Further to the news that north-west water company United Utilities (UU) has decided not to renew any more grouse-shooting and pheasant/partridge-shooting leases on its land once the current leases expire in 2027 (here), the shooting organisations have gone into meltdown, first making veiled threats towards UU in the media (see here) and then whipping up the shooting community into a frenzy with familiar hyperbole that UU’s decision is an ‘insult‘, a ‘disaster‘, a ‘travesty‘, ‘tragic‘ and ‘appalling‘.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I disagree with all of those claims and welcome UU’s vision to restore their land for the benefit of wildlife and wider ecosystem health, and thus people.
I’d much rather see this:
Than this:
It’s still not clear (to me, anyway) just how many shoots will be affected by UU’s decision. BASC says on its website, ‘It’s estimated that more than 30 shoots will be shut down as a result‘ whereas the Countryside Alliance says on its website that UU’s decision ‘…will close seven grouse moors and three low ground shoots‘.
Whatever the number, the shooting organisations are predicting rural Armageddon, as they often do when there’s the slightest whiff of any threat to shooting, and they’re now running a campaign to urge their members to write letters of complaint to UU’s chief executive Louise Beardmore, I guess in the hope of piling on the pressure and persuading UU to reverse its decision.
They’re entitled to express their opinions, of course, so it would be good if counter views to this attack were also heard by UU, to commend their decision and encourage them to hold firm. Who knows, the support may also encourage them to sort out their terrible sewage dumping record.
Emails can be sent directly to Louise Beardmore: Louise.Beardmore@uuplc.co.uk
You might also want to cc your email to the UU press office, who I’m told are taking an interest: externalaffairs@uuplc.co.uk
UPDATE 30th July 2023: United Utilities stands firm & explains its decision not to renew shooting licences (here)
Raptor Persecution UK 
My letter copied below:
“Dear Louise,
I am a United Utilities customer living in the Forest of Bowland AONB and I would like to thank you for your decision not to renew shooting leases on United Utilities land.
This is commendable and sends a strong message to other utility companies that the negative impacts of shooting will no longer be tolerated and that you are taking United Utilities land management practices out of the Victorian era into the modern world.
No doubt the shooting groups such as BASC, the Moorland Association and the Countryside Alliance will be lobbying hard to reverse your decision, however I am sure you will find that the majority of your customers support the end of shooting, particularly driven grouse and driven pheasant and partridge shooting.
The shooting fraternity have had sufficient time to get their house in order but they continue to persecute any animal or bird that may reduce their bag numbers, including our rare and iconic raptors. They continue to use enormous amounts of lead shot. They continue to mismanage rare peatlands through burning and conversion to heather monoculture.
United Utilities will now be able to manage the land for all biodiversity, climate change and flood prevention. This will benefit us all, and not just the few involved in shooting.
I hope other utility companies and landowners will follow your example.”
I copied the UU Press Office.
Excellent letter, Tim, setting an example to us all.
I am thankful that at last the pedulum is slipping from shooting other life forms for sport, to acknowleging this old redundant pastime of breeding birds so that privileged people can shoot them for pleasure – is FINALLY beginning to lose its grip ….
Just sent:
Dear Louise
I write to thank United Utilities for deciding to not renew any more grouse shooting and pheasant and partridge shooting leases on your land post 2027.
Your step is bold, but commendable. You have made many more people and creatures rejoice than the few who have caused such harm to our moorland for so long and will grumble.
Those who have caused such damage to the Moors will shout loudly, but they can shoot other targets! They will get over it. They will find other ways to find pleasure in shooting, and those employed in the pastime will innovate and leave you in peace.
Meanwhile, the creatures of the moors (and I include myself among them!), the rare flora and fauna of these wonderful areas of wilderness, will restore their habitat.
Well done! Thank you for your strong decision!
Best get hen harriers numbers counted know and after this rubbish
Even the rspb study shows more harriers and other raptures are far more numerous on shooting estates than non managed moorland well done imbeciles
If you must lie, do it in In English please.
…..nice letter Tim….I’d send it to UU if I were you….I’m sure they’ll listen to your most comprehensive reasoning!!
…..nice letter Martin….I’d send it to UU if I were you….I’m sure they’ll listen to your most comprehensive reasoning!!
Ever heard of a spell check, Martin? and whilst you’re at it, why not check out your ethics ? ( and Facts)
Very good letter Tim
Rewild the land to bring back wildlife!!
No Grouse, no ground nesting birds, no raptors just plenty of foxes and crows, great result.
Tony, please provide the scientific evidence for that statement. I look forward to reading it.
Tony allso no dead raptors
No traps, snares, poisons, lead pollution, muirburn, no wildlife slaughtered, no Gamekeepers, no killing , it’s a win win situation 😉
You mean it’s a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win! situation:-)
Same “Tony”?
Same stupidity…
If you take the shooting fraternity away and the game keepers, eventually you end up with a natural balanced eco system not a Victorian mono culture.
and No facts in your reply… please supply evidence if so ( and not just your biased, prejudiced ‘observations’
Agreed, STOP killing for fun, Wildlife first, the shooting fraternity can always shoot clays and thet are a lot hard harder to hit than slow birds bred for killing, disgusting so called sport.
Just a couple of points, Martin: Red Grouse are neither slow-flying, or bred.
ok thanks for letting me know, I’m a garden feeder birder but love all birds, the thought of someone killing any living thing for fun disgusts me.
You’re welcome, Martin.
I believe accuracy is important when we challenge those who seek to defend the criminal abuse of our natural heritage.
Well shooting organisations need to learn to get their Gamekeepers in line they only have themselves to blame for this . Personally i would terminate the Leases Now today [Ed: rest of comment deleted as libellous]
The result is Communism – telling people what they can and cannot do.
Errrr…. no. It is called democracy. Telling people what they can and cannot do is what law and enforcement was invented for… by Parliament.
Of course, anything that doesn’t tie in with the Daily Mosley mindset of these people is either “woke”, “lefty” or “Communism”.
To paraphrase a recent comment from some nitwit grouser or other on these pages…
“It’s our land, and we’ll do what we want”
What delicious irony!
Dear Louise,
I am a United Utilities customer living in Clitheroe ,and I would like to thank you for your decision not to renew shooting leases on United Utilities land on the Forest of Bowland AONB. I walk up there frequently and have seen the effects of the gamekeepers of surrounding estates persecuting the Birds of Prey eg Peregrines now only breed on one site ( on the UU land) , all the others have ‘disappeared’
No doubt the shooters will try to discredit the company and try to get the decision changed, but please hold firm.
Regards, D Sheldon
Every form of government tells people what they can and cannot do. That’s what government is.
So would you prefer to live in a country without the rule of law?
Or where the rules are made by those prepared to use violence and brute force to dominate the rest of society?
Whilst you may not like United Utilities decision, I am sure that it wasn’t a decision taken lightly, and I wonder whether the decision was influenced by all the reports of criminal activity associated with game bird shooting?
Most businesses are now acutely aware of the importance of ESG – environmental, social and governance factors when deciding how a business or corporation will be managed. It is also a growing consideration for most investors.
When business leaders read reports of illegal raptor persecution, doubtful environmental practices and some of the other ills associated with game bird shooting then it is not surprising they want to distance their business from such activities.
The shooting industry only has itself to blame.
If the illegal persecution of raptors stopped, and shooting estates actively helped the police bring those responsible to justice, then there probably wouldn’t be such negative media coverage and public perception of game bird shooting.
The commercial shooting industry needs to get its house in order – something which is long overdue, and something which some of the well managed shooting estates now seem to understand. But the reality is that there is still too much criminal activity and too many criminals able to hide within the industry.
Only the shooting industry itself can resolve this.
So rather than expressing your frustration on blogs such as this, maybe direct your anger towards the shooting industries umbrella organisations, and directly at those estates suspected of engaging in or permitting criminal activity.
As without change the shooting industry risks destroying itself.
That won’t be helpful to all those in the industry who aren’t engaged in criminal activity and do responsibly try and conserve the environment and wildlife.
Done
I emailed Louise Beardmore and got a very quick reply, thanking me.
The more of us that do this, the better!
Terry Mullen
Done
Tried to copy and paste but the white text on black background doesn’t work. Can you provide the text in a different format please so I can use it. I don’t have time to reinvent the wheel at the moment. Thanks.
Learn how to control your screen. No wheels involved.
Hi, I believe identical emails will be recognised as such, and a short individual reply will have more effect. So one sentence would do, in your own words.
For far too long the supporters of this vile slaughter have wreaked havoc and mayhem on British wildlife and nature. It is way past time that their activities were banished and outlawed in this country.
Absolutely delighted to hear such terrific news, we all need to email Louise and thank her as the poor lass is going to get a lot of bad press from the shooting world.
Read some of the BASC arguments and majority didn’t hold a lot of sway for me. Emailed Louise yesterday to give support for the ban and got a very quick polite reply thanking me.
Appreciate some jobs may be lost following the ban but more productive ones could be created.
The ban has my complete support
Until I saw your photo I had no idea what they did to the land to make those places easy to hunt. I live in Appalachia in the United States where it’s mostly deer hunting. Rich or poor our hunters don’t cut anything down. At first I thought it was strip mining, which they do a lot of sadly. The water company’s decision is to be applauded, I’m happy to see people sending them positive feedback.
The ‘strips’ you see are the result of the annual burning of the vegetation. This exposes the underlying peat to serious erosion in heavy rain (it is high moorland) and kills all the ground fauna which cannot escape. The heather will regenerate (which grouse shooters need) but kills off other moorland plants (which the grouse shooters do not want).
Meanwhile, with the moorland denuded of vegetation like this, heavy rain also runs straight off the hills and floods downstream settlements, causing great hardship to some small towns and villages. Of course, the annual burning also adds CO2 to the atmosphere, and increasing atmospheric CO2 leads to even more heavy rain…
The strips shown on this photograph were created by cutting rather than burning. United Utilities (and Yorkshire Water) restricted burning a few years ago.
The scars from burning are more noticeable. And harmful (IMO).
I wonder whether the cutting might affect numbers of invertebrates and small animals, part of the food pyramid.
Sounds awful. With weather being as it is I would think it’s a bad idea. Doesn’t it take years to lay down that peat? Have they ever had one of those fires get out of control? Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Surely better controlled burns than the total destruction of wildfires .
As is widely known, it’s not a case of one or the other, and the heather monoculture of moorland “managed” for grouse shooting is far more vulnerable to accidental fires than a healthy mix of vegetation and wet areas.
https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3597/grouse_moor_burning_causes_widespread_environmental_changes
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.13708
Good to see an intelligent response!
This is of course a very tricky subject with pros and cons of burning, grazing or mowing. No one size fits all.
Many people would say that prescribed burning (the practice of burning small areas in the autumn and early spring) is a cool burn and very definitely a useful weapon in our arsenal to prevent more destructive wild fires. As our climate changes hotter summers and wetter winters we may well continue to use this method.
If a wild fire starts on a grouse moor it will be extinguished fairly rapidly by the estate workers. However as we have seen in the past when wild fires start on publicly owned ground they have often raged for days and caused severe damage which takes many years to rebalance.
There will be many repercussions of not renewing shooting leases, some good, some bad.
I feel it is important to comment that it is not just the shooting fraternity that traps and controls predators. There are other bodies that members of the public pay membership fees to which do the same In order to protect ground nesters.
Just for the record, game dealers no longer accept any quarry shot with lead so things are improving albeit too slowly for some.
The pendulum continues to swing and never stops in the middle ground, shooting is most certainly not all bad and much of the countryside we know and love has been shaped and paid for by well run shoots.
I just hope that ELMS will go some way to helping farmers and landowners look after the countryside for the benefit of the public as well as nature.
Whichever side of the fence we sit on it is always good to try and understand those on the other side.
As Ruth says let’s now hope our water companies can also quell public outrage by cleaning up their act regarding sewage.
Regards to all.
John Lee
1. Muirburn has nothing to do with wildfire prevention. It is undertaken to produce a profusion of young heather shoots, in order to maximise the “shootable surplus” of Red Grouse. The fact that some choose to conflate the issue with wildfire prevention is entirely incidental.
2. Conservation bodies undertake targeted, science-based predator control only as a last resort. To equate this with the wholesale, routine slaughter of all species which the grouse moor “managers” percieve as competitors is either ill-informed or completely disingenuous…
https://community.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/b/actionfornature/posts/the-conservationist-s-dilemma-an-update-on-the-science-policy-and-practice-of-the-impact-of-predators-on-wild-birds-8
3. Your claim that…
“Just for the record, game dealers no longer accept any quarry shot with lead”
Is simply untrue…
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/voluntary-uk-initiatives-to-phase-out-toxic-lead-shot-for-pheasant-hunting-have-had-little-impact
Well said. Absolutely spot on. Management of moorland for driven grouse slaughter produces no benefits for wider society.
Thanks for your rapid response.
I will read some of the literature you have forwarded, always interested.
It’s upsetting about the lead shot. August last year was I was lead to believe a cut off point for accepting lead shot quarry.
As for points 1 and 2 I still stand by what I wrote.
Many thanks for reading
Regards
John
You may stand by what you “wrote” Mr Wise (sorry, Mr Lee) for the rest of your life. It won’t alter the facts one iota.
Delighted to hear that you will help the regeneration of our precious moors and their wildlife by preventing the damaging practices of grouse moor management. They are currently wildlife deserts with few species and virtually no natural regeneration due to seasonal burning. Do not succumb to pressure from entitled vested interests.
Delighted to do-great news . Thanks again so much for all your wonderful, hugely important but often so terribly distressing work to expose the perverse reality of so many of those so called ‘ guardians of countryside ‘
There are 3 keepers loosing their jobs within 3 miles of my house. All with their families in tied accommodation.
They’ll have to find proper jobs now, won’t they?
Unfortunately not such an intelligent response!
Gamekeeping has been and is a proper job. Many gamekeepers have, like Chris Packham received death threats and much abuse.
This is an emotional topic and we should all try and understand the various different aspects.
We seem to be running on a tidal wave of rather poorly informed popular opinion.
There are many reports one can read in order to gain a better understanding of moorland management.
Remarking that these poor people will have to find proper jobs is simply not helpful to anyone.
“There are many reports one can read in order to gain a better understanding of moorland management.”
There are indeed…
Click to access grouse_moor_evidence_review_final.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320723001738#f0010
Click to access newton-2020-killing-of-raptors-on-grouse-moors_evidence-and-effects.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026974912036317X
Click to access bop-in-niddaonb-evidence-report-final-sept-2019.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09044-w
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2405296?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000632070300363X
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ibi.12356
https://www.nature.scot/snh-commissioned-report-982-analyses-fates-satellite-tracked-golden-eagles-scotland
https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3597/grouse_moor_burning_causes_widespread_environmental_changes
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.13708
It’s an understandable response though. It’s indicative that people’s patience has all but run out with anyone associated with DGS. The DGS industry in general, and lots of individuals within it, have been too unpleasant to too many people for too long. The industry has told (and is still telling) lies both big and small, and is (and always has) used political connections to perpetuate a lot of unforgivable and cruel illegal wrongdoing. Anyone who feels sorry for the plight of what is a minority (in my experience anyway) of good and law abiding keepers (as I do), ought to level their sights purely at the Owners and Agents, Guns and lawbreaking
Keepers that have steered the sport in this direction this past thirty years plus.
Agreed, Spaghnum.
There’s never been so much as a peep from the CA, MA and assorted cronies regarding any rural job losses other than those in the blood”sports” sector (see the comment from Giles). Agriculture has shed huge numbers of jobs…
“The total number of employees on payroll in the UK farming industry has dropped by 1.9% (or 553,000 people) since February 2020.”
“The total number of self-employed farmers dropped from 138,000 in 2019 to 109,000 in 2020, decreasing over 21%.”
https://www.agrirs.co.uk/blog/2021/07/current-issues-facing-uk-farms-and-farmers?source=google.com
Yet we don’t see the “rural representatives” demonstrating on our streets about this state of affairs.
We didn’t hear any objections from this lot back in the 80s, when the Thatcher government created mass unemployment as an economic tool, and a stick to beat working class people with. Nor have any of them uttered any complaints regarding the current hardship suffered by millions as a result of the so-called cost of living crisis.
So, I stand firmly by my previous statement. And no amount of patronising, sugar-coated argument will alter my convictions. Stuff ’em, and their “jobs”. The sooner our wild places are free from their despicable influence, and their vile practices are replaced by intelligent, ethical land management techniques the better for everyone.
Thousands of miners lost their jobs in the 1980s and 90s. Did you complain about that? Thought not.
Thankyou for the UU email addresses. I have just sent my two emails to UU to thank and support them for their decision to stop the licensing of shooting on their land. Let’s hope that they are swamped with praise, although I expect that their decision wasn’t made in support for the beliefs that Raptor Persecution and we all hold……
I am pleased to hear that uu have decided not to renew leases for game shooting the goverment should pass abill that makes it illegal and punishable by heavy fines and in imprisonment for those caught shooting all birds of prey and causing destruction of our moorland these people have no regard for our wildlife only the large amounts of money they can make
I just contacted UU before I got to see your excellent sample email Ruth. Hopefully it will still be OK, I did try make the point that the economic arguments for retaining grouse shooting are a pile of shite by sending this link – https://markavery.info/2018/09/27/guest-blog-driven-grouse-shooting-your-bluffs-been-called-by-les-wallace/#comments There’s also a strong case for dramatically enhancing the flood reduction of any eco rehabilitation by the translocation of beavers on to the moors after a bit of strategic tree planting with in the short term bringing in supplementary feed until the trees mature. The effects of drought would be reduced too and of course beavers are fantastic for other wildlife. The trump card is that fire risk will be substantially reduced as beavers build dams – something that’s being increasingly recognised in the USA especially. That’s a pretty good riposte to the fear mongering the tweed twits will be doing claiming the build up of flammable material will result in conflagrations. There’s scope for a great deal of public support/engagement (lowering the risk your home or business will get flooded is rather nice!) which is far more than can be said for grouse shooting. I know I bang on about this quite a bit, but I’m convinced that if any animal is the kiss of death for grouse moors it’s the beaver.
Please don’t even think of planting trees on peat!
Peat will store carbon far more effectively than trees will.
Thank you so much Louise and UU for this great step forward, it will help save so much wildlife and a healthy wild population of all the what some call game birds, I call them wild bird’s will be brilliant and a place where they will be protected from evil sport, I can’t thank you enough, you’ll have some brilliant wildlife reserves and hopefully all other land owners will follow reviving our whole native Raptor population to it’s original numbers as with everything else including rare plant life, moths and Butterflies and a whole range of insect and invertebrates aswell as the animals and birds that will thrive rare examples in each category, again I can’t thank you enough and your setting a great example for everyone to follow.
Regards
James William Scott