The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) is a charity registered in England, Wales and Scotland and as such it has to abide by certain rules and regulations.
A charity might find itself in deep water with the charities regulator if it was found to have been publishing material it knew was deliberately misleading.
Andrew Gilruth is the GWCT’s Director of Membership, Marketing and Communications. He’s a senior member of staff and has been around for as long as we can remember. He’s certainly not new to the grouse shooting debate and we’ve often blogged about his contributions, which we’ve viewed as mostly being grotesque distortions of reality (e.g. see here and here).
We think that Andrew Gilruth has taken his cherry-picking activities to a new level over the last month, but we believe his actions appear so deliberately deceptive that his motive must be to mislead the public – a serious accusation for an organisation with charitable status, and especially for one that prides itself on its so-called scientific integrity.
See what you think.
During March 2019, Andrew has submitted at least four letters to various national media outlets and in each one he’s included the same quote, attributed to the RSPB, that would suggest to the reader that the RSPB is supportive of grouse moor management:
We were quite curious about the provenance of this RSPB quote because it didn’t sound like anything the RSPB might have said in recent years and if they had, it was probably said within a wider context than that presented by Andrew.
So we did some digging and we found the document from which Andrew has lifted the quote. It’s an RSPB leaflet entitled ‘The Uplands: Time to Change?’ and it was published er, thirteen years ago, in 2006:
You can read the leaflet here: The Uplands_Time For Change_RSPB2006
If you do read it, you’ll find the quote that Andrew has been so keen to share with the general public. So yes, the RSPB did say that the “management of land for grouse shooting has protected upland areas from the worst of over-grazing and blanket conifer plantations whilst generating income for upland communities and forming a uniquely British form of cultural land use” but look closely at the context in which the RSPB made this statement, paying particular attention to the sentence that immediately follows it:
So not only has the GWCT’s Director of Communications cherry-picked a quote and reproduced it completely out of context from how the RSPB intended, but he’s also cherry-picked it from a publication that is thirteen years old, knowing full well that the RSPB has published plenty of more up to date material in the intervening years.
For example, RSPB staff wrote an excellent, balanced review of grouse moor management and included a discussion on the RSPB’s position, which was published in the scientific journal Ibis in 2016. You can read it here: Thompson_et_al-2016-Ibis
We know that Andrew Gilruth is aware of this publication because he blogged about it at the time (see below), so why is he now quoting from an ancient 2006 RSPB publication when he knows that this paper was published ten years later? Incidentally, we’ve highlighted the first sentence of Andrew’s 2016 blog because it somehow seems pertinent!
We’ll be contacting the GWCT today to make a complaint and depending on the reponse, the next port of call will be the Charity Commission.
We’ll keep you posted.
Raptor Persecution UK 
Excellent!! This lot need to be directly challenged and put on the back foot as opposed to being allowed to spend their time trying to deluge the real conservation community in a tidal wave of propaganda, smears and outright lies. Gilruth really is beyond the pale and I hope the RSPB get involved in this. Best of luck!
Well done! What arrogance (and stupidity) to think that he can misrepresent the RSPB in this grotesque way without detection…
Onwards and upwards!
I’ve nearly always found the utterances of Gilruth to be a gross misconstruing of the facts to the point where perhaps rather like Tim (Kim) Baynes another who suffers the same complaint, we should give him a nickname, how about Killtruth, because its nearer the truth! Best of luck in this campaign against misinformation from a registered charity.
Killtruth! I love it!
Killtruth! Please don’t. This is a serious blog. If you want to joke go and do stand up comedy. I have long thought your Kim / Tim references only detract from your aims. Leave name calling in the playground.
Great detective work once again. That truly is “quoting out of context”! Disgraceful.
What did you expect? These people have nothing left but lies to peddle to the public.
Science has destroyed any notion that game shooting benefits the environment in any way!
Neither does it do justice to the communities that live along side it.
Well said.
That is the one of the worst cases of quoting out of context I have seen (an excellent bit of detective work), when the quoted portion was deliberately counter-balanced by the question “But to what extent is this intensive land use compatible with favourable condition of designated wildlife sites, protection of ecological services such as carbon storage and the existence of a rich population of predators such as Golden Eagles.”. The author was quite deliberately paraphrasing the type of justification used by grouse shooting interests, but then questioning what sort of impact this intensive management has on the general ecology and biodiversity (especially certain aspects such as avian predators). In other words, in simple terms the author was questioning the validity of the type of general assertion grouse shooting interests makes about it’s activities. Ironically this type of literary device is intended to highlight the cherry-picking nature of assertions that vested interests make, here grouse shooting interests, where they mislead by not mentioning the negative impacts. So what did Andrew Gilruth do, but cherry pick to mislead.
In the past the GWCT and it’s forerunner name the GCT was a fairly reliable source of information, as long as you remembered that essentially it was a shooting organization, and so took a rather partial view. Of late this organization has veered into advocacy, verging on propaganda. What I’m saying is that in the past it clearly presented things from a certain perspective but generally did not use propaganda methods. Whereas in recent years it’s presentation has often been of the misleading type such as presented here. I actually tweeted a few days ago in response to the GWCT’s position over the recent Hen Harrier paper, that there goes the last vestiges of the GWCT’s credibility. I really meant this. In the past the GWCT at least made a stab of presenting things in a reasonably objective way, whereas now it engages in the type of pro-shooting propaganda that you expect from the Countryside Alliance and the Moorland Association.
Verging on propaganda? That’s an understatement!
It is gross understatement.
Brilliant! Well done RPUK! Good piece of exposure. The nasty brigade (NB) continue to pick apart arguments with logical fallacies –
Straw Man: US: “Ban driven grouse shooting”
NB: “I’m a gamekeeper. So are you
saying you want me on the dole
and my wife and kids out on the
street?”
Red Herring: US: “Grouse moor manangement
contributes to climate change.”
NB: “The habitat management
undertaken on grouse moors
preserves and enhances heather-
dominated habitats.”
Hasty Generalisation:
NB: “Most keepers and moor owners are entirely law-abiding and deeply unhappy about any reported incidents of persecution.”
US:”How do you know most keepers and moor owners are entirely law-abiding and deeply unhappy about persecution?”
NB: “We spoke to a few at the game fair.”
Poisoning The Well:
NB: “Every time the BBC has refused to rein in Mr Packham, his rhetoric has become more intemperate.“
And there is Ad Hominem, Division, Compostion, Post Hoc, Appeal To Emotion, Begging The Question, Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right and Appeal To Majority.
So predictable.
Are these the contortions and death throes of a withering industry?
You know when a vested interest has to resort to endless logical fallacies, that they haven’t got a leg to stand on. They have no credibility whatsoever.
So true. The worrying thing is that they don’t care about a loss of credibility as they have the power and the money.
This is what concerns me. The sheer arrogance of these people. They know they are protected by the establishment, and can more or less do and say what they want. They’re just so confident that no matter what they do or say, there will never been any adverse consequences to them. Whereas most vested interests at least pay lip service to trying to put their house in order, fearing a public backlash. But these arrogant sods just don’t care, because they know they’re protected by the most senior members of the establishment.
I like your photos….. Gilruth has some neck!
Just out on the GWCT blog there’s a lovely piece on Mountain Hare population surveys using a new methodology called ‘lamping’ !! Priceless !!