The open season on Red Grouse ends today and reopens on the Inglorious 12 August 2016.
What better day to add your name to an e-petition to get the Westminster parliament to debate the future of grouse shooting?
Grouse shooting is a pointless and environmentally damaging hobby for people with guns. this would be fine if their hobby didn’t have consequences for others.
The argument of my book, Inglorious, is that the intensive management of hills to provide unnaturally high levels of Red Grouse for shooting depends on high levels of wildlife crime (on protected species such as Hen Harriers, Peregrines and Golden Eagles) but also damages the ecology of the uplands more broadly and disrupts the ecosystem services (such as carbon storage, flood alleviation etc) that they provide for us all. Thus the expensive hobby for a few disadvantages the many. And it’s just a hobby after all.
We’d be better off without driven grouse shooting. If it didn’t exist then no-one would invent it these days. Let’s ban driven grouse shooting so that one year soon, it will never re-open on the Inglorious 12th.
“grouse shooting is pointless..” you say. Some would argue (though not me) that so is horse racing, especially steeplechasing – that’s your thing isn’t Mark Avery? Those poor horses….
Big Ben – yes, all sport is pretty much pointless.
Pointless and some of it now being reported as corrupt.
IAAF & FIFA
Horse racing…. point to point?
Yes, horse racing is pointless. So what ? It is not sustained by organised crime and it has minimal wider environmental impacts, so it does not attract the same odium as criminally destructive industries like grouse shooting. That’s the difference. Please keep up.
Gig Ben you chose to miss the point
‘and environmentally damaging’