Month: August 2023

The Hunt Saboteurs were out for a third day yesterday and stopped a grouse shoot on Barden Moor on the Bolton Abbey Estate.

This follows their work stopping grouse shoots on Saturday 12th Aug (here) and Monday 13th (here), all in Yorkshire.

Well this is interesting, and I’d say pretty embarrassing for BASC (British Association for Shooting & Conservation).

Cast your mind back to April 2023 when I blogged (here) about how BASC’s CEO Ian Bell had written to the lead author of a scientific paper that had just been published by Cambridge University researchers, that had found that 94% of pheasants on sale in the UK for human consumption were killed using toxic lead ammunition.

The paper in question was the third scientific paper published by the ‘SHOT-SWITCH‘ group, which was established in 2020 to monitor the shooting industry’s professed voluntary five-year transition from toxic lead to non-lead ammunition in the UK. The paper exposed the shooting industry’s appalling lack of progress on its much-heralded ‘voluntary transition’.

Mr Ian Bell wrote to Professor Rhys Green (Cambridge University) in March 2023 to express his “significant concerns” about the accuracy of the paper’s conclusions.

In addition, another BASC employee, Dr Conor O’Gorman, went further and wrote an unpleasant article published on BASC’s website where he slurred the SHOT-SWITCH research as “pseudoscience“.

You may recall that Professor Green wrote back to Ian Bell in April 2023 and responded, point by point, to BASC’s “significant concerns” and basically blew them all out of the water (no pun intended).

However, there’s since been a further response from Professor Green that’s been published on the SHOT-SWITCH project website (here). It turns out that after responding to Ian Bell, the SHOT-SWITCH team came across some additional research that they hadn’t included in their scientific paper because they’d previously been unaware of its existence.

Guess what that additional research was?

It was a study of what happens when you fire lead shot and steel shot into ballistic gel. The properties of ballistic gel mimic those of game tissue. This study was done by ballistics experts at Cranfield University and it showed that there was no difference between lead and steel in the extent to which they penetrate the gel, even when the gel block was covered by a pheasant skin to assess the effect of feathers/skin in reducing the depth of penetration.

This finding runs counter to the assertion by Ian Bell in his letter to Professor Green about his “significant concerns” that knowledgeable experts thought that steel shot were more likely to pass through pheasants than lead shot, which (he thought) would make the SHOT-SWITCH results wrong.

And guess who commissioned the Cranfield University study?

Yep, it was BASC.

And guess when that BASC-funded study was completed?

3rd August 2021.

That’s 20 months BEFORE Ian Bell wrote to Professor Green in March 2023, contesting the findings of the SHOT-SWITCH study.

Was Ian Bell ignorant of the findings of the BASC-funded study when he wrote to criticise the findings of the SHOT-SWITCH study? That would seem unlikely, given he’s the BASC CEO who presumably knows what studies BASC has commissioned/funded. Had he simply forgotten about the findings of the study that BASC funded? Or, was he well aware of the findings but just hopeful that the results would never see the light of day? Who knows. It may have been a genuine oversight but surely one of his team has since explained the BASC-funded findings to him, and how they actually support the findings of the SHOT-SWITCH study, and that BASC now owes the SHOT-SWITCH team an apology for slurring their work as “pseudoscience“?

You can read the latest response from the SHOT-SWITCH researchers to Ian Bell’s “significant concerns“, which provides more detail about how this recently-uncovered, BASC-funded research, further demonstrates that BASC’s criticisms are unfounded, and that’s being kind (see pages 3-5 below).

Many thanks to the blog reader who pointed out this latest update to me.

REVIVE, the coalition for grouse moor reform is hosting its biggest ever national conference at the Perth Concert Hall on Sunday 12th November 2023.

The conference will be hosted once again by REVIVE supporter Chris Packham and there’ll be speakers from REVIVE’s member organisations (Common Weal, Friends of the Earth Scotland, League Against Cruel Sports, OneKind and Raptor Persecution UK) as well as significant guest speakers from across the political, conservation and land reform sector.

The full programme will be published shortly but booking is now open – please click here to secure your place!

To find out more about REVIVE, please visit the website here.

Further to the news on Saturday when Hunt Saboteurs from across the country gathered in Yorkshire to stop three grouse shoots on the Inglorious 12th (here), they’ve been back out again.

In atrocious weather conditions they went back to Nidderdale yesterday and disrupted one of the same shoots they’d visited on Saturday.

Further details available on the Hunt Sabs website here.

Another opinion piece by a member of REVIVE, the coalition for grouse moor reform, was published over the weekend, this time in the Scotsman and written by Robbie Marsland, Director of League Against Cruel Sports Scotland.

It’s reproduced here:

Snares are used to legally kill an estimated 200,000 animals a year – including non-target species like badgers, dogs and cats – so that more grouse are there to be shot for so-called ‘sport’.

A thin loop of steel wire sits in an entrance to a mound of rotting animals. It’s a snare set to capture foxes drawn to the smell of what is known as a “stink pit”. Despite being cruel, primitive and indiscriminate, snares are currently legal in Scotland.

In theory, foxes are simply detained by the snares and wait peacefully for up to 24 hours for a gamekeeper to arrive and shoot them with a shotgun. In theory. In practice, foxes struggle and mutilate themselves as the wire cuts into their flesh.

Snares are laid on animal pathways as well as around stink pits. This means that any animal using the pathways or attracted by the smell of carrion can get caught by these indiscriminate devices. Badgers, which are protected species, are trapped in snares so often that there’s a name for the distinctive area of flattened ground around a snare made by their death throes. It’s called a “doughnut”. Cats and dogs are also common victims of these pernicious implements.

So why are snares still legal? For years, the League Against Cruel Sports and our friends at animal welfare charity OneKind have been calling for them to be consigned to history. Scotland has to some extent led the way in that it was the first part of the UK to regulate their use. But that lead has now gone with the Welsh Government recently announcing an outright ban on snares – the first UK nation to take this step.

The Scottish Government has the opportunity to catch up with the Welsh example. The Wildlife Management and Muirburn Bill currently approaching the end of its first stage in parliament provides the government with a vehicle to ban the use of snares. The government has acknowledged this and says that it will announce whether they intend to ban snares or not in the next couple of months.

One of the main reasons that foxes are targeted by these horrific devices is to make sure there are more grouse to be shot for sport. The ‘glorious’ 12th of August is the beginning of the grouse shooting season that goes on until December. But the killing of any animal that is thought to reduce the number of grouse goes on all year round.

A 14-month League Against Cruel Sports study of seven shooting estates in Scotland revealed the use of a massive array of traps and snares aimed at foxes, stoats, weasels and crows. Judging by what was found, we estimate more than 200,000 animals are killed on all Scottish shooting estates each year. The survey also revealed that just under 40 per cent of the dead animals found in traps were “non-target” species like badgers, cats and dogs, or even hedgehogs, that do no harm to grouse.

As the Wildlife Management and Muirburn Bill is debated in the Scottish Parliament over the coming months, the League Against Cruel Sports looks forward to snares being banned and questions being asked about the ethics of killing hundreds of thousands of animals killed each year to ensure there are more grouse to be shot for so-called “sport”.

Robbie Marsland is director of the League Against Cruel Sports Scotland

ENDS