I posted Stephen Lewis’s guest blog on ‘Why the licensing of driven grouse shooting is a bad idea’ for two reasons (three if you include ‘because it was very well-written’).
Firstly, I agreed with everything Stephen said (see a less well-developed post of my own Grouse moors | licencing slaughter from August 2020 which paralleled some of Stephen’s conclusions). And secondly, I think campaigners like me and Stephen (who’s been at this as long as I have) need to be unequivocal, because for far too long our major conservation organisations haven’t been, diluting the argument and allowing shooting to get away with wildlife crime and habitat destruction for decades before belatedly trying to tackle these hugely serious issues by persuasion. Shooting estate owners from the royal family down have been allowed to control the narrative and enabled by a sycophantic media (directly involved in shooting in some cases of course) have normalised the ongoing casual killing of our wildlife.
But it’s not ‘normal’ to raise and release sentient non-humans as live targets for so-called ‘sport’. They are not a ‘resource’ or a ‘stock’, they are living beings. What makes it okay to build an industry - and it is an industry, churning out ‘products’ for consumers - around maiming or killing them?
It’s not right that huge areas of land (plenty of it within our so-called national parks) are used to farm these live targets or routinely set on fire (despite calls for voluntary restraint) during a climate crisis. Recent figures suggest grouse moors occupy an area of land the size of Greater London (imagine the rewilding opportunities) and Wild Moors logged 1,203 reported incidents of grouse moors burning on carbon-rich peatlands between October 2021 and April 2022 in England alone.
Woodlands are crucial for native wildlife but are increasingly bought by shooting syndicates and converted into pheasant nurseries. No one knows just how many woodlands are now used to rear pheasants, but Who Owns England discovered via an FOI that “20,756,012 pheasants [were] reared in England in 2018 across 3,907 premises, and that 770 premises in just 4 counties account for nearly a third (32%) of this total’. That’s just in England.
Animals in those woodlands and on those moors are relentlessly killed. Countless numbers of traps and snares are used to eradicate predators (especially foxes and mustelids, part of our native biodiversity) as part of a never-ending unvirtuous circle of releasing vast amounts of food into the countryside and then trying to kill the animals attracted to it. And shooting estates are still killing corvids - a family recognised as amongst the most intelligent animals on the planet.
No one knows either just how many animals are killed in traps and snares. We don’t know because the industry is not required to keep records. What other industry gets to massacre possibly hundreds of thousands of animals without even having to bother to count them?
Those are just the ‘legal’ (ie allowed by government) killings attributable to the shooting industry. All birds of prey (raptors) are protected by law, but they are targeted heavily on shooting estates because they also predate the abundance of food presented to them. They are shot, poisoned, or trapped. Illegally. Some species (Hen Harriers and Golden Eagles in particular) have been driven towards local extinction or are unable to break out of narrow ranges.
Shooting estates now appear to be turning on reintroduction projects involving Red Kites and White-tailed Eagles (the bizarre decision to not investigate the poisoning of an eagle found dead on a shooting estate in Dorset smacks of the shooting industry’s dead hand). Nothing and no one else illegally persecutes birds of prey so regularly and on such a scale as the shooting industry. Shut it down and raptor persecution would almost end overnight (a fact not lost on charity investigators when you speak to them off the record).
Wildlife crime doesn’t end with birds of prey of course. ‘Accidents’ regularly happen (like the death of a Little Owl in a trap on the Queen’s Sandringham estate in 2020), and there are scores of reliable reports from investigators and monitors of the illegal interference with badger setts on shooting estates (especially at sites that have been filled with pheasant pens). Some shooting estates enthusiastically back the government-imposed badger cull - not because of threats to cattle, but because badgers are omnivores and eat eggs…
Reintroductions of birds of prey are only necessary because shooting drove them out of huge areas in the past. Allowing them to return is important in one of the most-nature depleted countries on the planet. We have no virtually no large megafauna left. and many species of bird are in terminal decline - in fact, the most common single bird species in the UK is now the pheasant (thanks to the estimated 50 million released every year to be shot) and about half the total weight of all the birds in the UK is made up of pheasants. Yet shooting still demands that it should kill declining waders like Woodcock and Snipe and shoot down migratory waterfowl as they arrive exhausted from long sea crossings. It’s as disgusting as it is nonsensical.
Lead is a serious pollutant. Due to its high toxicity and the public and environmental health problems it causes, most releases of lead into the environment are strictly regulated in Europe (e.g. see AMEC 2012). In the UK lead was finally fully banned from vehicle fuel in 2000, removed from paint in 1992, and its use in water pipes before that. But who gets a free pass to keep using lead? The shooting industry, which still sprays tens of thousands of tonnes of lead across fields, moorlands, and woodlands, contaminating soil and water. Spent lead risks the health of wild birds that mistakenly ingest lead shot with prey or (in the case of waterfowl like swans) instead of small stones to grind down food in their gizzards. Poisoned birds die agonising deaths, as frequent firsthand reports from the likes of Wildfowl and Wetland Trust attest.
Almost unbelievably the industry tries to claim that they use lead shot for welfare considerations! Because it is dense shooters claim it allows for better accuracy - the obvious suggestion to genuinely improve welfare is to stop allowing any idiot with a gun to shoot birds, or even better to stop shooting them at all…
Another serious ‘pollutant’ is disease. Back in the early 2000s a virus was spreading through appallingly crowded poultry sheds in east Asia, killing millions of factory-farmed birds. Incredibly, lax biosecurity saw their faeces being washed straight out of the sheds into waterways, killing thousands of ducks and geese. That virus has now spread around the world as highly pathogenic avian influenza, killing untold numbers of wild birds including declining seabirds here in the UK. The shooting industry annually imports most of the sixty million pheasants and red-legged partridges its supporters shoot - most coming from intensive rearing sites in France. This year shoots across the UK are being shut down or scaled back because of import bans, but who’s to say what virus might sneak in under the radar next time around and decimate our wild birds?
Shooting can’t even honestly claim that slaughtering all those vast numbers of pheasants and other birds is to do with ‘food’. Caches of dumped birds are regularly filmed or found and the surplus created by the enormous numbers that are shot means that they have virtually no ‘value’ (the profits in shooting come from selling ‘pegs’ (a position on a drive where a shooter will stand) and accessories). Fears of ingesting lead shot deter many potential customers anyway - utter abhorrence of the shooting industry deters many others…
It is absolutely unforgivable (for me at least) that despite all the evidence of cruelty, wildlife crime, destructive land use, and the massacre of so many of our native predators, major wildlife charities still seem to demur to the shooting industry, minimising concerns and looking to legitimise the shooting of some birds (so-called ‘gamebirds’ - a term no animal welfare or bird protection charity should ever use) through licencing because they’re not rare or in danger of extinction (or in the hope that non-existent enforcement will somehow dissuade estates from law-breaking). That has to stop.
Others will/might disagree, but in my opinion, the shooting industry is a national disgrace. The time for ‘friendly’ negotiation, wishful thinking and crossed fingers has long passed. It will never change (its resistance to even stopping using an environmental toxin like lead is testament to that). Dialogue is taken as a sign of weakness. Its supporters will continue to use social media to ridicule and verbally abuse the very organisations still insisting it wants to work with them, and will continue to be willfully blind to the havoc their fun creates and the crimes committed to support it.
So what should we do?
In my opinion, for a start rather than allow shooting to demand that we explain why we want it shut down, we should make it explain why they think in the 21st century such an anachronism should still exist.
I think we should either wear the badge of ‘anti’ with pride (who wouldn’t want to be anti such devastation) or respond that we’re ‘pro’ - pro-wildlife and pro the law.
We need to be very careful about the language we use in discussions like these. ‘Gamebird’ for example is a shorthand for cruelty, the persecution of raptors on shooting estates, the deaths of millions of animals in traps and snares, the seasonal slaughter of millions of birds. It also allows shooters to be incredibly lazy with identification: if everything is a ‘gamebird’ why bother learning the distinction between a Red Grouse and a Ptarmigan, a protected Brent Goose from a non-native Canada Goose, or a Woodcock from a Snipe. They’re just a ‘thing you shoot’ after all. Let’s please pledge not to use it anymore.
And most importantly we need to unite.
Yes, there are a range of views, but I think we should find out just how many of us out there loathe the shooting industry and want it shut down. Then work together to persuade others. I am convinced that when people hear just what the shooting industry does to wildlife and to the land they don’t think, ‘Great, I’m off out to buy a gun’ - they want it shut down too. We have many natural allies that don’t even realise that we’re on the same side yet. We need to find them. And we need to take back the narrative. This is no more about ‘tradition'‘ or ‘sport’ than foxhunting. It is though about violence, cruelty, waste, unsustainability, and illegality.
These are just the first steps, actions will come later. But let’s be unequivocal in our condemnation: shooting has been a toxic stain on this country for far too long - it’s time to get the antiseptic out and get shot of it.