General Dogsbody

Retired lawyer now looking after abused animals. Wide awake.

[AnUnimportantPerson @TheUn_important]

@JamesEsses Yes, keep my piece fiction, thank you. https://t.co/7L4jPwLpuy

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave.

The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it.

Understand what is walking out.

Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long.

The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour.

Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet.

Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable.

Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers.

Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

[Help2Rehome Scotland @H2RScotland]

Nala is looking for a new loving forever home.
Nala is a healthy beautiful 18 month old Domestic short hair, black outdoor cat.
Once Nala learns to trust you she totally loves her human people, she is calm, adorable and has a very affectionate nature.
She will probably take about a week to settle in to her new home. She will initially hiss, appear a little timid and will hide, however once you gain her trust she is an easy cat to love and care for.
Nala will need a new home as an independent cat.
She is not tolerant of other cats.
Nala once settled is fine with children and dogs, she can be left on her own, she generally just sleeps, mostly on a living room chair.
Nala appears calm in the car, the occasional times its been required.
She will need a large carrier for transporting, otherwise she will become stressed.
Nala is registered with the vet, no health problems and has been spayed.
Nala only eats dry food, currently on Harringtons, likes Dreamies and uses wood pellet cat litter.
If you are interested in giving this beautiful wee girl a new home please email [email protected] for more information.

If you need help to rehome please call 0330 133 4594.

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

Disgusting promotion. Best thing about this is the number and content of responses

[Melissa 🐭 @missyTHX1138]

Here is what they do with the research money they get besides blow it on claiming cough medicine or BS Cognitive behavior therapy will help treat symptoms. I have never seen a legitimate patient be able to move like this. Even those of us injured by, drugs, and different viral persistences can’t. I sure as heck can’t. I move like a stiff plank of wood or not at all. This is the biggest farce ever. It’s offensive.
In the comments they try to explain it away and the patients are not buying it. They used to be called CFIDS Association of America and got caught blowing money on weird things. They can try to change their name and re-invent themselves all they want, but it doesn’t hide that they are frauds who go with whatever bullshit narrative the government tells them to. Meanwhile zero patients have been truly helped.

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

@ValerieAnne1970 A thought provoking article on what happened in Samoa in 2019 with measles:
https://t.co/pQ6EWYUKVb

[Valerie Anne Smith @ValerieAnne1970]

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny: "Don’t fall for the fear campaign... what is MEASLES?... a fever, a cough, a rash, runny eyes & runny nose."

"The measles vaccine came out in 1963. In 1962, the death rate from measles was two in a million.”

"So it was not even deadly BEFORE we had a vaccine."

IF YOU FEAR MEASLES...

You must not know that even in the 60s, before the vaccine, the survival rate was over 99.9%.

You must not know that the MMR is a live virus vaccine & can cause measles.

You must not know that MMR and MMRV vaccines have been linked to 2,657% MORE DEATHS than measles itself since 1995.

You must not know that it's a very mild childhood illness for well-nourished children.

You must not know that natural measles infection provides lifelong immunity, unlike the vaccine.

You must not know that there are huge lifelong health benefits to getting measles, including a lower risk of cancer, heart disease & stronger immune resilience.

You must not know that the MMR insert lists over 60 serious adverse events, ranging from encephalitis, seizures & death.

You must not know that studies show Vitamin A drastically reduces measles complications-yet public health officials ignore it.

[TWS @tws_pk2]

Since last night some have been very kind and some not so much. We have been criticised for asking a popular account for help. Please note we are not asking for money but exposure. You see we always help smaller organisations in Pakistan when they are struggling and it's never done us any harm. You have to understand that the dogs of Pakistan are being massacred and there is nobody outside of Pakistan speaking up for them. But for those who have objected please don't worry, we will not ever ask any popular account for help ever again. We will continue to be the voice for these dogs and we know our loyal supporters will be by our side. Meanwhile whilst those who have taken offence at us for requesting help just remember that whilst we write this post more dogs will have lost their lives. RIP innocents, we are sorry we failed you 😢💔

[ETHICAL APPROACH UK @EthicalApproach]

A single entry in the Metropolitan Police CRN 6029679/21 SAR continues to trouble me.

The allegation was ultimately classified as a "Victimless allegation".

By that stage however, the Metropolitan Police had already been provided with statements from individuals alleging death, serious injury and other harm arising from the matters reported. Indeed, the police record itself acknowledges that the complainants attended Hammersmith Police Station with a large quantity of documentary evidence.

A simple constitutional question therefore arises.

How does an allegation supported by victim statements become classified as a "victimless allegation"?

Were those statements examined?

If they were, why were those individuals not regarded as victims for the purposes of the assessment?

If they were not, on what evidential basis was the classification made?

These questions go to the integrity of the criminal justice process itself.

How can an allegation be recorded as "victimless" when victim evidence had already been placed before the police?

This is a matter arising from the Metropolitan Police's own documentary record.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The obvious answer to losing our foreign shearers is to simply train our own. Britain already does. Training was never the problem, and here is what actually is.

The country has fourteen million breeding ewes and about three months to shear them, because the fleece has to come off in a short warm window or the animal suffers. A mountain of work crammed into one season, then nothing for nine months.

So think like someone weighing up the trade. You spend years mastering one of the hardest physical skills in farming, shearing hundreds a day with calm hands and no harm to the animal, and the reward is twelve brutal weeks in summer and three quarters of a year with no work and no money. Nobody builds a life on that. So they don't, and who could blame them.

The shearers who fly in have solved the one problem Britain cannot. A top shearer works four countries a year, New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, three months in each, chasing the season round the planet until twelve weeks becomes fifty. That is what makes it a career instead of a summer job, and no single country can recreate it, because no single country has more than one season.

There used to be British gangs on this circuit. Contractors who travelled, who trained the next lot, who knew every shed in the dale. That world thinned as the wool stopped paying and the young went to jobs that ran all year, and the gap was filled by the shearers who fly in, who now teach the British newcomers coming up, because the knowledge had nowhere else to live. Cut them off and you do not force Britain to train its own. You remove the last people still doing the teaching.

And this is what makes it so hard to stomach. Seventy-five people, in for twelve weeks, gone the day the job is done, costing the taxpayer nothing and leaving the flock shorn. If any arrival on earth is the useful kind, it is this one. A government serious about who comes and goes would fling the door open to exactly these people and spend its energy on the arrivals it genuinely cannot account for.

It has done the precise reverse. A hard No for the seventy-five it could see, needed and time-limit, while the numbers it cannot explain carry on untouched.

They looked at a skills chain held together by seasonal workers and decided the workers were the problem. They were the only reason it still existed.

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

If you don't believe me about folic acid, perhaps you might believe the manufacturer?

Sign the petition below: 👇

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Your apple was washed to strip off the wax it grew itself, then sprayed with a beetle resin, an emulsifier Europe will not approve, fumigated with a gas that switches ripening off, and held for up to twelve months in air stripped to roughly one per cent oxygen.

That is one fruit. Here is the rest of the bowl.

- Orange: gassed with ethylene, then dyed where the gas fails.
- Grape: shipped on a metabisulfite pad releasing sulphur dioxide.
- Banana: picked green, shipped green, ripened in a gas room on arrival.
- Pear: same ripening blocker, so it stays hard until told otherwise.
- Mango, avocado, tomato: same blocker, same sealed rooms.

All of it legal, routine and invisible, on the one thing in the shop sold as having had nothing done to it.

Take morpholine, because it has the best paperwork. Shellac comes from the lac bug in India and Thailand, carnauba from a palm that grows only in Brazil, and neither will mix with water. Morpholine is the carrier that lets the coat go on thin and come up glossy, about 0.2 millilitres a fruit. It is permitted in America, Canada, Chile, South Africa and Australia, and has never been authorised in the European Union, for the excellent reason that nobody has ever filed an application.

In 2010 a laboratory found morpholine at two parts per million on apples shipped from Chile to Britain, and the Food Standards Agency ordered them off sale and returned to origin.

Then look at what it did with the citrus on the same lorry. It left it on the shelf. Apples are eaten unpeeled and oranges are not, so the identical compound was a legal problem on one fruit and an acceptable one on the next, decided by whether the customer swallows the outside.

Now the chemistry. Morpholine is a secondary amine. Amines meeting nitrite in the gut undergo nitrosation and form N-nitrosomorpholine, a genotoxic carcinogen in rodents, and the reaction has been demonstrated in human saliva. The largest source of dietary nitrate in an ordinary diet is not the bacon dragged through the press every fortnight. It is vegetables. Spinach, rocket, celery, beetroot.

So the salad brings the nitrite, the apple brings the amine, and they are introduced in your own stomach.

None of it exists for your benefit. Wax buys warehouse time. The gas rooms let an apple picked in September be sold as fresh the following August. Sulphur dioxide keeps a grape alive for fifty days at sea. Dye covers an orange that had the bad manners to ripen without changing colour. When Europe began enforcing on morpholine, the trade's answer was to argue it should be reclassified from an additive to a processing agent, which changes the rules without changing a molecule.

Meanwhile a cow is asked to account for her methane, and a sirloin arrives carrying a farm, a date and a name.

Nature gave the apple a coat. We washed it off and sold it a better one.

[D. Janković (aka Dog's Breakfast) @breakfast_dogs]

Is this the reason Yusen Zhou was killed?

Fauci was alerted up to novel hACE2 mice. The paper mentions mice that are already 30 weeks old, dating them to August 2019. Since SARS was eliminated, why invent a new ACE2 mouse model in 2019?

Well spotted @lafemme_nikkita!

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Paid To Fail: The £900m Bill For Power Nobody Used

Britain's consumers are paying wind farm operators not to produce electricity. Put plainly, that is the literal mechanism behind almost £900m in compensation handed out in the first half of this year alone, for power that was generated, then switched off, then paid for anyway.

The figures come from Montel, an energy data firm, and cover January to June. Wind operators were ordered to curtail output by 28 per cent over that period, chiefly in Scotland, because the grid connecting those wind farms to the rest of the country cannot carry the power they produce. Rather than let that shortfall fall on the operators who built in the wrong place, the system compensates them, and the compensation is recovered from ordinary billpayers.

Six terawatt hours were wasted in six months. To put that in perspective, it is roughly what every data centre in the United Kingdom consumes over the same period, the servers behind the country's banking systems, its cloud storage, its growing artificial intelligence infrastructure. That much electricity was generated, then discarded, then billed to households regardless.

Fintan Denny, an analyst at Montel, said the volume being curtailed has risen every year since 2022, and pinned the underlying cause squarely on Scotland's grid, built without the capacity to handle the pace of wind development layered onto it. That is the detail worth sitting with. This is not a story about bad weather or unlucky timing. It is the predictable consequence of building generation capacity faster than the infrastructure needed to carry it, a sequencing failure baked into the strategy from the start.

Last year the total cost of curtailment payments and the gas-fired backup power needed to replace the lost wind reached £1.5bn. Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, says that figure is on course to reach £10bn a year by 2030 if nothing changes, all of it passed through to consumer and business bills.

The strain is already visible elsewhere on the balance sheet. Domestic energy debt has climbed from £1.4bn four years ago to roughly £6bn today, and suppliers expect it to reach £7bn next year. Alex Schoch of Octopus Energy put the underlying problem bluntly: an electricity system built for a different era is forcing turbines to switch off in Scotland while gas plants are fired up in England to cover the gap, a costly duplication that exists only because the grid was never rebuilt to match the ambition placed on top of it.

Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation went further, arguing that intermittent generation is inherently expensive to manage, and that what consumers are now paying for is not clean power but decades of governmental naivety, planning renewables expansion without planning the grid to carry it.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the new Energy Secretary, inherits this bill rather than having created it. Her department says it is accelerating grid investment to bring the costs down. But the households and businesses paying £900m for electricity they never received are entitled to ask why a country capable of approving wind farm after wind farm was never equally capable of building the wires to connect them, and why, in the meantime, they are the ones settling the account.

"Wind operators were ordered to curtail output by 28 per cent over that period, chiefly in Scotland, because the grid connecting those wind farms to the rest of the country cannot carry the power they produce."

[Dog Desk Animal Action @DogDeskAction]

Every dog has a story worth telling. ❤️

Come and meet the amazing dogs of Dog Desk Animal Action on YouTube.

https://t.co/VgU4x18lXt

[Hedgehog Cabin @HedgehogCabin]

As we enter yet another week of drought conditions please, I beg you, put out water for the animals.
Our nocturnal wildlife is dying of thirst.
A terrible, painful way to die.
And you hold the solution, the cure.
A turn of the tap will save a life.🚰
So get out your casserole pot lids, your flan dishes, your old baking trays - anything that is shallow and wide and not easily tipped.
It doesn't matter what it looks like, this is an emergency.
Put them out at dusk, front and back garden.
Your local charity shop will have loads of suitable water dishes - so with one simple act of kindness you can benefit so many.🥰
Keep them clean.
Keep them full.
Keep them coming.
Please share this to save a life today.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

This Scottish highlander farmer points out a few inconvenient home truths about the wildfires currently in the Cairngorms. He should know. He works on the land.

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

Good summary of the core issues here.

Sign petition: 👇

[Help2Rehome Scotland @H2RScotland]

This gorgeous girl is Poppy, an 8-year-old Crossbreed who is searching for a loving new family to spend her golden years with.

Making the decision to rehome Poppy has not been easy. She is very much loved, but due to changes in her owners’ circumstances, they can no longer give her the exercise she needs. Poppy is a strong dog on the lead, and while her owner has always walked her, he is now unable to do so because he is not strong enough. They want to do what is best for Poppy and find her a home where she can continue to thrive.

Poppy is a wonderfully affectionate girl who absolutely loves fuss, cuddles, and being close to her people. In fact, she’s happiest curled up on her owners’ bed at night! She’s friendly, enjoys the company of children, and loves meeting other dogs. She can be quite boisterous when she plays, so she’d be happiest as the only dog in the home where she can have all the attention to herself.

She has a healthy appetite and isn’t fussy with food, happily eating both wet and dry food, with chicken being one of her favourite treats. Poppy is microchipped, spayed, registered with the vets, and has no known medical issues.

Although she hasn’t travelled in the car very often, she has happily been on a bus, showing she’s adaptable with a little reassurance.

Poppy would suit an individual or couple, or a family with older children, who can confidently handle a stronger dog and offer her the love, attention, and exercise she deserves. In return, you’ll gain a loyal, affectionate companion who will happily snuggle up beside you at the end of the day.

If you think you could offer lovely Poppy the warm, caring forever home she deserves, we’d love to hear from you. Please help us find this wonderful girl the next chapter she’s been waiting for. ❤️🐶

For more information please email [email protected]

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

@GillianMcKeith Typical behaviour we will see from MSM (trusted news) with the dystopian “False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice”; clearly misleading headline but questioning this could, in future, see penalties for creating harm. 😨God help us all