Builders Fined After Destroying Newts' Breeding Site

[alan]

http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=132384&command=displayContent&sourceNode=132384&contentPK=16478910&folderPk=77465

A building firm has been fined £7,000 after admitting destroying the breeding site of a protected species. Gerald Patrick McHugh, of King Street, Seagrave, company secretary of McHugh Construction, pleaded guilty on behalf of the firm to destroying a structure or place used by great crested newts and a charge of damaging or destroying a breeding site of the same creatures.

 

[ian]

they should also make him return the site to its original condition. £7.ooo is probably chicken feed to them anyway

 

[jesper]

Heh, that's basically saying it's ok. £7000 is nothing. Returning the site into the original condition would probably have cost £100 000s no? Or possibly even £ 1 000 000s depending on what they would have to tear down...
That's more like it. Then they should have forced them to set up signs, like the ones Pin-Pin made. Now that would have been a working law.

Hey for only £7000 extra it might be profitable for a private person to buy protected areas, destroy them and resell them. Why do governements do half-assed laws?

(Message edited by jesper on January 25, 2007)

 

[laura]

That is ridiculous, i mean its there homes. Money cant make up for that!

 

[jake]

i think people like that should be maid to see haw rare they are and haw little of them are left and see haw nice they look. all living things should have the same rights as people i think. and they should think about haw much baby newts were not born or had a chance to have a life in the next year that would be about 20-50 in one pond that is if its a large pond but the numbers are going dawn fast so in 5 years time that would be 150 little lives or more that never had a chance at life just because of that company

they do not care about them at all its not right

them baby newts never had a chance at life that were larvea in the pond or the ones that would have been born in the next 10years

 

[deborah]

so sad...

They probably laughed at the neighbor who told them about the newts, knowing the fines would be a pittance to pay and not worth the bother of postponing construction or finding another site.

People will only understand the importance of the smallest links to the chains of life when they discover that the largest links cannot survive without them. And down the road I believe it will happen if people don't change their attitudes and their destructive treatment of our planet and its beautiful denizens.