E-petition to ban driven grouse shooting © Mark Avery

 
E-petition to ban driven grouse shooting – FAQs

Mark ♦ November 23, 2015 ♦ Comments Off on E-petition to ban driven grouse shooting – FAQs

My latest e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting was launched on 20 March 2016. Here are some questions I am commonly asked about it.
Q: Why ‘driven’ grouse shooting? And what is it?
A: Driven grouse shooting is c150 years old and is when a line of shooters wait in line, usually standing in small shelters called grouse butts, for Red Grouse to be driven towards them by a line of beaters who walk across the moorland flushing the birds towards the guns (see Chapter 2 of Inglorious).
Q: Aren’t you just anti-shooting?
A: I’m not anti shooting, that’s why this e-petition is specifically aimed at one type of shooting.
Q: Are there other types of grouse shooting?
A: Yes, but driven grouse shooting is the predominant form these days, and the problematic one (see Chapter 2 of Inglorious) because it depends on intensive management of the uplands to provide huge numbers of birds to act as targets.
Q: Why do you want it banned?
A: How long have you got? I’ve written a whole book (Inglorious – conflict in the uplands) on the subject so as to set out the arguments clearly.  Two main reasons: wildlife crime and ecological damage. Protected wildlife, particularly birds of prey such as eagles, falcons and harriers, are killed because they eat Red Grouse and so deplete the numbers available to be shot and the burning and drainage of the hills to create good conditions for Red Grouse cause other ecological problems such as increased flood risk, increased greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and damage to protected blanket bog habitats.
Q: Are you saying that all grouse moors kill protected wildlife? I’ve heard it’s just a few bad apples.
A: Where did you hear that? No, I’m not saying it’s all grouse moors, although for all I know it might be, but the impact is very large – there is plenty of science to show the impacts on birds such as Golden Eagles (see Chapter 4 of Inglorious), Peregrine Falcons (see Chapter 4 of Inglorious) and Hen Harriers (see Chapters 1, 3, 4 of Inglorious).
Q: Why don’t the grouse shooters just release more grouse to shoot?
A: Red Grouse are not reared and released like Pheasants and Partridges – they are wild birds but the predator control and habitat management that is carried out produces densities of birds often 10-100 times natural densities – these are needed for shooting.
Q: Surely a few birds of prey can’t make that big a difference to how many Red Grouse are available for shooting?
A: I’m afraid they can – it’s a real conflict (see Chapter 3 of Inglorious) so you have to choose which side you are on.
Q: Someone told me that both Red Grouse and Hen Harriers need grouse shooting to survive.
A: Who told you that? Both species live in many other countries at our latitude (eg Norway, Russia, Canada) and there’s no driven grouse shooting there. Also, these species evolved long before men in tweed got fun from shooting grouse so the grouse can’t need it and neither do the harriers (or eagles or anything else).
Q: What about this ecological damage you say is caused by burning drainage etc?
A: The RSPB has an ongoing complaint to the EU about damage to protected blanket bogs from grouse moor management. There are several scientific studies that show damage to the environment from grouse moor management – it is the public that picks up the bills for that damage through increased water bills, increased home insurance costs, less wildlife etc etc (see Chapters 4 and 5 of Inglorious).
Q: OK, so your main beef with driven grouse shooting is that protected wildlife is killed by some people, but in large amounts, and that there is ecological damage. There must be some good things about grouse shooting – aren’t there?
A: Yep, that’s it. There aren’t many good things that I can see. Grouse shooting brings money into the local community and some ground-nesting birds do better on grouse moors because they benefit from lack of crows, foxes etc that are killed, legally, to produce massive densities of Red Grouse.
Q: What about those ground-nesting birds then?
A: Grouse moors definitely have higher densities of a few species than less-managed moors – I didn’t say everything about them was bad. But those extra Curlew and Golden Plover are achieved at the expense of many other species, damage to protected habitats and wider ecological damage. The profit and loss wildlife account is in the red.
Q: Talking about profit and loss then – what about the huge amounts of money that are spent on grouse shooting to the benefit of local communities?
A: Who told you they were huge? The grouse moor industry is only worth, at most, a few hundred million pounds a year by their own calculations. Academic economists say that the grouse shooters estimates are inflated, and include public grants that would go to more deserving recipients if we shut down grouse moors. Also, the grouse shooters don’t even attempt to cost the ecological damage that they cause and that means they are cooking the books. In any case, money spent on grouse shooting would be spent, probably elsewhere rather than in the uplands, if grouse shooting were banned – so it wouldn’t be lost from the economy, just spent somewhere else on other luxury pursuits.
Q: Well, I see where you are coming from, and I might read your book. What was it called again?
A: Inglorious – conflict in the uplands!
Q: I thought so. But what is your alternative vision for the uplands?  I’ve heard they’d be covered by trees and windfarms, and destroyed by sheep, if it weren’t for grouse moors.
A: Who told you that then? No they wouldn’t. So much of the uplands are protected by designations (National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Special Protection Areas, Special Areas of Conservation, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) that there isn’t much scope for those things to happen on a big scale. See Chapter 6 of Inglorious for one alternative future – in essence we should encourage landowners to re-wild much of the uplands to store carbon, produce clean water and to reduce flood risks, those are serious aims, not shooting chicken-like birds for fun.
Q: Why doesn’t the RSPB support your e-petition?

A: You’d better ask them – particularly if you are a member, please do. The RSPB prefers licensing of grouse moors to banning them altogether. I don’t think that’ll work and simply postpones the inevitable – it is inevitable that a pastime that is so pointless, so ecologically and economically damaging, and is just a hobby, is not long for this world. Nowhere else in the world practises driven grouse shooting – we don’t have to either.  And because we’d be better off without it, let’s ban it now. Sign here if you agree – thanks!

Implausible deniability © Mark Avery (ex RSPB director)

Mark ♦ January 4, 2016 ♦ 17 Comments

An ugly view in Scotland. Ripe for reform. Photo: Donside April 2014 by Peter Cairns

This time last year I was finishing writing Inglorious. As I wrote it, it became clearer to me that the game really was already up for driven grouse shooting – it was on its last legs but it might keep stumbling along for a decade or more because of the power of the vested interests involved.

Attractive drainage ditch near a grouse butt.

The floods of the last few weeks have been primarily caused by heavy rain – if it hadn’t rained then we wouldn’t have floods. But recent events have made more people realise that the nature of the ground over which rainwater flows is an important determinant of whether and how badly it will cause floods.  How we manage our hills affects whether they exacerbate floods or moderate them.  And management for the hobby of grouse shooting is a big part of the upland scene.  Burning and draining, to create the right conditions for Red Grouse for the rich to shoot, are techniques that are likely to lessen water retention in the hills and get that water off the hills much quicker. It seems that the grouse managers don’t care too much where the water goes, that’s someone else’s problem. That’s why we have governments – to act on behalf of the many even if it doesn’t always suit the interests of the few.

Heather burning Great Hograh moor. Photo: Colin Grice

Of course, all that rain in December may or may not be a product of climate change. Grouse moor management has been criticised since I wrote Inglorious by the Committee on Climate Change and the FT reported Daniel Johns, head of adaptation at the Climate Change Committee as saying that ‘grouse moors and sheep farming led water to run straight off hills into populated valleys. Burning back heather reduced its ability to retain water and reduced areas of peat’.  Earlier this year the same committee wrote in its report to government ‘The damaging practice of burning peat to increase grouse yields continues, including on internationally protected sites‘.
And the wildlife crime goes on too. Fewer people may care about the beautiful sight of a Hen Harrier floating over a blanket bog than care about their houses being flooded but these people are all on the same side – they should want change in the hills.  The momentum is building on just about every front and there is no escape for grouse shooting.

Photo: Gordon Yates

To produce large numbers of Red Grouse for a rich person’s pointless hobby you need intensive management to get the number of birds up. To do that, you need to get rid of as many natural predators as possible, foxes, crows etc legally, and birds of prey if you (or your neighbour) can get away with it (which they usually can) and you need to drain and burn the moors to produce heather monocultures that are good for the production of unnaturally high levels of (increasingly diseased) Red Grouse for shooting.
No-one can justify this use of the hills and no-one will for much longer. Instead, as you have seen, they will play the game of plausible denial. ‘No I don’t kill raptors – just a few bad apples, you know’. ‘Hen Harriers need grouse moors to survive, you know’. ‘Grouse management protects the peat stores, you know?’. ‘We provide beautiful landscapes that deliver far more than just a traditional sport, you know?’.
All this is looking pretty shabby now. The management of the uplands for an entirely pointless sport is an ecological disaster that we taxpayers are paying for several times over: in grants and subsidies to landowners; in the loss of wildlife that belongs to us all; in increased carbon emissions; in water supplies that require expensive treatment; and, yes, in increased flood risk which, when it rains a lot, leads to worse floods.  And denial of this package of harmful impacts is no longer plausible.
No amount of brood management will stop flooding, and no amount of blocking of drains will put the Hen Harriers back in the hills. The system of intensive management for driven grouse shooting is a Victorian hangover from the time when women lacked the vote (as did most men), from when the landowner knew best and from when the profession of scientist hardly existed.  Continuing to use our hills for a rich man’s hobby when this hobby necessarily disadvantages society as a whole is not just living in the past, it is living in the distant past. If driven grouse shooting did not exist we certainly wouldn’t introduce it to our hills today, so why keep it when we know it to be damaging?

Photo: Tim Melling

But, as Inglorious spells out, there is no sign that grouse moor owners and managers are ready to change their ways – land management has intensified rather than lessened in recent years and wildlife crime has increased rather than decreased. This is where government needs to step in for the public good.
Defra will have had a sharp shock over the last few weeks, with the increasing focus on grouse moor management because they have, for the last few years, been used to treating the grouse shooting industry as their mates.  Take a look at the response of Defra to the e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting and see how a government department reproduces the nonsense of the vested interest of the grouse moor industry.  Was this written, in September, by a department that has a clue about the role of land use in flooding and carbon storage, or a clue about how to stop protected wildlife being killed, or a clue about the economic cost of water pollution and flooding compared with the paltry sums from a worthless ‘sport’?  You decide.
If you want floods, knackered peat bogs and hills stripped of their natural wildlife (even in National Parks) then you should be quite happy with the inaction of Liz Truss and Rory Stewart (and others before them) who seem to think that throwing a few tens of millions of pounds at the symptoms of a problem is all that is needed when they should be addressing the causes at their source. If you want a more sustainable and ecologically secure future then you might want to give Defra a nudge and sign this e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting.
A year ago I was writing Inglorious.  See Chapter 4 for details of the unfolding of the case for protecting the uplands for their ecosystem services. See Chapter 5 for the publication of the important EMBER study. See Chapter 6 for a picture of how the uplands could be without grouse shooting – better and more use to us all. See Chapter 7 for how you can help make a difference.

Walking up the Roeburndale East road to the barn

keep going up the steep hill from Wray on the Roeburndale East road

enjoy the view towards Ingleborough

and the Howgills

until you reach the footpath sign going right towards Roeburndale West

the map at the gate

walk along a very ancient path where you can see signs of an aggar

looking west towards The Lake District with Hornby Castle in the foreground

view the Lake District mountains in the distance

keep on the ancient path till you reach the gate into the woodlands and still on the public footpath, walk down to the valley and walk alongside the Roeburn river going upstream on your right to get to the barn

Environmental Impacts of Driven Grouse Shooting © Raptor Persecution Scotland

New paper on environmental impacts of driven grouse shooting

By raptorpersecutionscotland 9 Comments

Categories: News

A new scientific paper has just been published that drives another nail in to the coffin of driven grouse moor management in its current form.
Published yesterday in the scientific journal Ibis, this is a free access paper which means everyone can read it without having to pay high subscription fees:
Thompson, P.S., Douglas, D.J.T., Hoccom, D.G., Knott, J., Roos, S. and Wilson, J.D. (2016). Environmental impacts of high-output driven shooting of Red Grouse. Ibis 158: 446-452.
This paper provides a timely and succinct review of the damage caused by various aspects of intensive grouse moor management, including predator control, heather burning and the medication of red grouse to prevent disease. It’s well written, well referenced and well worth a few minutes of your time.
The authors argue that grouse moor management could contribute a lot to upland conservation but not in its current form. They say that for this to happen, “a fundamental shift in behaviours and practices would be needed, informed by evidence, supported by public policy, and led by landowners committed to a sustainable future for grouse shooting”.

This paper is another damning indictment of the current intensification of grouse moor management and is authored by some well-respected scientists from the RSPB. It’s interesting then, that the RSPB’s Conservation Director Martin Harper is still advocating ‘constructive’ dialogue (see his blog from this morning here) with an industry that has proven, time and time again, that it is unwilling or incapable of change.
Sometimes (often) dialogue can be a good strategy, and it’s certainly where you should start, but there comes a time when you have to recognise that behind-the-scenes dialogue isn’t working. A good example of this can be seen with the Scottish beaver fiasco, where the RZSS has been engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy to work out a plan for managing the beavers on Tayside, but this morning has sent a damning open letter to Environment Minister Dr Aileen McLeod, accusing her of dragging her feet at potentially enormous cost to the beavers (see here).
The dialogue about the mis-management of upland grouse moors has been going on for years, and especially the impact of this mis-management on the conservation of hen harriers (remember the six-year chat that ended in failure?). The RSPB walked away from that; how long before they join those of us whose patience ran out a long time ago and call for a ban on driven grouse shooting?
Please sign the latest e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting HERE
Photograph of an intensively-managed driven grouse moor on Donside (RPS).