More on the risk assessment on gamebird releases

The risk assessment published yesterday by Defra, but presumably done by APHA, is vaguely interesting but not spectacularly well-informed. It’s not that well-informed because no-one has invested in studying the process of disease transmission of avian flu to, within, or from wild birds. So there is quite a lot of guesswork dressed up as something swanky. What the risk assessment does say is that releasing large numbers of Pheasants into the countryside risks higher levels of avian flu in wild birds. Well, who guessed?

This finding was not used by Defra or other devolved administrations to limit game bird releases in July/August this year so we can agree with RSPB that Defra has been asleep at the wheel over avian influenza. The obvious and precautionary approach would have been to reduce gamebird releases this year. That wasn’t done.

This assessment looks at two questions. First the impact of releasing infected birds into the countryside and second the impact of releasing uninfected birds which later are infected. The impacts are much the same – more birds having the disease and transmitting the disease, and acting as a reservoir for the disease.  This has implications for the risk of disease transmission to poultry flocks too – not explored in this assessment.

The focus is on Pheasants, perhaps because by the time this assessment was being prepared millions of Red-legged Partridges had probably already been released as the shooting season for them opens a full month before that of Pheasants.

It is not clear (ie not transparent) who carried out the risk assessment nor who peer-reviewed it, nor why it was started so late in the day, nor why it took so long to do.

There are some dodgy statements in the risk assessment such as:

• Executive summary: ‘The wild bird species mainly affected over the summer have been seabirds breeding at multiple coastal sites around Great Britain.‘ Well, it depends what you mean by affected.  The seabird mortalities have been visible, well-documented and large but many species have been affected and the so-called surveillance scheme is not up to doing anything as useful as ranking species of wild bird by how they have been affected.  It is probably not the case that all seabird species have been affected to the same extent.
• Executive summary: ‘Additionally, resident Canada geese, mute swans and mallard ducks have been infected at some inland sites and there are also
  several reports of raptor species being infected including buzzards, red kites
  and hen harriers.’. True enough, but those are examples, anecdotes, plucked from the reports from the woefully inadequate so-called surveillance scheme again.  They are all types of birds that Defra has specifically asked the public to report so do not represent an unbiased sample – far from it.
• Page 13: ‘It is estimated that over 40 million  pheasants and partridges are released each year in Great Britain (Aebischer 2019, Madden 2021).‘ True, but it is also true that it is estimated that more than 1 Pheasant is released – this way of describing the data is unhelpful and seems designed to minimise the numbers.
• Page 24: ‘The likelihood that a flock of captive pheasants is infected with HPAI H5N1 and subsequently released in a Protection Zone (PZ) or Surveillance Zone (SZ) is considered NEGLIGIBLE (low uncertainty) since in these areas it would be
  illegal to release pheasants or to move them from a captive site to a release site
  without a licence.’.  This assumes that the gamebird industry is full of individuals who act lawfully – such is not the experience of many of us (lead ammunition use?, raptor persecution?) but the release of infected gamebirds into the general countryside is perfectly possible and could be the cause of an area becoming a PZ or SZ couldn’t it? After all, released gamebirds are not close-ringed and so whether an individual bird was released this year or in  previous year is difficult to ascertain or prove.
• various: the situation is described as ‘unprecedented’ – almost everything might be described as unprecedented in some way or other and here it seems to be designed to create the impression that Defra couldn’t possibly have foreseen what was happening – this is nonsense, and others did see clearly the likelihood that there would be a lot of avian flu in wild birds in late summer 2022. Defra should have asked around or seen this too.

In essence, I think this risk assessment reaches the right conclusion – gamebird releases carry with them considerable risk of increasing bird flu in wild birds (which has knock on impacts on commercial flocks).

I would repeat the points made at the end of my previous blog post today.

Defra, particularly the Chief Vet, and particularly the minister Lord Benyon, should be asked the following questions (for starters):

• why was the risk assessment published yesterday not commissioned earlier this spring/summer when it was obvious to all that bird flu in the UK had entered a new and very different phase. Were Defra, as the RSPB suggested in July (click here), simply ‘asleep at the wheel’ ?
• why was the risk assessment only published yesterday when it was finalised over 6 weeks ago, perhaps more like 11 weeks ago?  What purpose was served by the delay?
• since the risk assessment published yesterday can be summed up as saying ‘if Pheasants already infected with bird flu are released into the countryside for shooting that’ll be bad news AND EVEN if no Pheasants are released already infected with bird flu they’ll get it from wild birds post-release and then pass it on to others and that will be bad news too’, and that that was blindingly obvious to many of us back in early summer, why did Defra not act on that this year and prevent releases of gamebirds?

Or I could put this another way, to allow releases of millions of gamebirds into the countryside this summer looked to a great many people with some nous as a remarkably stupid thing to do. So why did Defra (and devolved administrations) allow it? Was it because they had less biological nous than the rest of us (ie they were stupid) or was it because they were so in hock to shooting interests that they simply didn’t bother to reduce the risks? If there is another explanation then please provide it.

 

 

 

[registration_form]