Broadside on the withdrawal of the wild men of the woods from a world that has changed for the worse; with a partially hand-coloured woodcut of a wild man and woman with two children and a dog in a landscape after Schäufelein (Hollstein 73-74) and 122 lines of letterpress verse in four columns by Hans Sachs. (n.p.: n.d.)
© The Trustees of the British Museum
I have to say that I thought, after posting yesterday's Time To Study The British Wild Men - http://terryhooper.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/time-to-study-british-wild-men-reports.html - it would get some enthusiastic responses from the UK "British Wild Man" community. I linked up to a couple of sites and joined one of the Face Book groups. "No one takes us seriously" and "science just is not interested" are the constant chants. Well, here I was, an established naturalist and one with the mantra of "Dismiss nothing. Investigate everything".
Reading that post you will see that I made it clear that I was not dismissing anything. I would look at the evidence and see where it led. Apparently, being open and willing to listen was an attack on the reports and people involved! Seriously, two nasty emails dismissing the idea out of hand while bemoaning that the established sciences will never listen. And an exchange on Face Book where it appears my pointing out that I had never heard or had a report of a British wild man made to Me was also dismissing all the evidence. In fact I had to explain myself several times -I got a private apology later but not one public on the group where people had probably seen me dismissed as calling it all fake -and, yes, taking down the comments does not mean that the conversation is deleted from my files.
Just what the hell is going on?
I've no reason to close the study but if observers do not want to come forward I will need to assess based on what I can find. But I'm leaving the invitation to report sightings open until 31st January 2016.
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