The Reason Dogma Continues...The "experts"

 

There was once an incident in the United States when astronomers were gathered together for a conference and at one point some other astronomers walked in and announced that there were objects flying around the sky outside that they could not identify. "UFOs" said someone and all the astronomers refused to even get up and go look -as true scientists would.

If you have well paid jobs-for-life and free dinners you do not want to rock the boat or call some of your own work into question. "It's the only field this could happen in!" it was claimed.

Wrong.

I contacted various European museums regarding the Old Fox and Old Wild Cat research which included the offer to share any findings and data. One museum was very cooperative while others are just simply not interested. It may well be the not wishing to rock the boat" or not wanting their seen (by themselves) positions of importance taken from them. Today I received this response from one person at a museum (I shall name neither right now):

"Many thank you for your request. Although I have spent years studying the genetics of red foxes and wildcats, I am not familiar with your theories between old and new types of foxes and wildcats, with the exceptions of the well know problem of the genetic introgression of the domestic cat into the Scottish wildcat . Is there any scientific literature - i.e. peer reviewed - on this ? Obviously, this is a prerequisite for us to justify the effort of consulting our scientific collection."

Ooh, "not familiar with your theories". Now that could be taken as rude but also dismissive. You see not being part of a university or museum the work I do is not taken as worth much although more than a few academics have, let's say 'borrowed' my work as their own in the past. The whole dismissive attitude is not what I would expect from someone actually interested in wild cats or foxes. But when I read that he had "spent years studying the genetics of red foxes and wildcats" I can see why he wrote it.

Here is the problem with "scientific papers" as he would well know; you have to be a part of some university or established institute for anyone to accept your work for a scientific paper and even if they had it under consideration it can take a few years to be published. As an example, back in the 1990s I put forward what evidence I had in an article The New Scientist publication and my article was dropped in favour of one expounding some very weird ideas about UFOs by a Ufologist who was not attached to any scientifically recognised establishment. After several more attempts I realised that the subject of foxes was of no interest.

Even the BBC Wildlife Magazine a little later stated that they did not feel there would be enough interest in the subject to publish the article.

Therefore, after 34 years of research, in 2010, I published the original Red Paper Canids. The late Dr David Bellamy stated that the contents were well researched and "explosive" for British wildlife history. Other naturalists were equally as encouraging and some even suggested publishers, however those publishers were not interested for various reasons.

And after 46 years of constant study and research, in 2022 I published two books; Red Paper Vol. I -Canids and Red Paper Vol. II -Felids which are not just vastly expanded on my 2000 wild cats and hybrids paper but with the canids it was bulkier, filled with even more information, colour photographs and taxidermy evidence and every single reference source I consulted is given and some of those include scientific and conference papers that it seems no naturalist or zoologist has ever heard of let alone consulted since the early 1900s. The books are far more comprehensive than any small paper presented for publication.

It is very telling that this person, sat in a large museum, will not even get out of his chair and look in the museum's collection unless he has a "peer reviewed paper" first. Imagine that, someone who considers themselves an expert in red foxes not even being interested in looking and see what is in the museum collection. That is the very definition of an unscientific armchair jobs-worth.

It is even more striking that for an expert he is totally unaware, then again around 99% of British zoologists are also unaware (or just do not want to mention it), that many thousands of foxes were imported into the UK each year to continue hunting after the well enough described Old fox types were hunted to extinction. My assumption is that this person is one of the "modern crowd" who only read modern books and dismiss anything before 1970.

There are, as I have proven on this blog, examples in art from Europe of Old fox types and we can roughly state how and when red foxes began entering into Western Europe replacing the rapidly dying out (through hunting) Old fox type.

How do you sum up over four decades of research, many thousands of newspaper items, journals, hunting books and natural history books by people who actually saw and hunted the Old fox and wild cats? And what of the taxidermy specimens now gathered of both that, interestingly, no museum in England, Scotland or Wales have examples of because they were "just foxes" and wild cats had to be of a "museum type" so anything else was disposed of?

Some wild theory with no evidence or fact? Perhaps, if that particular museum or expert can afford it, then buying copies of the Red Papers might educate them though I suspect that, rather like the Natural History Museum Paris, this expert is only interested in dogma and not really that interested in the history of foxes as a species.

If I am respectful to people then I expect to be treated respectfully in return. Certainly ask questions -it might have gotten him two free books- but dismissive attitude is never good science wise.