Grouse shooting is supposed to be popular – well not according to this perfectly fair comparison of support for grouse shooting compared with its radical, extreme and outrageous alternative of banning driven grouse shooting.
Today is the last day of the e-petition set up as a rival to our own. If it receives 98,000 extra signatures by midnight then it will have caught us.
Let the record show that we won 5-1.
so a tiny minority signed one petition and an even tinier minority signed another
Giles – which did you sign Giles?
I signed the one that 65,000,000 – (123,075 + 25,318) implicitly signed
And this is what happens when you immerse yourself in String Theory.
Let’s be honest about it, who can doubt that, had the numbers been reversed, then you’d be crowing about it, Giles, and saying it proves the ‘antis’ are out of touch. Your side lost a popular vote and pretending otherwise only makes you look foolish.
I think that as a percentage of people who can actually be bothered to know anything, one of those totals is in the mid to high percentage bracket. Most of the general public only care about iPhones and x factor. You can hardly include them.
When is the next petition? Awareness, awareness, awareness!
I’m quite surprised they haven’t managed to do better than that – the shooting fraternity is both tribal and well organised. Maybe it really is a sign of growing concern over the impact of the grouse/ HH debate on shooting as a whole ? It should be.
Yes, it is tribal and well organised Roderick but it is tiny compared to the law abiding nature loving public. Even in the countryside the shooters are very much in the minority – they just have more access to the media and politicians via rich and powerful landowners and their pals.
Maybe some of the more responsible shooters are beginning to realise that the stain caused by the illegal antics of a minority threatens to contaminate public perceptions of shooting as a whole.
This petition is now 25,320. Or, to put it another way, it’s gone up by two since this blog was published.
Another interesting thing is the map: all the high signing constituencies are clustered in the N and NE of the UK and have moorland. There is one far flung exception: that Cotswolds one. There are various theories explaining this but, to be honest, it’s much nicer to think about disjunct distributions in other forms of life, especially plants.
Murray – not quite right (see second blog today) – central London, particularly Chelsea and Fulham is a source of support.
Sadly it’s irrelevant how many signed their petition, they never needed as many signatures as us. They had the politicians in their pocket for the debate…which didn’t go in our favour