think we can rein it in before that and probably much higher, I suspect.
Anyway, so if we wait for governments to act on climate, we're not gonna get very far, and as for biodiversity, . I did, I was optimistic about what government was doing in the UK for a while, Michael Gove. Introduced this new Elms Farm subsidy Environmental Land Management scheme it stands for, which was going to be a whole new subsidy system for farming, which was going to really basically mean that farmers only got subsidies for looking after the environment rather than at the moment most of the subsidy is given out as a kind of area-based payment.
And that was great, or at least it looked like it could be great, and you know, I mean, I'm not Michael Gove's biggest fan, but I credit to him when he was Environment Secretary, he was really on it. But unfortunately, the, this ELM scheme after 4 years of development, has just been shelved. We don't know whether it's going to be revived or thrown in the bin, what's gonna happen.
Farmers are left completely in the lurch, not knowing what, what's gonna happen next. It's a shambles. So it would be great if Rishi gets around to it and revives it.
I'm not convinced he will. He hasn't got the strongest environmental credentials. Time will.
Maybe the only hope we have is that he's appointed, hopefully a really, really strong environmental minister, Dave. You are joking. Yes, well, I'm hoping, but having seen some of the tweets about glyphoz Glyphoz then I'm, I'm not so sure she gets it all.
Hopefully she can be on a steep learning curve. We're talking about Therese Coffey at the moment. It would be nice if she was, but I don't have any optimism at all, I'm afraid.
Yeah, I mean, you allude to her 2018 tweet, which was a picture of a big bottle of Roundup glyphosate, herbicide. It looked like it was on her garden picnic table with her lying underneath was something like, I can't wait to get spraying my roundup in the garden. And I mean, why would a government, why would a government minister post that?
I just can't think of no earthly reason unless, you know, she, she was sponsored by. Bayer or whoever it is Bayer in fact that produced glyphosate. I'm not suggesting she was, I'm sure she wasn't, but who knows what goes on behind the scenes.
I just can't understand why any politician would be promoting garden use of herbicides. Yeah. Yes, it's, it's concerning and obviously we, we are at the moment in a, in a situation where we're also trying to see as vets that we do no harm, you know, that we, we are there as forces of good for the environment and for the animals.
In fact, at the moment we're, we're getting involved in a one health scheme to try and encourage people to take their antibiotics back to the . Pharmacies or the vets, be they, you know, human antibiotics or animal antibiotics because. Believe it or not, a lot of people just flush antibiotics down the toilet, which again adds to the problem, and I think we, we're in danger aren't we of.
All the chemicals that we are using that are becoming more and more powerful, more and more potent, that we're creating problems actually within the environment where there's antibiotic resistant bugs in sewage farms, etc. Etc. It's a, it's a worrying time, and I think similar things are happening, you know, with parasiticides.
Some of the powerful parasiticides that we've developed for agriculture now are banned like DDT. But actually more powerful anti anti parasiticide came after those and we, we kind of closed our eyes a bit, didn't we, because we thought we'd got rid of DDT we'd solve the problem. Why, why do you think that happened?
I it's, it's a good question. I mean, there's there's a kind of long backstory which I'll have to cut very short, but you know, in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which was a kind of groundbreaking book which highlighted the fact that A lot of the pesticides that were in use at the time, which were pretty new creations, most of them were only really started to be used in the 1940s onwards. Things like DDT were poisoning farmers, livestock, wildlife, and so on.
And there was a big controversy at the time. She was vilified by the pesticide industry, but ultimately it turned out, you know, what she was saying was basically true. And the, the chemicals were mostly banned.
DDT was banned and so on. And I think environmentalists, conservationists thought at that point that the problem had been fixed, . But, ah, the sad reality is, you know, when, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Earth, there were 37 different pesticides available to farmers in the United States where she was based.
Today there are over 1000 pesticides available to farmers in the United States, about 500 to European farmers, and we keep finding that these pesticides that have got through the kind of regulatory process that have been in use for 1020, 30 years, ultimately many of them turn out to be much more harmful to the environment than we'd thought, and I think this really came to light, particularly with the neonicotinoids which are A new group of insecticides, a newish group of insecticides were introduced in the 90s. . They, they are neurotoxins.
They are about 7000 times more poisonous to insect life than DDT was, and they're used all over the world, . And anyway, so eventually this came, came to light that they were killing bees and probably contributing to insect declines globally. And so again, neonicotinoids have been banned in Europe, at least not elsewhere yet, for farming use.
But then it turns out something most people were unaware of that that you can still get hold of neonicotinoids to drip on your dog or your cat. These advocate or advantages is the active ingredient is imidoloprid, which is was the original neonicotenoid. So it's kind of, you know, it seems a bit of an anachronism that that these things have been, they're too dangerous for farmers to use, but ordinary untrained folk can drip them on their family pet, and the various environmental issues relating to this, probably the most serious is that he kept flea treatments .
Both the active ingredient in advocate and frontline, which is something called fipronil as the active. And are turning up in our rivers very frequently. In fact, we recently found fipronil in 100% of English rivers and imidoclopra in 70% of English rivers.
Now fipronil isn't used in farming. It never has been used in farming in the UK. So it's very hard to think where it could be coming from other than from our pets.
So, so I have a PhD student, Rose Perkins, who's investigating this at the moment, and she's Treating treating dogs with spot-ons and then trying to work out where they go in the environment. Do they go onto the dog's bed? Do they go onto the pet's hands?
If the dog swims or is bathed, does it go down the drain or into a river and so on? We're trying to get a kind of accurate picture of the environmental fate, but it seems pretty certain that quite a lot of it is ending up in our waterways, often at levels. That exceed what are deemed to be the safe limits for wildlife in those rivers, and you know that that is something every dog and cat owner and every vet should be aware of, I think.
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I think these new products are much more specific. DDT obviously was causing harm. Peregrines were producing very .
Thin thin eggshells, weren't they, and they weren't able to breed and so on, whereas. We've probably got better at producing more specific treatments that are, you know, specific to insects, and as far as we're aware, I don't think imittoloprid causes health problems to us. Obviously I know there are problems with glyphosate and so on.
But the problem is that they're also very potent, aren't they? Yeah, so, so, I mean, you're correct in that, neoncotenoids are much less toxic to vertebrates than they are to invertebrates, . That's not to say that they're not toxic to vertebrates, but they are incredibly toxic.
I mean, the, the dose that you're supposed to put on the dose of advantage that you're supposed to put on the neck of a of a medium sized dog is enough to deliver a lethal dose to 60 million honey bees, you know, so they're really, they're kind of like knob of chock for insects if you like. It's quite hard to get your head around how little it takes to do environmental damage. So although the amounts being found in rivers are obviously quite low concentrations, you know, parts per billion typically, yet it's clear scientific evidence that things like mayfly larvae living in streams are sensitive to those kind of levels that, you know, that's enough to do them harm.
What do you think the solution is, . To, to this problem, obviously they're a topical product, is a, is a an oral product a better product to use? I, my suggestion to start with, I'm not a vet, but it would seem to me that prophylactic use is unnecessary, and that we could reduce.
Any treatment quite considerably if animals were only treated as necessary rather than this once a month blanket treatment which many vets are still encouraging as part of a pet care plan, but if you are going to, you do have to treat then I it's unclear to be honest because there hasn't been a kind of rigorous environmental risk assessment done on the alternatives either, but I think The the tablet treatments, the oral treatments are probably, and they're rather cautiously, probably better than these, these spot-ons. We did do, we, we had somebody speaking on dung beetles and obviously the faeces can obviously have metabolites, again, we don't know exactly what, but certainly we know that . Cattle treated with various chemicals can end up with very few dung beetles in in the pasture.
Obviously it's very easy to pick up a piece of dog poop, not everybody does it, you know, whether you go for a walk anywhere, you'll notice that, but I think actually bagging it and putting it into a bin or landfill is much more. A better way of dealing with it, because of course plastic bags are pretty impervious and take a pretty long time to break down, don't they? Yeah, I, I would, I mean, if, if it's bagged and ends up in landfill, then probably from an environmental perspective that's, that's OK, sort of.
I mean, it's not landfill, it's a whole, whole different issue, but, but yeah, probably better than it ending up in our rivers which these external treatments seem. I know, are we, you know, I, I did large animal vetting for a few years when I qualified and. We had to be really careful with the drugs that we used on animals because if we wanted to get the milk from them or if at some point they were likely to be.
Killed for, for meat, we had to make sure that there was a big enough withdrawal period that those chemicals weren't going into the milk or going into the, the meat. Do we need, do you think to be more strict on the companion animal side in perhaps some of the testing that we do before we let er products come through? I absolutely, I mean I think as I understand it, many years ago the decision was taken that veterinary products intended for companion animals didn't need the environmental risk assessments that are routinely done for drugs intended for livestock simply because the amount used was assumed to be so much smaller that it wasn't going to be a problem and we didn't need to worry about it.
Clearly this whole tale of flea treatments ending up in rivers shows that that, that, that, that decision was, was wrong, and I think it needs to be, you know, re-evaluated and clearly we, I, I believe there's something like 8 million dogs and slightly smaller number of cats in the UK, . And quite a proportion of those are clearly treated with one or another of these, these drugs, you know, that's, that's clearly enough, I think that it warrants a proper environmental risk assessment of these products. Finally, I just wanted to finish off with one of my favourite places which I know is very close to you, which is, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book Wilding, if you haven't read it, Isabel, Isabellare, do read it.
They took what was basically a, degraded farm with degraded soil and just let it go back to nature, didn't they? With remarkable results, do you think there's a lesson for us to learn. You know, there is a bit of friction obviously between farmers and ecologists.
Can NEP help to, to bring those two groups together, to, to produce something? I know there's a lot of farms that, you know, are part of nature friendly network and so on, but do you think there's more that we can do and is those sort of conversations with places like NEP, are they, are they a useful place for us to come closer together? I, I love Nep absolutely.
I go there quite a lot and it's amazing actually to see how wildlife thrives if, if, you know, if humans stop messing things up. Rewilding isn't everybody's cup of tea, and, and many farmers really hate the term. I think they see it as a bit of a threat to their way of life, .
But from my perspective, it seems reasonable to that on land that isn't very productive, that's not contributing much food, and where it's only economic to farm with heavy subsidies from the taxpayer, that actually instead turning that land over to Nature, carbon capture and recreation, you know, thousands of people go and exploreEP. It's a really amazing place to wander about. That seems to me something that it's a reasonable proposition, and if farmers, landowners want to do it in those circumstances, I don't see why we shouldn't, shouldn't encourage them to do so.
Nobody's suggesting we should be forcing anyone to do this. . And it's not for all land, this was obviously a piece of land that they really struggled.
To grow anything on, they had to use a lot of pesticides, and they were at the point where it wasn't making any money and I think sometimes there's a danger if we're putting our subsidies in the wrong places, which encourages bad behaviour instead of good places like Elms. This is where government can be a force for good or a force for harm, they need to decide which way they want to go, don't they? Yes, indeed.
I mean, so the original version of Elms had a portion of it specifically devoted to funding rewilding projects. They said, I think they wanted something like 30,000 hectares of minimum of rewilded land in the UK, and they were setting more ambitious targets into the future. So it would be fantastic from my perspective if that was if that was revived.
Of course we could, you know, we need to grow food. It's we need to support. More conventional farming as well.
I personally would like to, you know, to see the full version of this Elms thing rolled out so that there's really strong financial incentives for all farmers to do more to look after the environment. And I, you know, we do need to build bridges. It's unfortunately the case that often farmers and farmers get criticised by conservationists and equally farmers are pretty critical of conservationists to see them as the enemy.
And we need to overcome that because we've all at the end of the day, got the same interests at heart, you know, we all, we all want to eat and we all want a healthy environment with lots of wildlife and healthy soils. So somehow we need to, to, to come together and there are some really exciting initiatives. There's some great farmers.
You mentioned the nature friendly farming network which has got hundreds of people involved from all around the country trying to explore ways to farm in a more sustainable and environmentally friendly way and produce food and make a profit at the same time and you know we can do it, but we just, we do need to kind of pull together and ideally get the government to help, but if they're not going to help, then we'll have to do it without them, I guess. Yeah, no, it's, I think there's a lot of things to be hopeful for, a lot of new initiatives like agroforestry, which obviously probably happened previously, we just called it rotational agriculture and things, but . Thank you so much, obviously, .
You know, I, I'd like to think of myself as a person of hope. I know Greta Thun Thunberg wants us to panic a bit, and probably we, we should, but at the same time, we can only do our own actions in our own area and I think. We, we had a a talk from a psychiatrist who talked about solastalgia, which is this existential dread, you know, for the planets, and actually in the end.
If we are Depressed and and everything, then we're not gonna be able to do our best work, so it's important that we all do our little bits and those little bits of lots of individuals can add up, can't they? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I, I do worry about the state of the environment, but I don't lose sleep at night because I figure I'm doing what I can and if we all are doing what we can, then that has to be good enough.
And as another thing Greta has pointed out many times is that it's not a, it's not a kind of pass fail, you know, . Everything we do will make the future slightly better. It will reduce the severity of climate change.
We'll reduce the number of species that are lost. So, you know, it's all worth doing. I mean, there's no doubt that climate change is going to get worse and that we will continue to lose species from this planet, but we, we can mitigate both of those things if we try and, you know, obviously we, we have to get cracking.
Time is very much of the essence. Yeah. Dave, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the podcast.
I've really appreciated it. I always learn when I listen to you and read your books. So thanks again.
This is Anthony Chadwick from er the webinar vet and this was Vet Chat. Thank you.
