Now I am not going to mention names or the institutions, however, everything is documented and my colleague LM has been privy to the responses.
For The Red Paper 2022 Canids I had a number of photographs of "fox masks" (masks being the trophy head of a fox killed in a hunt and with starving hounds it is usually all that gets left) on shields (wood plaques with dates and locations of the kill. Some were quite obviously not foxes -there were jackal like heads and the most obviously odd were those that were clearly coyote or wolf like.
That I believed that these were jackal, coyote or wolf does not matter. What I needed to get was confirmation from experts who knew these canids. I learnt from my first attempts to get jackal heads identified that as soon as you stated "Killed by a hunt in England" things went very quiet. So what I asked people who are experts and deal with wolves and coyotes on an almost daily basis is whether they could confirm that the masks were coyote or wolf -no deception just asking for their professional opinion.
I got all of the masks confirmed as wolf or coyote and one possible Eastern Coyote. One mask I was told looked coyote like...but slightly fox like and was "odd". That mask was sent by accident and was a jackal head so it would seem odd to them.
I had all the confirmation I needed from 4-5 experts at well known institutions. When asked where the masks came from I explained and as soon as I stated England... back pedalling was so fast, confused and even contradicting their own statements! I did offer full information and even sent copies of the mask shields with the details on them but no one was talking any more -although one brave soul DID stand by his identification.
Why the sudden reversal and denial of their own opinions? It was explained to me by someone who would know that it was probably out of fear of rocking the academic boat. They don't want to upset their colleagues in the UK over this as it might have those colleagues responding angrily or making cooperation difficult and a lot of people from different universities cooperate on papers.
That is highly believable. Their statements are on the record so why cause problems -maybe one day they will come around or even accept a copy of The Red Paper Canids as offered?
My policy is still to ask other experts for confirmation of an animal and I have always done that via museums, etc.. It is just a pity that academia is so butt clenching when it faces up to dogma or things their colleagues have just never bothered looking into.
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