Sadly, Chris has lost the plot
These claims simply aren’t true or are at least extremely misleading propaganda
Saddens me, because it makes environmentalists look like complete foolsChris Packham (@ChrisGPackham)This is the reality of where the vast majority of our food comes from – far from the fairytale depiction served up by Clarkson and Amazon .
@FarmersWeekly @FarmersGuardian @AnimalAid
Video
— https://x.com/ChrisGPackham/status/2081451537662959674
Every sheep in the UK has to be shorn for its welfare. There is no choice. Yet the heartbreaking reality is that it often costs more to shear a sheep than the fleece is worth.
So tonnes of beautiful British wool are treated as waste, burned, buried or composted, while we fill our wardrobes with synthetic fibres made from oil that shed microplastics into our rivers and seas.
It feels as though somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten the value of the things nature gives us so generously.
British wool is warm, breathable, biodegradable, renewable and grown every single year by animals already grazing our countryside. It deserves to be treasured, not thrown away.
Perhaps the answer isn’t to produce more. Perhaps it’s to remember what we’ve always had, and start valuing natural materials, skilled craftsmanship and the people who produce them once again.
Wool is a technology so good that if a startup unveiled it tomorrow, it would raise a fortune.
Run through the spec sheet with a straight face.
It keeps you warm even when it's soaking wet, which almost nothing else does. It is naturally flame-resistant. It doesn't catch and melt onto your skin like plastic does. It chars, refuses to sustain the flame, and puts itself out when you take the fire away. It manages moisture, breathes, and resists smell so well you can wear it for days. It bends tens of thousands of times without snapping.
And when you're finally done with it, you can put it in the ground and in a matter of months it's gone, rotted back into the soil, feeding it nitrogen on the way out.
Then there's the supply chain, which is the part no engineer could ever replicate. It grows back. Every year, on its own, on nothing but grass and rain, on a sheep that was going to stand on that hillside anyway. A self-renewing, fireproof, compostable insulation fibre with a production input of weather.
We replaced it with polyester. Oil, spun into thread, that melts on you in a fire, sheds plastic into the sea with every wash, and sits in landfill for centuries when you're done.
We had the better version the whole time. It says baa.
There is now a serious, well-funded plan to vaccinate every cow on earth, twice a year, so it burps less politely. Bill Gates is behind it. So is the New Zealand government. Somewhere a marketing department is very proud.
The company furthest along calls its methane vaccine the holy grail of livestock emissions, a phrase that should make you reach for your wallet and check it is still there.
The pitch is gloriously simple. Train the cow's own immune system to turn on the microbes in her gut, so she belches less methane, with a single jab lasting months. Early results suggest a cut of ten to fifteen per cent. Trials run through 2027, launch around 2030, by which point the dream is a needle in the neck of every cow they can corner.
Pause on that. Not a feed tweak. A plan to medicate an entire species, forever, across the whole planet, to fix a problem with how we count its burps.
Because methane from a steady herd cycles out of the air within about a decade. It does not pile up like fossil carbon. A stable national herd adds no new warming whatsoever, whatever the headlines shriek. The cow was convicted by an accounting method, and the sentence is a lifetime of injections.
And follow the money, because it does the confessing for you. The cash floods in from billionaire climate funds and the food giants chasing their own supply-chain targets, the very people who need the cow to look guilty so their spreadsheets come out green. Not a penny from the farmer, who just inherits the syringe and the bill.
So the grass-fed cow, quietly turning rain and sunshine into food on land that grows nothing else, is now a wellness patient with a biannual appointment. Marvellous. The cow was never the emergency. The people insisting she is just happen to have a vaccine to sell.
