Looking back at 2019 – August – October

August is always a busy month and this was no exception. Wild Justice organised the biggest Hen Harrier Day event ever – attended by at least 1500 folk. And it was fun.

This was closely followed by a meeting with Natural England during which the Petitions Committee, after a curiously long delay, published the latest e-petition on banning driven grouse shooting which achieved 100,000 signatures on its 20th day of existence – a record and a remarkable achievement.

The eventual government response to the Ban Driven Grouse Shooting e-petition was as wilfully blind as usual.

And then we moved on to the always-wonderful (but this year rather soggy) Bird Fair.

In September important government indicators were published about UK biodiversity. These were more or less ignored by the mainstream media but not by this blog – see here1, here2, here3 and here4.

Wild Justice’s legal challenge forced DEFRA to announce a review of the impacts of the almost completely unregulated release of nearly 60 million non-native gamebirds into the countryside. We are still waiting for this to happen.

During August and September we learned that three of the five brood-meddled Hen Harrier chicks reared in Yorkshire ceased to transmit signals (and the other two had wisely left the country). We learned about the first two birds from an amazingly inept press release from the Moorland Association which was not straight with the facts and had not been agreed with Natural England or the police (see here, here here, here ).

The Glover review of protected landscapes was published and was good in parts but overall was a disappointment, certainly in terms of its treatment of biodiversity issues which was, at best, sketchy (see here, here, here, here and here).

At their AGM the RSPB announced a review, involving the membership, of their position on game shooting. We are still waiting to see what form this will take and what the involvement of the paying member will be.

The National Farmers Union objected to this supermarket advertisement for vegetarian sausages and in one move showed how out of touch the main representative organisation for farmers is, and how nasty it is.

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