Our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting passed the 14,000 signature mark yesterday.
14,000 isn’t 140,000 but it is a lot of signatures.
14,000 signatures was reached in c33 days, less than five weeks. Last year it took eleven weeks to get to the same total. Just more evidence that awareness is growing and spreading all the time. More and more people are realising that the intensive management of land for driven grouse shooting is bad and that the grouse moor managers don’t want to give an inch. If they won’t give an inch then we will take a mile.
Thank you to all who have signed already. Here’s a tip for how you can help make the e-petition even more of a success – please ask your partner/boyfriend/girlfriend to sigh too. I had several conversations at the Bird Fair with couples where both were obviously equally committed to the cause but only one had signed. That’s an easy way to double the number of signatures!
We have now been been waiting 19 days for a response from the Westminster government on our e-petition (since passing 10,000 signatures). We are one of 15 e-petitions to have passed the 10,000 signature and not to have had a government response yet and if they were answered in order than we are number nine in the queue. This is fine, there’s no rush. but the longer the wait, the better-argued one would expect the response to be. We’ll see. The Defra Minister, Rory Stewart, has had a copy of Inglorious for quite a while now and so we should expect a decent response which demonstrates that Defra is properly engaging with the arguments.
Let’s ban driven grouse shooting – let’s deliver a better future for the uplands. Please sign this e-petition.
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Absolutely true, a few people who I had assumed had signed the epetition because I’ve asked them several times, well it transpired they hadn’t so I’m pushing again. As a government epetition this carries a bit more weight than most epetitions – laudable though they are – so it is especially worthwhile to support it. Also the subject is driven grouse shooting, but this epetition currently represents the best option for making a formal protest against the obscene undemocratic privileges many fieldsports are given in this country, being allowed to ‘dump’ millions of artificially reared birds raised for shooting in the countryside every year, hundreds of thousands of acres of what could be prime wildlife habitat instead of burnt over wasteland and most ludicrously of all allowing stalking estates to have excessive numbers of red deer which kill off woodland, but also dramatically raise risk of potentially FATAL road accidents. The status quo is vile and needs changing.
A rather naive question, prompted by Les W reference to ‘dump’ or alternatively translocating species onto / into areas which may have designations. If these areas are in receipt of public funds (HLS etc.) then do the tenants / landowners have to apply to NE for a derogation / permission?
A further thought on the road casualty / threat to vehicles, if these animals were ‘tagged’ in some way (game birds or deer) then the insurance companies would be able to claim against the ‘sporting’ interest’s insurance perhaps?
Bloody good idea about tagging pheasants etc so if they are involved in collision with vehicle which could cause fair bit of damage (especially to bird) then responsibility tracked to whoever released it. At moment I believe once pheasants are released they become ‘wild’ animals so estates can avoid legal action. That nonsense needs to be stopped, would like to see motoring organisations such as RAC and AA wade in on this one especially as their members lives are threatened by artificially maintained numbers of red deer too!
Thanks Les, seems perfectly reasonable to me & easily achieved (for pheasants & grouse at least) but clearly someone’s not too keen on the suggestion but hasn’t explained why …. maybe they resist opening that can of worms?
Wonder if the costs to insurance companies are available somewhere, then that can be used to reasonably offset the claimed benefits of these ‘sports’?
Exemption is rather like the tax benefits enjoyed by agriculture / landowners when they diversify into other businesses?