Frances Gaskell

[Frances Gaskell @FrancesGaskell]

@LadyHaywire The best mobiles and immobiles ever

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"British beef is factory farmed."

Is it. Go on then. Take me to the factory.

Not the one in the documentary. That footage comes from a place called Wellton, in Arizona, where one yard holds 120,000 cattle on concrete, and the biggest one going up in Nebraska is rated for 150,000 head on a single square mile of pad. Real places, four thousand miles from Hereford.

Take me to the British one.

Because Britain tried. In 2009 a company applied to build a dairy at Nocton in Lincolnshire for 8,100 cows, and the country lost its mind. They pulled it, came back with 3,770, and 67,000 people signed a petition against that instead. The Environment Agency objected over the aquifer. In February 2011 the whole thing was withdrawn. The largest attempt at an American-scale unit this country has ever seen never poured a slab, and fifteen years on there is still nothing here at that scale. Not because farmers are saints. Because the planning system, the water table, the neighbours and 67,000 signatures would not have it.

What is out there instead is a field in June.

Forty cows lying down in a block an hour before the rain comes in, because they knew before you did. Swallows working the air a foot off the grass behind them, taking the flies the herd stirs up. Dung beetles under every pat and something in the hedge living off the beetles. A calf born in the corner overnight with nobody present and nobody needed, on its feet by breakfast, wet and thoroughly unimpressed. They come to the gate when the quad starts because they have decided the quad means something, and they will walk up the lane in single file without being asked twice.

That is the factory floor. It has a hedge round it and a buzzard over it.

There are 9.3 million cattle in the United Kingdom on 9.4 million hectares of permanent grass and rough grazing, well over half of everything we farm. The beef breeding herd is 1.3 million cows across thousands of holdings, most of them families running a few dozen sucklers on ground that will grow nothing else. The average British beef farm is a bloke, his father, a quad bike and a spaniel that thinks it is helping.

They go out in April. They come in when the ground turns too wet to carry them, which here is a kindness rather than a confinement, because a cow standing on saturated Cheshire clay in February ruins the field and her own feet with it. Then out again in spring. Rainfall sets that timetable, not a shareholder.

The word factory implies a roof and an input you have to buy in. The input here is rain landing on grass. Nobody delivers it. Nobody invoices for it. Show me the factory whose raw material arrives sideways off the Irish Sea, free.

The documentaries are true. Every foul thing in them happened, on camera, in a building, somewhere. Almost none of it happened here, because we spent forty years making the building illegal. So the footage gets shot in Arizona, narrated in London, and aimed at a Northumberland suckler herd already shrinking by 4 per cent a year. American farming, filmed for a British audience, sold as a reason to import more American farming.

Find the factory. Bring a postcode. I'll drive.

[Hunt Saboteurs Association @HuntSabs]

Yesterday sabs from Mendip Hunt Sabs, North Dorset Hunt Sabs and Dorset Borders Hunt Sabs were out at dawn to help this beautiful stag escape the depravity of the Quantock Staghounds.

Forced to run for hours; this image from Mendip Hunt Sabs shows the stag frothing at the mouth, panting and sweating as the QSH tried to get their blood lust fix.

This is also amidst a bluetongue virus outbreak in the area which is raging through cattle and sheep. This behaviour shows how little the QSH care for local farmers as they have continued to rampage around the south-west.

A massive thank you to the sabs that were up on the hills yesterday ✊

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

In 2020, 13-year-old Callum Manning from South Shields, England, created an Instagram account for one simple reason. He loved books and wanted somewhere to share his reviews.

At the time, the page had around 50 followers.

Then some students at his new school found it.

Instead of encouraging him, they created a group chat and mocked him for reading, calling him names like “creep” and “sad weirdo.” Callum was added to the chat and had to watch the messages appear himself.

It hurt more than he expected. He later said it was the first time in a long while that he had actually cried.

His 24-year-old sister, Ellis, decided to do something. She shared what had happened online, hoping maybe 20 or 30 of her friends would follow Callum and leave a few kind comments.

That wasn't what happened.

Within days, Callum went from around 50 followers to hundreds of thousands.

Authors including Neil Gaiman, Malorie Blackman, Matt Haig and Caroline Kepnes reached out. Publishers offered him books. Waterstones encouraged him to keep reviewing and offered him a free book when he next visited.

And Callum kept reading.

The account that classmates had mocked became the place where hundreds of thousands of people came to hear what a 13-year-old thought about the books he loved.

His sister had only wanted a few people to remind him that there was nothing embarrassing about loving books.

She found an entire community waiting to tell him the same thing.

[Freyja. Missing Children Advocate🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @FreyjaBakke]

We are asking for your help to find missing girl, Macee-Mae, from Cannock.

Macee-Mae, who is 13, was last seen at her home address in Norton Canes at around 2.30pm today (Friday 21 August).

She is described as 5ft 4ins tall, of a slim build, with dyed reddish-brown shoulder-length hair.

Macee-Mae was last seen wearing a black zip-up top and black leggings.

Anyone who has seen Macee-Mae or knows of her whereabouts should call us on 101 or use Live Chat on our website quoting incident number 454 of 21 August.

[Galgos del Sol @GalgosdelSol]

You may remember the other day we told you about Ethel and Mildred, who arrived together.
We were initially told that both were very old dogs.
Then, rather embarrassingly, we discovered that Ethel—who now has a very old-lady name—was actually only three!
We worked this out more or less from her spay, as her uterus was still very small.
Well, Mildred went in to be spayed today. Like Ethel, she was covered in lumps, bumps and tumours. But this time, it has been confirmed that she really is old! So at least we got one right. 😂
Mildred is around 10 years old, a lovely Galgo mix, and she is now looking for a home.
She is absolutely wonderful, and all of her tumours have been removed.
Plz share 🙏🏻❤️

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There are about fifty bulls at Chillingham and between them they manage roughly ten calves a year.

Fifty. Ten. Nobody has ever sat them down about it.

They are the last wild cattle in Britain, shut in the same Northumberland park since the Middle Ages, and the first surprise is the size. You picture wild cattle, you picture something the size of a shed.

A Chillingham bull is 300 kilos. A large pony with a grudge. A Charolais bull goes past a tonne and would look at one of these the way a docker looks at a whippet.

Nothing has ever selected them for anything. Not milk, not meat, not size, not temper. Seven centuries of breeding for one criterion, which is still being here in March.

Half the herd is bulls, because individually they are not much cop. The population grows at under four per cent a year. Slower than bison. Slower than wisent. A fifth of the rate the Heck cattle managed in the Netherlands before that project collapsed in on itself.

Seven hundred years at a pace a spreadsheet would file as a crisis.

They do not do the king-of-the-herd thing either, which everyone assumed and nobody checked. They spread out. Each bull takes a corner of the park, stands in it, and bellows at the next one over. Nobody moves. Nobody wins. This goes on for years.

Someone eventually recorded the noises and found a vocabulary in there. Different calls for different situations, cattle saying specific things to each other across four hundred yards of Northumberland. We bred that out of every other cow on earth before anyone thought to listen, and the last fluent speakers are in a field outside Alnwick, insulting each other's postcodes.

The cows hide their calves. Newborn goes down in the bracken and lies flat on its own for days while the mother grazes off and comes back to feed it. Every deer in Britain does this. No farm cow does it any more. It was in there the whole time.

The winter of 1947 took the herd down to five bulls and eight cows. Everything alive in that park descends from those thirteen animals. Take blood from any of them and it matches all the others, and matches no other breed on earth.

By every rule in the genetics textbook they should have folded four times over. They are instead notably healthy, and have never been tuberculin tested. Not once. Not in the entire history of the place.

There is a reserve herd of about twenty of them at an undisclosed location in Scotland, which is the only sentence about cattle that has ever needed the phrase undisclosed location.

And they garden, brilliantly, by accident. Somebody has counted the wildflowers in that park in the same marked squares since 1979. The count dipped, the sheep came off in 2004, and it has climbed ever since. Over that same stretch the cattle went from sixty-four to a hundred and eleven.

Herd nearly doubles. Flowers come back with it. Grazed harder by cattle now than at any point anyone has measured, and there is more growing in it.

They do get hay in a hard winter. The charity says so cheerfully, and they had to change how they put it out because the big ones kept elbowing the calves off the pile, which is the least wild behaviour available and the most cow behaviour there has ever been.

Fifty bulls, one per corner, roaring at each other about nothing.

Ten calves.

Standing in the same field since before the Wars of the Roses, achieving very little, indefinitely.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Coming soon to a river near you.

[North Dorset Hunt Saboteurs @NDHuntSabs]

Organised crime gang the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt paraded at the Gillingham and Shaftesbury this week with the organisers deceptively omitting them from the announcement! The Portman Hunt who also have a conviction were also present.

[James Rebanks @herdyshepherd1]

@BenGoldsmith This is pretty much nonsense

The wet green bits are great
But don’t produce food

The land that does, a few metres out, is brown and burnt off with drought

The green bits don’t make it OK

Far more important would be how to make those fields more resilient…

[Frances Gaskell @FrancesGaskell]

@ruslandvalley And so quickly ,how dis that happen, I only blinked

[The Floof Lady @TheFloofLady]

A calm day in the orchard with lots of snoozing on various perches going on. I think the excitement of yesterday's rain with thunder and lightning caused an energy spike yesterday and an energy slump today.

To be honest, it was lovely seeing everyone so relaxed.

[Alexandra @Alexandr4Denman]

IMPORTANT PLEASE SHARE THIS TO EVERYONE LETS GET HIM BACK HOME TO HIS FAMILY
Aaron is missing from home he's 14 years old reported missing from Brighton .
He has connections to Burgess Hill, Wivelsfield, Shoreham and Crawley.
He was wearing a red Spain football shirt, black joggers and Nike trainers. He was last seen in Brighton 9.30pm on 19th August.
Anyone who sees him or knows his whereabouts is asked to report it to Sussex Police online or call 101 and quote serial 1627 of 19/08

[ifaw United Kingdom @IFAWUK]

It’s estimated that 1 million pangolins have been captured in the wild & illegally sold on the black market. IFAW is working with partners to wipe out wildlife crime, but we need your help. Pledge to protect pangolins and other exploited wildlife around the world.

[Ban Blood Sports @banbloodsports]

🔴 BREAKING NEWS: Heritage Minister James Browne has shamefully granted 2026-27 licences for cruel hare coursing. The licences, covering a 206 day period, allow 87 coursing clubs to capture thousands of hares in nets and use them as bait for dogs to chase https://t.co/ra1nZH1aJv

[𝟐𝐬𝐦𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐲𝐲 @nomodeath]

I work the front desk at a small doctor’s office, and I wish people could see what happens on the other side of the phone. Every day, older patients call us confused.

They are told to use the patient portal, upload documents, check lab results online, fill out forms before the visit, and confirm everything through a link. Some of them do not know what a portal is.

Some do not have a smartphone.
Some have one, but they are afraid to click the wrong thing.
Last week, a man in his late 80s called about his test results.

He said, “Ma’am, I don’t mean to bother you, but the computer says I have a message and I don’t know how to open it.”
He sounded ashamed.
That broke my heart.

He should not have to feel ashamed for needing a human being.
Technology can be helpful. I understand that.

But when people who built this country are made to feel helpless because everything became a login and a password, we have gone too far.
Not everything needs to be an app.
Not every answer should be hidden behind a screen.

Sometimes people need a voice.
A patient person.
A real human who says, “Don’t worry, I can help you.”
Progress should not leave seniors behind.

Because one day, the world will move faster than us too.
And I hope someone is kind enough to slow down.

[Missing Pets GB @MissingPetsGB]

Cannot get over this!! GINNY & MILLIE
The two of them coming home TOGETHER today on their own!! #reunited

"Can’t believe I’m writing this!!
The dogs came back just now. It’s been a long week an half. They're skinny & weak & just want to rest but they're here god bless them 😭♥️"

[Rob Rinder @RobbieRinder]

My dad died yesterday aged 73. I wasn’t sure whether to share this but if it brings attention to an illness too few people understand, perhaps it belongs here.

A London cabbie & lifelong Spurs supporter, he was there for every one of my brothers’ and his grandsons’ football matches. I once represented him at the Carriage Office for bad driving; I loved him but the prosecution had a case…

My parents divorced when I was little so I did not grow up with him at home. We were very different men. I loved opera and all its drama; he loved Tottenham and cigarettes. We both took people as we found them and we both loved women, though in rather different ways. I never once doubted his pride in me. When I came out he responded with magnificent indifference: I was still his son, there was nothing else to discuss.

In the last years of his life Jewish Care became his home, a place where dignity and tenderness were practised every day. Walid and Tosin, among so many others there, cared for him and came to kiss him goodbye. A Jewish man, held in his final days by people of different faiths: a quiet reminder that what is sacred in us is also what we share. He died with his family around him, loved and held to the last.

Funny, beautifully flawed, loving and my dad.

Lewy body dementia took him far too young. It made the familiar strange and the certain uncertain. Dementia can obscure a person but it does not erase them. At least one in ten people living with dementia has Lewy body’s, around 125,000 people in the UK yet it remains poorly understood, frequently missed & desperately under-researched. Please learn its name, learn its signs and if you can support the work to change that.

@lbsorg @Jewish_Care

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

🚨 SHELL SHOCKED: THE WARNING IGNORED

The industry warned government about the risks from imported eggs. Now a national Salmonella outbreak is growing

There is no identified link to UK-produced eggs or poultry

READ MORE: https://t.co/JiXy0z2Rxu

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

A spokesperson on BBC Breakfast just now saying they may have to cull some of the stags because of near miss incidents with humans getting too close.

There are silly people who go way too close to the Deer even with signs all around the place.

These are WILD animals, keep your distance. It’s not rocket science!!!