Month: July 2018

A few days ago we blogged about a proposal by the North Yorkshire police watchdog to implement an inquiry in to why the county has the worst record for raptor persecution crimes in England and why efforts to crackdown on the criminals have failed (see here).

This proposal was due to be discussed at the North Yorkshire Police and Crime Panel meeting last Wednesday.

That discussion did take place, and although we’ll have to wait until September for the official minutes to be published and to find out what the panel agreed to do, a couple of articles have since appeared in the media.

The following is an amalgamation of two of those articles, one published in The Northern Echo (today) and one in The Yorkshire Post (yesterday). The articles were almost identical apart from a few minor differences, so we’ve joined them together to ensure all the information is available in one post:

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has been accused of failing to take bird of prey persecution seriously in a county with an “appalling” record over the crime, a meeting has heard.

A leading councillor has been backed by North Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan in calling for the CPS to revisit how it tackles offenders, ahead of a National Rural Crime Summit in Harrogate on Wednesday.

ENDS

This might sound odd, given the lengthy criticisms of the CPS (and its Scottish counterpart, the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service, COPFS) that have appeared on this blog over the years, but we don’t think the fundamental problem lies with the CPS. Sure, there have been some unfathomable decisions and displays of what look like dumbfounding incompetence over the years, and the prosecutors’ subsequent refusal to discuss or explain these decisions has been exasperating, but all this has to be set in context of the criminal justice system which is, according to many leading lawyers, “at breaking point”. [For an excellent analysis we’d recommend reading The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken (Macmillan, 2018)].

Central to this ‘breakdown’ is a lack of resources which leads to chronic understaffing which then has a knock-on effect for individual public prosecutors and the cases they are working on.

As an example, last week we met a CPS solicitor at a court in northern England. She’d travelled some distance to be there first thing and said she’d been up until 1am that morning prepping her cases. Her schedule for that day alone included two separate trials and one other hearing to deal with complex legal argument. Imagine how soul destroying that must be for someone who spent all those years studying hard for a qualification, who is diligent, committed and wants to do a good job, but just isn’t given the time to prepare in full.

Now imagine that one of those cases she’s dealing with is a prosecution for alleged raptor persecution on a grouse moor. The accused’s employer will have stumped up hundreds of thousands of pounds to engage the services of a top QC, and the main evidence is likely to be covert video footage captured by the RSPB’s Investigations team (it won’t be police footage because the police are not permitted to undertake covert surveillance for what is officially regarded as a low-level crime). The QC will have had the luxury of several (many!) months to focus on getting the case thrown out on a technicality, and, as we’ve seen with increasing regularity, the QC’s painstakingly-crafted argument will win. The hard-working-but-pushed-for-time CPS solicitor doesn’t stand a chance.

Calls for a change in the legislation to introduce vicarious liability for raptor crimes in England are understandable, but what would that achieve? Before a prosecution for alleged vicarious liability can proceed, you first have to demonstrate that the original offence was committed by a named individual working under the supervision of the person being accused of vicarious liability. As we keep seeing, identifying (let alone convicting) a named individual for the original offence is becoming increasingly difficult, especially in cases involving grouse shooting estates that employ multiple gamekeepers where they’ve all given ‘no comment’ interviews to the police.

And even if you did get to the unusual stage of convicting the original offender, a subsequent prosecution for vicarious liability is not straightforward. As we’ve seen in Scotland, where vicarious liability for raptor persecution was introduced on 1 January 2012, there have been only two convictions in six and half years! A third prosecution wasn’t possible because the landowner couldn’t be identified (here) and a fourth prosecution was dropped by the Crown Office because, apparently, ‘it wasn’t in the public interest to proceed’ (here).

So what is the answer? There are those who would argue for a specialist wildlife crime prosecution unit in England, and there are definite merits in that, but again, look at the experience of Scotland where a specialist wildlife crime unit was set up at COPFS in 2011. Has this led to an increase in successful prosecutions for raptor persecution? No, it hasn’t.

There are those who would argue for a specialist environmental court – again, there are definite merits in that but as someone pointed out to us during a discussion on this topic just the other day, what happens if, within the small pool of judges available, one or several of them has vested interests in gamebird shooting and/or strong links to the ‘establishment elite’ (many of whom are involved in grouse shooting)? It doesn’t take much imagination to predict the outcome.

It’s a difficult issue if we’re going to rely upon the justice system to solve the problems although a few of us will be sitting down with some very bright legal minds in the near future to discuss exactly that.

Another option of course is to stem the problem at source – just ban driven grouse shooting. That seems a long way off but an interim step of licensing driven grouse shooting (and thus being able to withdraw the licence of those estates that persist with the illegal killing of raptors) is becoming an inevitable outcome, at least in Scotland.

We look forward to hearing the suggestions put forward by the North Yorkshire Police and Crime Panel about how they intend to address the ongoing problems in their county.

Thanks to the blog reader who sent us these gruesome images of wildlife destruction (aka 21st Century grouse moor management), photographed on a grouse moor in the Angus Glens.

Fox, rabbits and a cat:

Cat slung over a tree above a stink pit:

A song thrush:

A stoat:

Amusingly, the Angus Glens Moorland Group (part of the Gift of Grouse propaganda campaign) is launching what it calls a ‘wildlife campaign’ this weekend, presumably in an effort to get favourable press coverage as the opening of the grouse shooting season draws ever closer. They’re asking the public to post images of wildlife on to social media platforms using the hashtag #WeHaveWildlife.

Wouldn’t it be awful if these images of what really goes on (#We Have Wildlife But We’ll Kill It If It Threatens Our Grouse Shooting Profits) were to be seen instead?

Oh dear.

The game shooting industry’s desperate attempts to self-regulate and demonstrate ‘best practice’, before regulation is finally forced upon them, is failing spectacularly.

The industry’s new self-regulatory body is the British Game Alliance (BGA), ‘the official marketing board for the UK game industry’, which, according to the Countryside Alliance, “aims to run a ‘British Game’ assurance scheme to ensure our game meets the highest standards“.

We blogged about the launch of the BGA a few weeks ago (here) and noted with surprise the name of two estates that had been listed as ‘assured’ members despite them both having recently been subject to police investigations in relation to reported wildlife crime incidents and one of them currently serving a three-year General Licence restriction, imposed by Scottish Natural Heritage on the basis of evidence provided by Police Scotland of illegal raptor persecution.

When we wrote that last blog the BGA hadn’t yet published the list of its ‘assured’ members on its website, but it has now, and what an interesting read it is (see here).

According to the BGA’s twitter account, this membership list includes “assured shoots and agents”:

And apparently includes “over 100 shoots” that are “adhering to high standards”:

Unfortunately for the BGA, these claims aren’t accurate. If you look at the list of ‘assured’ members on the BGA website (as of 12 July 2018 at 2pm) you’ll find only 87 shoots. The other listed members include 6 ‘dealers’ and 7 ‘agents’. This amounts to 100 members but they’re not all ‘shoots’ as the BGA has claimed. We’re not even sure whether any of these 87 ‘assured member shoots’ have even been independently assessed to ensure they’re meeting the BGA’s standards required for accreditation. According to the BGA website, assessments will ‘commence in summer 2018’. So how many of those so-called ‘assured member shoots’ listed on the BGA website have been assessed to date? Surely, if an estate hasn’t been independently assessed it can’t yet be given ‘assured member’ status?

In addition, according to the BGA, there is no accreditation scheme (yet) for agents (no clue about dealers):

Have another look at the list of 87 ‘assured’ member shoots, all supposedly ‘meeting rigorous and ethical standards’. There are some other interesting names on there, in addition to the two we highlighted in our previous blog.

We were surprised to see Newlands [Estate] listed – this is surely a different Newlands to the estate where a gamekeeper was convicted in 2015 of killing a buzzard by throwing rocks at it and repeatedly stamping on it. There then followed a protracted prosecution against the landowner for alleged vicarious liability, until the Crown Office decided to drop the case last year “because it was not in the public interest to continue” (see here).

We then wondered whether SNH would impose a General Licence restriction on the estate for the proven illegal persecution of the buzzard. We’ve asked SNH about it several times but it has refused to discuss this case (and at least eight other cases) because, apparently, “it is in the public interest NOT to release the information” (see here). To date, the Newlands Estate has not been listed on SNH’s list of estates with General Licence restrictions, so we can safely assume a restriction isn’t being imposed. Marvellous.

This complete lack of transparency (some would call it a disgraceful cover up) by the statutory authorities seems to be an approach shared by the British Game Alliance – according to its membership list, 24 of its ‘assured’ member shoots are listed as ‘private members’ (14 in England, 9 in Scotland and one in Wales) and includes grouse shoots and pheasant shoots.

How can the public have any confidence in an ‘assurance’ scheme when it can’t scrutinise a substantial number of the ‘assured’ members because their names remain top secret?!

Sorry (not sorry) but this purported accreditation scheme looks nothing more than yet another greenwashing scam.

UPDATE 16th August 2022: Millden Estate’s sporting agent is signatory to ‘best practice’ scheme! (here)

We’ve been writing about the grouse shooting industry’s dodgy use of veterinary drugs for some time.

In 2015 we exposed the scandal about how Government regulators had failed to test shot red grouse for residues of Flubendazole, an anti-worming drug that is used by grouse moor managers at up to twenty times the strength permitted in the UK, in the form of medicated grit placed out in trays on grouse moors.

Photo of a medicated grit tray on a Scottish grouse moor [Ruth Tingay]

Grouse moor managers, if compliant with the law (not something they’re well known for), should remove all traces of medicated grit from the moors no later than 28 days prior to the grouse being shot and entering the human food chain. Statutory testing is required to ensure legal compliance, as is done for every other meat product destined for human consumption.

When challenged about its failure to conduct statutory tests on shot red grouse to ensure the drug is not entering the food chain, the Government’s Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) claimed, unbelievably, that testing had never taken place because officers didn’t know where to find carcasses to test!! (see here).

After we’d pointed out where dead red grouse could be located for testing, the VMD promised to begin tests in 2016. We followed up on this to find out how much testing had been done in 2016 and were shocked to find that only six samples (two from Scotland, four from England) had been tested, out of a conservatively estimated 700,000 shot birds (see here).

In 2017 we followed up again and discovered that the VMD had only managed to test eight birds this time (four from Scotland, four from England) (see here).

This year, according to an FoI response to one of our blog readers, the VMD says “Ten samples are scheduled to be collected“.

This continued level of inadequate testing is scandalous. The number of red grouse shot each year is now likely to exceed 1 million birds (the estimated 700,000 shot birds comes from the industry’s 2012/2013 figures and we know that the intensification of grouse moor management has increased significantly in some areas over the last five years so an estimate of 1 million shot birds is probably still a gross underestimate).

How can the testing of ten birds, out of an estimated 1 million, be considered representative?

How can the Government continue to risk public health like this?

Ah, but then this is the same Government that refuses to test ANY game birds for lead shot, a highly toxic poison, despite every other type of meat destined for human consumption having to undergo rigorous tests for Pb.

We do know that the Scottish Government’s current review of grouse moor management is considering the unregulated use of medicated grit, which presumably will include an assessment of the risk to public health as well as the significant spread of wildlife disease that is a consequence of using communal medicated grit trays (see here).

We’ll return to this issue throughout the year as the game shooting industry launches yet another desperate greenwashing campaign to market red grouse and other gamebirds as ‘healthy’.

Some toxic red grouse ready for cooking. Yum yum. [Photo by Ruth Tingay]