Yesterday evening the BBC regional programme Inside Out for the East Midlands and Yorkshire featured a very good piece on driven grouse shooting. Well done them! Here is the link and the piece is the first one after the general introductions.
You’ll hear some familiar voices and see some familiar faces: Tim Birch from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, Nick Moyes with his petition asking the NT not to replace their shooting tenant, Blanaid Denman at the Sheffield Hen Harrier Day, Natalie Bennett at the same event, footage of a man taking his Hen Harrier model for a walk and a gamekeeper giving a badger a hard time. These may seem familiar to regular readers of this blog but the programme will have brought this issue to the notice of many more people – good for them!
Andy Beer from the NT said some very sensible things but we are all looking for NT to announce their new non-shooting tenant for their Peak District land soon – if I were advising them on PR I’d do it in the next 10 days, before their contentious AGM where their line on fieldsports comes under further scrutiny.
But no Amanda Anderson and no Andrew Gilruth, instead a very sensible man, Steve Bloomfield, from BASC, giving one of the first indications that BASC are seeing the writing on the wall when he said that if illegal persecution continues then people will continue to ask why they should allow driven grouse shooting to continue. Correct! I can’t imagine Duncan Thomas saying that and BASC need to decide whether they are going to continue to attack those who question the legitimacy of driven grouse shooting or whether they are going to get a shovel and a hose and make a start on cleaning out their own industry. Maybe that is a question for their new Chief Exec. But the shooting industry needs to realise that the clock started ages ago – they have been slow to react and they are losing ground every day, they don’t have the luxury of setting the timetable or hiding their heads in the sand. Clean it up or clear off!
Some chap called Ian Gregory was speaking on behalf of grouse shooting (I am guessing it’s the Ian Gregory behind YFTB see here, here, here (but it is a fairly common name)). His views represent the ‘nothing to see here’ school of thinking in grouse shooting, which consists of burying their heads in the sand, or the peat, and expecting everyone else to do the same. Well, that’s not working very well is it?
Gavin Gamble’s e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting appeared less than 24 hours ago – check out how it’s doing by clicking this link.
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Let’s hope the NT do the right thing
Pressures from housing? True with some species of course, but Hen Harriers. ! You simply can’t make this stuff up.
Well done ‘Inside Out’. This went out on their West Midlands programme, too, it’s good to see the plight of our birds of prey getting some well deserved exposure.
As far as the pro hunting crowd are concerned, they will, of course, view this as typical biased, leftie BBC spouting bile, because they know satelite tags are killing these birds, because they said so. So there!
Hallelujah, the BBC reporting current issues (although some of us might think they are now having to gallop to catch up as they realise that we ain’t walking away from this ‘bun fight’).
Thank you Inside Out, Simon Hare & Keeley Donovan.
Here’s to the continuum ….
Remember the words of our battle hymn: They ignore, They laugh, They fight & Then we win #wildlifecrime #spreadtheword
In a way it’s reassuring to see the BBC producing a fairly well balanced programme on this subject. Unfortunately allowing equal weight to those on both sides of the debate, without aggressively challenging the lies and ignorance coming from the shooting side, must make it difficult for the average viewer to discriminate. Of particular interest was the statement provided by the Moorland Trust that it “fully supports efforts to encourage numbers of hen harriers“. That sounds like a thoroughly sensible and reasonable statement superficially, and most viewers would probably go along with that, but in fact it is highly disingenuous. We know what it really means – that they are happy to go along with the Defra “Hen Harrier Action Plan,” and that their idea of managing numbers of harriers would involve reducing the natural breeding population to no more than a quarter of the species’ potential. The brood meddling proposal, if ever introduced, will ensure this happens. And how gullible is anyone who believes the sanctimonious statement by Steve Bloomfield of BASC that they intend (NB always in future tense) to get rid of the few bad apples in the gamekeepering profession? Why do these trained members of the industry, many of them scientists who have undergone academic training, have such a poor understanding of fundamental ecology, as demonstrated in the ridiculous statement “Foxes are a nightmare [sic] for ground-nesting birds…”? To even start to make progress, we need to be vigilant in the campaign to end driven grouse shooting. Personally, I don’t believe the real nightmare will go away until all grouse shooting is banned, for starters.
Ian Gregory said one reason for raptor decline was that people need more space for leisure and more for their homes! So, just how many houses have been built on grouse moors in the past….. say 50 years?! And cycle trails, skateboard parks, playgrounds… oh, I could go on!
The joke is that the people building roads, car parks and buildings on grouse moors are the grousers themselves. At least that is what is happening on Bowland and from what i read here and on RPUK, also on other moors. Just to make easier access for the tourists and gamekeepers to get to the killing grounds.
By tourists, i meant the gun toting, blood sports kind.
With reference to BASC seeing the ‘writing on the wall’ you’ve only to look at their tweets and you’d be forgiven for thinking they are the greatest conservationists ever?
Bit like another Association, but we need to be vigilant and challenge points of accuracy?
This was repeated on BBC News channel last night – national coverage wow!
and repeated again this morning!
Dick – good heavens!