On Saturday 27 July we launched a new website bloodbusiness.info – but what is it and what is it designed to do?
In a nutshell, bloodbusiness.info is a secure list (or database) of businesses that in one way or another support hunting with dogs and the shooting of birds and mammals (‘live targets’) by taking part in it, servicing it, selling its products etc. Details about each business are given and a paragraph of text explains what ‘evidence’ we have to list them. If we don’t have ‘evidence’ (which might be a link, a photo, a screenshot perhaps) we don’t list them: hearsay or rumour is not enough.
The data is extremely searchable. From the homepage you can search businesses in a number of pre-determined categories (Location, Venues, Services, Retailers, Landowners, and Digital Media), search every business in the database at once (they’re listed in alphabetical order), or even search using keywords like hunt, shoot, Boxing Day, national park etc.
The primary idea is that if someone is out for the day and wonders whether the pub that they’re about to go in supports hunting or shooting. they can check the site and decide whether or not to go in. Same for hotels they’re thinking of staying at, the retailer they’re thinking of buying from, the contractor they’re about to invite into their home to fix something. It gives us all choice.
Of course, it will also be grimly fascinating to realise just how many businesses there are out that support hunting with dogs or shooting birds or mammals. Thousands? We’ll have a better idea in another six months or so when we’ve really got the site up and running…
It’s all about choice
We’ve been careful to make a couple of things clear on every page (and especially in a list of FAQs on our About page). Firstly. we’re not saying that any listed business is doing anything unlawful. It’s not illegal to be an official hunt photographer or sell pheasants to be killed on a shooting estate. Individuals may be committing crimes of course (and we all know that some do) but that’s not what we’re claiming here. Secondly, we’re not demanding or organising boycotts of any listed business. What the public does with the information on the site is up to them.
Which is the point. This is about giving people choice. Informed choice. Personally speaking, none of the Protect the Wild team want to have anything to do with businesses that support hunting with dogs or the shooting of birds and mammals. We assume most people who visit a site developed by Protect the Wild and updated by Protect the Wild feel the same way.
But it’s very difficult to know which businesses those might be. Which is why we’ve built bloodbusiness.info.
What impact might the site have?
The information we’re collating is not ‘secret’ or even new. It’s on websites. in adverts, on hundreds of Facebook pages – it’s just never been collated like this before.
But will people be interested in it?
We trialled a ‘soft launch’ on Saturday. By Monday morning the homepage had been visited over 12,000 times. We have a Contact Form for people wanting to tell us about a business: this morning there were more than 130 emails waiting to be opened and responded to! We’ve had messages of support across the board. Not right across the board admittedly – remarkably a pro-hunt website (we’re not naming it as it likes to reveal the identities of sabs) has already run an article titled “Protect the Wild will ruin rural businesses”: not the fact that these businesses associate with ‘hobbies’ that a majority of the public don’t want anything to do with (and from which they can disassociate anytime they want, remember), but because we have launched a website that offers the public a choice? They are clearly rattled and far more worried about the future of hunting and shooting than many people realise!
It’s an amazing start, particularly as we have so few businesses listed yet (around 70 at the moment). We’ve spent a long time developing this site and now we need to populate it, but if we were in any doubt about its potential and how powerful it might be, we’re not in any doubt now!
Contributing information
It’s important to remember a couple of things before emailing us though.
- Please check whether a business has already been listed – a quick search will give you the answer in seconds and save us all time!
- Please give us ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’. We detail what that needs to be in our FAQs, but we won’t list a business unless we have evidence and we can be sure it is currently supporting hunting or shooting – a lot of venues have changed hands or policy in the last few years and it’s important we get this right. We can’t justify listing a business because of hearsay or opinion, so we won’t.
- We can’t reproduce copyrighted images, but they may be useful for research purposes. If you took a picture yourself that we can use (or have the express permission of whoever did take it for us to use it) that would be great.
Please let us have the name of the business and its location (many pubs, for example, have the same name – we want to list the right one!). If it has a website please let us know the address.
As we said, we are asking for proof or evidence. Evidence might include a link (or a screenshot) to text or images on the website of the business showing support for hunting with dogs or shooting birds or mammals; a link to an online advert in a hunting or shooting magazine; or an eye-witness account backed up by images or video.
Please send anything you have to us via our Contact Form and please let us know if you would like to be credited or not.
Oh, and we’re a very small team, please don’t be concerned if we take a few days to get back to you!
And note that only the Admin team can upload data. We’re not opening the site to comments or ‘reviews’. That’s to ensure a consistent message and ‘style’, and to deny ‘bad actors’ a route to hack or take down the site.
What about other Protect the Wild projects?
Everything we do is a part of the whole – and that whole is our work to end hunting with dogs, end the shooting of birds and mammals, and end the badger cull.
