Last November, the Scottish Government finally reached the end of its tether with the criminality and environmental damage associated with driven grouse shooting and announced its intention to bring in a licensing scheme for grouse shooting estates (see here).
In response, the Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA) went in to an enraged meltdown and announced its members would hold a protest (or at least localised protests as Covid restrictions prevented a gathering at Holyrood), although it wasn’t clear what, exactly, they would be protesting about – they just seemed furious about the idea of a scheme that would mean a licence could be withdrawn if criminal activities were detected – (see here).
Since we’re all in another period of lockdown, even localised protests are out of the question and so now the SGA is planning an online protest instead. An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times revealed more details:
The online protest is set for 19th March 2021 and it seems the SGA is trying to drum up support from various industries, to come under the banner of a ‘Rural Workers’ Protest’. Look out for the hashtag #RWP21 on social media.
According to this article, the reasons for protesting include what the SGA calls ‘anti-rural measures pursued by the SNP and the Green Party’, and claims that the sector ‘has not had a fair deal from this parliament’.
Interestingly, amongst all the reasons given by the SGA for wanting to protest, grouse moor licensing does not feature explicitly in this article. The nearest the SGA gets is to complain about the Government’s alleged ‘unwillingness to manage or address predation’ and ‘curbs on muirburn’.
In response, the Scottish Government is reported to have said that it ‘did not recognise the claims being made’. In addition, Mark Ruskell MSP from the Scottish Greens said:
“Many more rural jobs could be created if we banned the cruel practice of grouse shooting and used the land in other ways, to restore our forests and peatlands to tackle the climate emergency“.
According to Tim (Kim) Baynes, Director of landowners’ lobby group Scottish Land & Estates, there is “very little evidence” of ongoing raptor persecution in Scotland.
It’s a bare-faced denial that Baynes and his grouse shooting pals have been making for years e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Deny everything, carry on and hope that nobody checks the actual facts, eh?
This most recent denial came in a podcast for Living Planet, a programme on the German International English Language Service, of all places! The seven minute programme also features Ian Thomson (RSPB Scotland) and Logan Steele (Scottish Raptor Study Group) talking about satellite-tagged golden eagles that suddenly ‘vanish’ from Scottish grouse moors and how last year the tag of one of those missing eagles was found with cut straps, wrapped in lead sheeting (to block the tag’s signal) and dumped in a river (see here); a clear indication of the lengths the eagle-killers will go to cover up their crimes.
As well as denying the extent of ongoing raptor persecution, Baynes was asked about grouse moor licensing, due to be introduced by the Scottish Government because, er, last year Ministers accepted the indisputable evidence of ongoing raptor persecution on some driven grouse moors.
Here’s what he said:
“There needs to be a balanced approach to it, so if you have too many birds of prey there has to be some mechanism for managing them, to keep them in balance with the prey species. And that’s what we’re asking Government to address“.
Now, some might argue that this is not anything we need worry about because the probability of having “too many” (whatever that means) birds of prey on some driven grouse moors seems quite unlikely given the long-term absence of breeding species like hen harrier, golden eagle and peregrine on many of these moors, as a direct result of on-going persecution.
However, having seen how DEFRA and Natural England define a ‘high density’ population (two hen harrier nests within 10km of one another!) for the purposes of the insane hen harrier brood meddling trial, and knowing that Scottish Land & Estates has expressed an interest in having a hen harrier brood meddling scheme in Scotland (more on that shortly), we should all be alert to the very high probability that grouse shooting reps will be lobbying the Scottish Government hard when consultations open for views on what the grouse moor licensing scheme should look like.
Wild Justice celebrates its second birthday today!
Many thanks to the readers of this blog who have supported WJ – work is already underway on several new projects. Please visit the Wild Justice blog for news of these (see here).
There’s an article about WJ’s second birthday in The Guardian (here)
In December 2019, a total of 23 buzzards were reported to have been illegally poisoned with the banned pesticide Carbofuran in a single incident in Co. Cork, Ireland.
This news wasn’t made public until May 2020 when the Irish Raptor Study Group partnered with Birdwatch Ireland to issue a joint statement criticising the lack of enforcement measures to deal with the continued illegal persecution of birds of prey (see here).
This shocking mass poisoning crime prompted calls in the Irish parliament for an investigation (see here) and calls for the establishment of a special police unit to focus on tackling wildlife crime (here).
Later in the year a local animal welfare charity ‘The Amica Projects’ put up a reward of 5,000 Euros for information about who was responsible for poisoning the buzzards and it placed a full page advert in the Southern Star newspaper appealing for whistle blowers to get in touch (see here).
Now six months on, an article by journalist Kieran O’Mahony published in the Southern Star yesterday says that The Amica Projects has now confirmed it has paid the 5K Euros reward for a tip-off that it had received.
From the article:
“We are delighted to report that a number of people came forward with information about this and actually some other cases too,’ said a spokesperson.
Some of these reports were highly specific and highly credible and we’ve passed the most useful and relevant to the gardaí [the police] and to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, who are responsible for prosecutions of this type“.
According to The Amica Projects – which was founded in 2019 and addresses animal welfare problems in Ireland – both entities shared the view that the information was credible and actionable.
“This was a senseless attack on the buzzards, which are fully protected in Ireland under the EU Birds Directive, and under the National Wildlife Act of 1976. What’s more, the poison carbofuran has been banned in Ireland for over a decade and even the possession of the poison is an offence.”
The charity also said that it is entirely prepared to repeat the reward initiative should the need arise.
“This should serve as notice to bird-poisoners that they are being observed, and that most of the general public finds their actions abhorrent. No poisoner is safe and the penalties are significant“.
The Langholm Initiative (the organisation behind the successful community buy-out at Langholm Moor) is reminding job applicants that the deadline is looming for the recruitment of two managers to take the lead on transforming the old grouse moor in to the new Tarras Valley Nature Reserve.
This is a fantastic opportunity to be part of creating a new nature reserve with ecological restoration and the community at its heart. Closing date: Friday 19th February 2021.
WARNING: For those of a sensitive disposition this post will contain examples of grossly offensive material so if you’re likely to get upset by reading it I’d suggest you don’t go any further than this point.
What follows are a number of examples of the obscenities hurled by gamekeepers and others in the game-shooting industry at those of us who campaign for an end to the illegal killing of birds of prey on game-shooting estates and for strict environmental regulation of the UK game-shooting industry.
There’s so much material it’s going to take a number of blogs to publish just a simple overview to demonstrate the extent and type of abuse we receive. So today’s blog will focus on the abuse I’ve received – future blogs will focus on the abuse my colleagues and others have received.
I don’t write this as a casual observer / commentator. I write it as someone who has been at the receiving end of a targeted smear campaign of hatred for approximately six years.
I am subjected to a volume of online personal abuse pretty much on a daily basis; it’s routinely misogynistic and usually along the lines of being a nasty / ugly / fat / evil / poisonous / vile / lying / bitter / miserable / bigoted / dirty / rabid / lesbian / bitch / whore (take your pick of these or add any other offensive adjective of your choice).
I’ve been accused of being a ‘deranged whore’ and an ‘animal rights extremist’.
I’ve been accused of sleeping with Dr Mark Avery, Chris Packham, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, RSPB Investigator Ian Thomson, Cabinet Secretary Roseanna Cunningham, Professor Ian Newton, Chief Inspector Lou Hubble and Andy Wightman MSP.
My personal telephone number has been published and folk have been incited to make abusive phone calls.
I have received abusive text messages.
My home address has been published and shared on social media. Photographs of my home have been published and shared on social media.
I have been followed and photographed on grouse moors and these have been published on social media with accompanying defamatory comment.
I have been accused of fabricating evidence, of perverting the course of justice, of inflicting cruelty to wildlife, of killing eagles, of planting evidence, and conversely (and bizarrely) of withholding evidence from the police, of lying to the police, of lying to Ministers, of lying to supporters, of lying in general…….I think you get the picture.
I don’t often talk about this stuff because frankly it’s not good for my mental health but I have documented the evidence, systematically and meticulously, for over six years and now some of that evidence is being used to support a number of ongoing investigations in to harassment, stalking and offences under the Malicious Communications Act.
Now, I’m not for one minute going to claim that I’ve never ridiculed anyone. Of course I have, many a time, probably just like many people reading this blog will have done. And I intend to continue – humour and mild ridicule are powerful tools for challenging all sorts of people and policies and besides, it helps me to deal with the daily onslaught. However, there is a line that I don’t cross and I certainly don’t support libellous or grossly offensive commentary about anyone, which is evidenced by the strict editorial policy on this blog.
To be clear, I’m not posting about online abuse to elicit any kind of response – I don’t need tea & sympathy, I have a fantastic support system in place and a world-class mental health coach – I’m posting this stuff simply to counter the ridiculous narrative from the game-shooting industry that they’re all innocent victims.
Awareness about campaigns of abuse will be nothing new to some of this blog’s followers – many of you will no doubt remember the disgraceful abuse suffered by a small local brewery in Lancashire (Bowland Brewery) a few years ago after they posted a photograph of Chris Packham and Mark Avery enjoying a pint of Hen Harrier, a brew developed to help raise funds for the RSPB’s hen harrier conservation work. That particular hate campaign was led by a former gamekeeper in Scotland and involved many other gamekeepers from across the UK (see here).
Ok, so here we go….
EVIDENCEDEXAMPLES
This is written by Bert Burnett, a former Director of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association and a current columnist for the SGA’s quarterly rag for members, who over the last 12 months alone has published almost 100 abusive posts targeting me. He also routinely targets my colleagues at Wild Justice, RSPB and the Scottish Raptor Study Group:
The following three are written by people who identify themselves as gamekeepers:
This one from January 2021 documents an example of casual misogyny by Duncan Thomas, BASC’s Director of Northern England, no less! I hope he doesn’t have any direct supervisory capacity of any females at BASC.
I wonder if misogynistic abuse is BASC policy? I’m sure it isn’t. Perhaps I’ll write and ask.
As a co-director of Wild Justice I am also at the receiving end of some pretty gross and offensive abuse. Since we launched our not-for-profit company two years ago it’s provided another avenue for gamekeepers and their supporters within the game shooting industry to publish obscene comments about the three of us. We’ve written before about some of the abuse we’ve received (see here but beware, it’s particularly unpleasant).
Here are some more examples:
On that note, I think that’s probably enough for today.
I will be writing more on this subject shortly.
UPDATE 19th February 2021: Gamekeepers lead disgusting hate campaign against conservationists (2) (here)
UPDATE 17th March 2021: BASC Director Duncan Thomas apologises for misogynistic abuse (here)
UPDATE 18th July 2021: Organised crime, harassment & intimidation – another day on the grouse moors (guest blog) (here)
Is this the most ridiculous shooting-industry propaganda narrative ever?
It’s got some stiff competition, to be fair. Over the years we’ve seen the industry endeavour to clean up its public-facing image, superficially at least, and make some pretty outlandish (and largely unsubstantiated) claims about how welcome raptors are on game shooting estates, but all to no avail as the illegal killing of birds of prey on, er, game shooting estates, has continued on and on and on.
In desperation, because they know they’re losing public support as these crimes are exposed time after time, the latest tactic appears to be to present gamekeepers as innocent victims of abuse, presumably in an attempt to elicit public sympathy and support. How this is being done with straight faces I just don’t know, given the deluge of obscene abuse many of us receive, on an almost daily basis, much of it orchestrated by gamekeepers and their supporters in the shooting industry.
But more of that in a bit. For now, let’s have a look at the level of abuse being claimed by gamekeepers.
This propaganda/victimhood campaign began late last year just before the Scottish Government published its response to the long-awaited Werritty Review. We saw BASC Scotland proclaim that ‘as many as 64% of Scottish gamekeepers experience threatening behaviour or abuse from members of the public at least once every year‘ although this claim was recently debunked after a forensic dissection of the report on which it was based uncovered some apparent misrepresentation of the results (see here).
That’s not to say that gamekeepers don’t experience any abuse at all – they do, for sure, just like most people do from time to time, no matter what their profession (as a quick look on social media will attest), but there are different scales of abuse, from mild ridicule to actual death threats, and the claims being made by the industry were not an accurate reflection of the report’s findings.
The Scottish campaign also included a public letter written to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon by Mike Holliday, a gamekeeper from Perthshire and a BASC Working Group member, who complained about the online abuse he and his colleagues had apparently suffered from ‘animal rights extremists’. I’ll be writing more about Mr Holliday and his own behaviour and that of some of his colleagues on social media in due course.
It seems that the game shooting industry was pleased with the victimhood approach because shortly after the Scottish campaign, a similar ‘survey’ was opened in England at the end of November 2020. The results of that ‘survey’ (and you’ll understand why I’m using inverted commas in a minute) have just been published and guess what? More headlines proclaiming an ‘alarming increase in abuse’.
This gamekeeper ‘survey’ is very interesting. First of all, look at the partner organisations involved – BASC, Countryside Alliance, Game Farmers Association and the National Gamekeepers Organisation. Nothing unusual there, you might think, until you look at the number of partners who were originally signed up to coordinate this ‘survey’ back in November – what happened to the GWCT and the CLA? Their names/logos do not appear on the final report.
The next interesting thing to notice about the report is the date it was compiled: 16th December 2020. Funny how it’s taken this long for the report to be published. Mind you, had it been published just before Christmas it would have had to compete with the grouse-shooting industry’s disgraceful ‘advent calendar of hate’ – a malicious campaign, which ran every day from 1st-24th December, hosted by a nasty little astroturf group with a growing reputation for vicious online abuse (here), this time targeting charity workers, trustees, authors, conservationists, scientists, raptor workers and politicians – indeed anyone who has spoken up against the toxic grouse shooting industry – and this spiteful, abusive campaign was being shared daily by gamekeeping groups across social media – yes, those very same gamekeeping groups who are now complaining about, er, abuse.
You couldn’t make this up.
Or could you?
The ‘survey’ itself was not what could be called rigorous, in any sense. If you read the report it was sent out to 2,372 BASC gamekeeper members and to an undisclosed number of others via the other partners’ websites. In fact, the ‘survey’ wasn’t restricted to gamekeepers at all – it was available online and accessible to anyone to fill in.
How do I know that? Because I filled it in, and I’m not a gamekeeper.
I made some pretty outlandish claims in the ‘survey’ as you can see from the screenshots below, and at no point was I asked to provide (a) evidence of identity, (b) evidence of occupation, (c) evidence of any abuse I claimed to have received as a result of me being a [fake] gamekeeper or (d) evidence of any of the crimes I claimed to have witnessed.
I filled in this ‘survey’ simply because I wanted to be able to demonstrate how unreliable its results would be. Now the ‘survey’ findings have been published, the game shooting industry is once again churning out the rhetoric without even the slightest acknowledgement of its lack of rigour or its hypocrisy.
For example, BASC’s Head of Game & Dogs Glynn Evans is quoted as saying: “The survey reinforces what we have been seeing and hearing in the last couple of years. Attacks on the gamekeeping profession are unwarranted and highly damaging. Gamekeepers, like other job sectors, should be free to undertake their profession without fear of attack or abuse.
Much of this aggressive behaviour on the ground is a product of targeted campaigns by those against shooting. While debate and a difference of opinion is welcome, shooting organisations are calling on those against shooting to consider the consequences of their publicity stunts and social media campaigns“.
Good grief, is he for real? Does his condemnation stretch to his colleagues who have published targeted and abusive commentary on a young woman just because she happens to be Chris Packham’s step daughter (see here)? And this was published on the BASC website!!
And does his condemnation stretch to his own organisation or his ‘partners’ at the Countryside Alliance and GWCT who have campaigned relentlessly for the BBC to sack Chris Packham? Why shouldn’t Chris be ‘free to undertake his profession without fear of attack or abuse‘?
Out of all of us, Chris has drawn the most abuse from the game-shooting community and the extent and content of it is horrendous. In the next blog on this subject I’ll be posting some examples and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading but it does put in to context this ridiculous idea that gamekeepers are innocent victims.
UPDATE 11th February 2021: Gamekeepers lead disgusting hate campaign against conservationists (1) (here)
UPDATE 19th February 2021: Gamekeepers lead disgusting hate campaign against conservationists (2) (here)
UPDATE 17th March 2021: BASC Director Duncan Thomas apologises for misogynistic abuse (here)
Press release from Humberside Police (9th February 2021)
Rural Task Force – East Riding of Yorkshire
Protecting our rural communities, wildlife and heritage
Humberside Police have set up a new dedicated unit focusing on tackling rural, wildlife and heritage crimes within the East Riding of Yorkshire.
The Rural Task Force will be based at Driffield Police Station, ideally placed within the ‘Capital of the Wolds’ and will consist of four police constables and one sergeant.
The team will be targeting those who chose to commit crime within our rural communities.
The Inspector leading the Rural Task Force is Neighbourhood Police Inspector Jon Powell, he said, “Over the years Humberside Police have worked tirelessly to tackle rural crime and help to make our rural communities feel safer. This new team will focus on disruption of criminal activities, apprehension, arrest, charging and prosecution of offenders.
“All with the aim of deterring others from committing similar offences. This will send out a clear message that rural, wildlife and heritage crime will not be tolerated.
“The team will be building on existing relationships with local rural communities, groups and businesses which will develop and support them in tackling crimes that affect them most.”
The Rural Task Force will continue the pro-active work already undertaken by our community teams who are targeting hare coursing and poaching, marine wildlife disturbance, raptor persecution as well as offences around hunting with dogs, badger baiting and heritage crime.
There is also a focus on supporting and co-ordinating disruption around plant and agricultural theft and associated crimes.
The Rural Task Force will be working in partnership with Humberside Fire and Rescue utilising the latest drone technology to achieve best evidence of hunting and poaching offences, and also East Riding of Yorkshire Council with further enforcement opportunities around Community Protection Warnings and Notices for those who commit wildlife crime within our area.
A close working relationship has already been established with neighbouring forces and the Rural Task Force intend to continue this with increased sharing of intelligence and information to target those who travel across the border to commit offences.
On Wednesday 27 January 2021 the team worked alongside North Yorkshire Rural Task Force in a joint cross border night time operation targeting night time poaching and acquisitive crime within the rural communities of Humberside and Ryedale setting a clear intent of partnership working from day one.
ENDS
This is very welcome news. Humberside sees its fair share of illegal raptor persecution so it’ll be good to have one dedicated team instead of a number of them working ad hoc.
For more info on the new rural task force see here and scroll to the bottom.
In September Wild Justice launched a new e-petition calling on Natural England to ban the shooting of badgers as part of DEFRA’s badger cull.
Over the weekend the petition passed 100,000 signatures, the amount needed to trigger a debate at Westminster Hall.
Many thanks to the blog readers who supported this petition – it’s off-topic, I know, but there have to be perks to writing this blog and besides, it gives the blog’s detractors something else to whine about.
The petition is still open until 24th March 2021 so if you’d like to support it you can sign here
Further info about the petition and what happens next can be found on the Wild Justice blog here
Raptor Persecution UK 