becomes a fire risk<\/a>.<\/p>\nLower down on the side of the moor in a beautiful farmhouse, a tenant of the Duchy of Cornwall who keeps Dartmoor ponies as well as cattle and sheep says there is more at stake than ponies.<\/p>\n
The farmer, who is very keen on wildlife conservation, says there are parts of the moor where she believes Natural England\u2019s low stocking density approach isn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe we need to turn it on its head and look at putting more stock up,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout the animals grazing on the common and producing dung, you don\u2019t have insects for the wading birds,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou also end up with a large fuel load and a risk of fire,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
For some residents of Dartmoor, the pony issue represents a culture war between radical environmentalists and traditionalists seeking to preserve the landscape.<\/p>\n
In the middle are ecologists, who tend to be more nuanced.<\/p>\n
Paul Lunt, an associate professor of environmental science at the University of Plymouth, has warned against the ponies\u2019 removal, noting they \u201cwill eat vegetation that other species won\u2019t\u201d.<\/p>\n
The last time Dartmoor really hit the headlines was when Alexander Darwall, the financier, attempted to get so-called \u201cwild camping\u201d banned on his 4,000-acre Dartmoor estate in 2023.<\/p>\n
Darwall is keen on shooting pheasant, which many environmental campaigners oppose, and the issue of wild camping became a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre for them.<\/p>\n
Cat Frampton, a local cattle farmer, thinks that the trouble with battles like that one is that they politicise the moor. The issue turned Dartmoor into a cultural battlefield.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt puts a spoke in everything. It becomes really toxic really quickly,\u201d says Frampton.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the same with the pony stuff or the stocking density stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frampton claims there are only a few genuine green rabble-rousers, and most are incomers, but they have made her local farmers feel isolated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t want ecologists on the land because it\u2019s that sense of you\u2019re either with us or against us, and the other side is going, \u2018But we know how to make this really beautiful.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A culture war A short drive away, where the ponies are, the land looks very different. A dozen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[2851,84,5257,90,5438,58919,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-649635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animals","tag-business","tag-devon","tag-science","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}