Author: RaptorPersecutionUK

Scottish Raptor Study Group letter in response to estate licensing scaremongering claims

Earlier this month we blogged about two articles that were published in the Scottish Mail on Sunday about so-called ‘draconian’ proposals to introduce a licensing scheme for game shooting estates (see here).

One piece was just a review of various organisations’ positions and the other one was a fairly lengthy comment piece written by Carrieanne Conaghan, a gamekeeper’s wife and coordinator of the Speyside Moorland Group. Carrieanne claimed that the introduction of estate licensing would ‘penalise‘ law-abiding estates, although she didn’t explain how she thought this would work.

Logan Steele, the estate licensing petitioner (on behalf of the Scottish Raptor Study Group) contacted the Mail on Sunday and asked for the opportunity to provide a comment piece in response, especially as Carrieanne had made a number of unsubstantiated (and inaccurate) claims about his motivation for launching the petition. The Mail on Sunday refused (surprise!) but did say he could write a 150-word letter, an option Logan described in a comment on this blog as “a pretty second rate alternative“.

Nevertheless, Logan did submit a letter and it appeared at the weekend. He says it’s been “butchered” (the published version is only 89 words) and they couldn’t even spell his name correctly. Even so, he makes his points well:

A quick bit of background research has led us to believe that Carrieanne’s husband is employed as a gamekeeper at Glenlochy, near Grantown-on-Spey in the Cairngorms National Park. This estate is no stranger to police investigations into alleged raptor persecution (e.g. see here) although nobody has ever been prosecuted. This history, perhaps well before her husband’s employment, might help explain Carrieanne’s concerns about the introduction of an estate licensing scheme.

National Trust to receive petition calling for cessation of grouse shooting

Today (Tuesday 25 July 2017) the National Trust will receive a petition calling for the cessation of grouse shooting on one of their moors in the Peak District National Park.

The petition was launched last year by a newly-formed group called Moorland Vision (see website here). It was triggered by a video we posted on this blog in April 2016 showing an armed man sitting close to a decoy hen harrier on a National Trust-owned moor within the National Park (see here). The National Trust had leased the moor to a tenant for grouse shooting and the moor was supposedly one of several within the Peak District Bird of Prey Initiative – an ambitious partnership plan to restore raptor populations in the region, which unsurprisingly has so far failed to meet its targets.

That video, filmed by two birdwatchers who had the presence of mind to record their observations, led to a police investigation but unfortunately there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution. Many readers of this blog (and others) were infuriated by the content of that video and were frustrated by the lack of criminal proceedings. As a result, the National Trust was inundated with emails calling for the Trust to take action.

A few months later, in June 2016, the National Trust surprised us all by announcing it was to terminate the grouse shooting lease four years early (see here). The tenant was given 22 months notice and is due to leave in April 2018. We viewed this as a significant and welcome move by the National Trust, especially as the decision wasn’t based on the outcome of a criminal prosecution, but rather that the Trust had lost faith in the shooting tenant’s commitment to the National Trust’s upland vision, including the restoration of raptor populations. It was a fantastic example of how public opinion and pressure can effect change.

However, other campaigners didn’t think the National Trust had gone far enough. They wanted to see the removal of the shooting tenancy altogether, rather than the Trust’s idea that a new, more enlightened shooting tenant would be installed in 2018.  This is when the campaign group, Moorland Vision, was formed.

For the last year, members of Moorland Vision have run a local campaign to secure petition signatures calling on the National Trust to remove the grouse shooting tenancy from this moor. They’ve collected nearly 5,000 signatures and have the support of fifteen local organisations:

Derbyshire Ornithological Society, Dark Peak Fell Runners, Darley & Nutwood LNR Management Group, Pleasley Pit Nature Study Group, Sutton-in-Ashfield and District Rambling Club, Ogston Bird Club, Derbyshire Mammal Group, Carsington Bird Club, Wessington Green LNR Management Group, Bakewell Bird Study Group, Buxton Ramblers, Derbyshire Amphibian & Reptile Group, Derbyshire Bat Conservation Group, Stanfree Valley Preservation Group, Derby Natural History Society.

Nick Moyes, the founder of Moorland Vision said: “The National Trust is a major conservation organisation and normally does brilliant work in protecting and enhancing our environment. But with clear evidence that moorland management for grouse shooting leads to the killing of birds of prey and almost every other predator – and especially here on its doorstep – you would think the National Trust would have decided immediately that enough is enough. The fact that it did not immediately recognise the opportunity this provides us with to re-wild and restore these moorlands without the well-documented problems associated with grouse moor management is really disappointing. Hence our petition“.

Bob Berzins from the Dark Peak Fell Runners said: “I and my club members see so much harm done by mis-management on the Peak District moorlands. The worst excesses are definitely on privately-owned shooting estates, where intensive burning, track building, predator snaring and shooting is particularly rife. But this is a one off opportunity for the National Trust to say ‘no more’ to management purely for one hobby and to show its true conservation credentials by establishing a proper rewilding project over 8,000 hectares of iconic moorland which would be far better for biodiversity and would create more natural landscapes – just as the Trust is helping to do on the Eastern Moors where the Peak Park banned shooting many decades ago“.

Congratulations to Moorland Vision for all their hard work over the last year. This is a fantastic grass-roots effort and has done much to increase awareness in the local community and beyond. It’ll be interesting to see how the National Trust responds.

Photo of some of the local campaigners (by Moorland Vision)

Gas gun on Broomhead Estate: an update

Ten days ago we blogged about a gas gun that had been photographed on the Broomhead Estate in the Peak District National Park (see here). This moor is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Special Protection Area (SPA) and Special Area of Conservation (SAC).

The SSSI and SPA designations are, in part, to provide protection for nationally important breeding bird populations, particularly short-eared owls, merlin and golden plover. As such, we believed the use of a gas gun would require consent from Natural England so we asked NE a couple of questions: (a) did the landowner apply for consent?; (b) did NE approve consent and if so, on what grounds? We also asked NE for a copy of the ‘appropriate assessment’.

Many of you also wrote to Natural England (thank you) and NE has now replied with this generic response:

Many thanks for getting in touch; In the case that prompted your enquiry I can confirm that a consent was issued for the use of gas guns to deal with a persistent problem of ravens attacking young lambs. We have contacted the estate who confirmed that although set up the guns have not been used this year. We have asked the estate to remove them as the consent has now expired.

You are right that the use of gas guns in the Peak District within the Protected Site (SSSI) could require Natural England’s consent depending on the specific species notified for that site. As a general rule consent is likely to be required where the following ‘operations requiring Natural England’s consent’ are listed in the notification papers:

  • Erection of permanent or temporary structures
  • Recreational or other activities likely to damage features of biological interest
  • Game management and hunting practice and changes in game management and hunting practice

The use of gas guns within, or immediately adjacent to Protected Sites, notified for their importance for birds requires careful consideration during sensitive periods, for example during the breeding season or where roosting birds are present. Where protected sites form part of the Natura 2000 network a Habitats Regulation Assessment is completed.

In the Peak District consent for gas guns limits use to when they are required, on a reactionary, rather than precautionary approach to deter large groups of juvenile ravens from predating on lambs. Their use is restricted to defined areas and use controlled within those areas to minimise the impact on the notified features. Such restrictions include numbers of gas guns to be used, time which they can be used, buffer zones around nest sites and regular third party monitoring (by the Birds of Prey Initiative for example). The timing of deployment is also restricted to ensure breeding ravens are not disturbed.

Natural England is committed to working with land owners to seek solutions that can both deliver the land owners objectives whilst at the same time protecting important wildlife on the protected site.

Jim

Natural England Enquiries Team

ENDS

 So, this response answers our first question: Did the landowner apply for consent? Yes, he did.
The response attempts to answer our second question: Did Natural England approve consent (yes) and if so, on what grounds?
The response failed to provide a copy of the appropriate assessment.
The idea that Natural England gave consent for the use of gas guns ‘to deal with a persistent problem of ravens attacking young lambs’ is fascinating. According to our local sources, the Dark Peak “is largely raven free”. Indeed, if you look at the latest report from the Northern England Raptor Forum (Annual Review 2015), it says this:
Peak District Raptor Monitoring Group
Extent of coverage: Part upland and part lowland areas
Level of monitoring: Excellent coverage; all or most sites receive annual coverage. Breeding ravens appear to be seriously under-represented in the PDRMG study area. Just two pairs were recorded breeding successfully in the Dark Peak area in 2015. One pair failed at the egg stage. A number of new nests were recorded but there were no birds in attendance and all appear to have failed early. One pair failed at the small young stage in the south west of the Peak District for reasons unknown. However, a further successful pair was recorded by the Group away from the Dark Peak in Cheshire.
We’ve written again to Natural England and asked them, again, to provide a copy of the ‘appropriate assessment’ and/or any other assessment that Natural England staff completed when they approved consent for gas guns on this moor.

Hen harrier ‘reintroduction’ to southern England: Project team visits France

Continuing on from recent blogs (here, here and here) about a series of updates on the proposed ‘reintroduction’ of hen harriers to southern England, here’s some more news gleaned from the latest FoI response from Natural England.

We know from previous FoI responses from Natural England that the Southern England Reintroduction Team has been scouting around looking for a donor population of hen harriers (see here). They’re not allowed to use any hen harrier eggs or chicks that might be ‘brood-meddled’ in northern England so they’ve been looking elsewhere in Europe. The Netherlands, Spain and Poland all said ‘no’ but France seemed to be a distinct possibility, which was a surprise given that the French hen harrier population is showing a long-term declining trend.

Earlier this year Adrian Jowitt (Natural England) wrote to researchers in France about a potential visit. This was to learn more about the captive rearing and release scheme (hen harrier & Montagu’s harrier) that the French have been undertaking for genuine conservation purposes, as the birds are threatened by industrial harvesting machinery before the young are able to fledge the nests in agricultural fields. The French team collects the birds, keeps them in captivity until the harvesting period is over, and then releases them back to the wild once the threat has ended.

Incidentally, the UK grouse-shooting industry often argues that this French conservation project is ‘proof’ that hen harrier brood meddling is a tried and tested conservation tool and they use it as justification for the UK brood meddling scheme. What they don’t seem to understand is that the two situations are incomparable. In France, the threat to the harriers is temporary (just during the crop harvest) and so the birds can be safely released back to the wild whereas in the UK, the threat to hen harriers is year-round, on the grouse moors and, increasingly, at winter roosts. There is no ‘safe’ time to release brood-meddled hen harriers in the UK.

Anyway, back to the France visit. Here’s a copy of Adrian’s email to the French researchers: Planning visit to France_May2017

It makes for quite an amusing read, as Adrian’s choice of words tries to minimise the scale of the problems the proposed project is facing in the UK – he mentions “small pockets of resistance” from some landowners (actually strong enough resistance that the Project Team is now suddenly keen to explore Dartmoor National Park as an alternative release site) but emphasises the ‘positives’ such as the Chair of Natural England declaring that he wants to see more hen harriers in England within the next three years. Yep, that’s what the grouse shooting industry claims too – talk is cheap.

In June this year some members of the Project Team did visit the French project and here’s Project Manager Simon Lee’s thank you email to the French researchers:

Simon says “Let’s not talk of the British politics again“. He probably didn’t mean this in a literal sense, rather it was likely just an acknowledgement that they’d spent a good deal of time talking about it during the visit. But talk of it he, and the rest of us, must, because whether the project is technically feasible or not isn’t the issue here; the ‘politics’ (i.e. legislation & ethics) is still the main issue to be addressed.

We’re not convinced that a reintroduction is legal. The IUCN guidelines are clear: ‘There should generally be strong evidence that the threat(s) that caused any previous extinction have been correctly identified and removed or sufficiently reduced‘. This criterion cannot possibly be met when the current hen harrier population is on its knees, showing no signs of recovery (see results from 2016 national survey), and the main cause of the decline (illegal persecution) has not been dealt with. We used the same argument against the planned re-stocking of golden eagles in southern Scotland, although in that scenario there is a counter argument that golden eagles in the Highlands (the proposed source birds) are just as likely to be killed in the north as they are in the south, whereas hen harriers in France would have much better survival prospects if they remained in France as opposed to being sent to persecution-rife England. (So, sorry, Simon, but your notion that this reintroduction could possibly “benefit European harrier conservation” is just ludicrous).

As for the ethics of reintroducing hen harriers to southern England, well we’ve talked about that over and over and over again. The proposed reintroduction is clearly a plan to move the focus away from the real problem (illegal persecution on grouse moors) – shove a load of hen harriers in the south, hope they survive, and then shout about how the species’ conservation status has improved, whilst ignoring the on-going illegal slaughter in the north. Job done.

And talking of ethics, here’s a rather confusing message from Jeff Knott (RSPB) to the new Southern Reintroduction Project Manager Simon Lees:

“While we have said we don’t actively support the reintroduction project, nor are we opposed to it and of course we would want to see it be a success“. Eh?

Photo of hen harrier nestlings by Andrew Sandeman.

Hen harrier ‘reintroduction’ to southern England: revised costs

Continuing on from recent blogs (here, here) about a series of updates on the proposed ‘reintroduction’ of hen harriers to southern England, here’s some more news gleaned from the latest FoI response from Natural England.

The estimated cost of a ‘reintroduction’ of hen harriers to southern England has previously been estimated at £515k (see DEFRA’s Hen Harrier InAction Plan).

Since DEFRA’s Inaction Plan was published in January 2016, we haven’t seen any other paperwork relating to these costs, or an explanation of how they were calculated. There was some comment last year from Natural England’s external funding bid, who were asked to provide advice to the Southern Reintroduction Project Team about a potential funding application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, that the final cost was more likely to be in excess of £2 million (see here).

However, in Natural England’s most recent FoI response, the details of a 2013 cost estimate (at the lower end of the scale) has now been released: HH southern reintro estimated project costs 2013

This estimate was described by the author (Ian Carter, who has since left NE) as “back of the proverbial fag packet stuff“. That’s fair enough. With so many project unknowns, it would have been difficult to provide anything more robust at that stage.

Fast forward four years and Natural England is now working to a revised cost estimate. It appears to have jumped from half a million quid to 1.15 million quid, and the only rationale, that we can see, is that this is how much the South Scotland Golden Eagle Project has just secured from the Heritage Lottery Fund:

Hen harrier ‘reintroduction’ to southern England: Dartmoor as potential new release site

Continuing from yesterday’s blog about a series of updates on the proposed ‘reintroduction’ of hen harriers to southern England, here’s some more news gleaned from the latest FoI response from Natural England.

We knew from previous FoIs that Natural England was looking at Wiltshire and Exmoor National Park as the two preferred release sites for translocated hen harriers. These two areas had been identified by an unpublished feasibility study (which in our opinion is a flawed study – see here). The study had initially examined four potential release areas: Dorset, Dartmoor, Exmoor and Wiltshire. Based on multiple assessment criteria, Exmoor National Park was identified as the #1 preferred choice, Wiltshire as #2, Dartmoor as #3, and Dorset was considered unsuitable.

We blogged about Exmoor National Park here and Wiltshire here and there were early signs of some local resistance to the project. The latest FoI response from Natural England reveals that there is still trouble at t’mill in both areas and so now Dartmoor National Park in Devon is being considered as a potential release site.

Local resistance in parts of Wiltshire and Exmoor National Park seems to be coming from those with shooting interests. Some of those involved with pheasant and partridge shooting in Exmoor NP appear to object to the project because it might lead to “undue scrutiny of legitimate activities“. Eh? If the shooting activities are legitimate why would they have any concerns about “undue scrutiny“?

It’ll be interesting to see whether the same concerns are raised by shooting interests in Dartmoor National Park (another popular shooting area). It’s clear that Natural England is hoping that new Project Manager Simon Lee’s contacts in the area will help things along.

Here are the notes from the Southern Reintroduction Team’s last meeting in May 2017 when these issues were discussed:

Hen harrier ‘reintroduction’ to southern England: new project manager appointed

As many of you will know, DEFRA’s Hen Harrier (In)Action Plan was launched in January 2016. We’ve been particularly interested in two of the six ‘action points’: Brood meddling, and a ‘reintroduction’ of hen harriers to southern England.

We blogged recently about how this year Natural England has been refusing to release any more information about the brood meddling plan (see here). Today’s blog (and several to follow) is an update on the southern ‘reintroduction’ project, following the release of various documents under FoI that has taken us seven months to prise from NE.

As a quick recap for the benefit of new readers, here’s what we were able to find out about the southern reintroduction plan last year:

  • That the feasibility/scoping report being used as the scientific justification for a hen harrier reintroduction is flawed (here)
  • Which individuals and organisations are involved with the project group and what the group’s planned work timetable looks like (here)
  • The potential funding options for this project (here)
  • Exmoor National Park as a proposed reintroduction release site (here)
  • Wiltshire as a proposed reintroduction release site (here)
  • From which potential donor countries is NE planning to source hen harriers (here)

So, the first update for this year is that Natural England has appointed a Hen Harrier Southern Reintroduction Project Manager. His name is Simon Lee and he has been an NE employee since 2000, so is probably regarded as a safe, reliable option. Here’s a bit about his career history that we found on an old website:

Simon’s experience working on Dartmoor may well have been a key consideration for this new appointment (that will become clearer in a later blog).

Simon has been busy getting up to speed with the project, having interesting chats (more on this later), visiting a potential donor site in France (more on this later) and, according to this short update he wrote for a recent Natural England Board Meeting, he’ll be helping to establish a technical group to produce a technical project plan. He might be doing other things too but NE redacted the second paragraph:

It’ll be interesting to see who is invited to serve on the technical group. As Mark Avery pointed out at the beginning of the year (here), the composition of the southern reintroduction project group “hardly looks like a list of independent experts“.

More blogs to follow shortly…..

Super computer needed to count this year’s English hen harrier nests

Here’s the tried and tested method that Natural England has deployed in recent years to count the number of hen harrier nests in England. In fact they’ve only needed one hand to complete the task.

This year, there are so many hen harrier nests, they’ve had to deploy a super computer to cope with the figures.

We know there must be loads and loads of nests, judging by the response we received from Natural England to a recent FoI request. In early July we asked NE the following simple questions:

  1. How many hen harrier breeding attempts in England are Natural England aware of in 2017, to date?
  2. How many of those were successful, to date?
  3. In which counties were the successful/unsuccessful nests?
  4. How many of those breeding attempts were on a driven grouse moor?

Today they responded and told us the information was being withheld for the time being. One of the reasons was a Public Interest Test, as follows:

Gosh! Soooooo many nests the data are having to be “quality assured and analysed” so as not to be misleading or inaccurate! We can hardly wait to see the results of such a challenging and complicated analysis.

Interesting to note that NE says the results “will be made available within the next month“. Will that be before or after Hen Harrier Day, which takes place in two and a half weeks?

SGA Chairman wonders why gamekeepers aren’t respected

We always look forward to the publication of Scottish Gamekeeper, the quarterly rag for members of the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association. As you can imagine, it’s often stuffed full of bright intellectual commentary and an appreciation of birds with hooked beaks and sharp talons.

The latest edition landed on our doormat last week and as ever, its content didn’t disappoint. Looking at the cover, we were particularly keen to read Chairman Alex Hogg’s thoughts on ‘working people’ (he means gamekeepers) being fed up about being wrongly ‘tarred’.

As an aside, we were also intrigued to see the Partnership for Action against Wildlife Crime (PAW) logo displayed on the banner. As some of you will recall, the SGA recently spat the dummy and announced they’d no longer attend PAW Raptor Group meetings. So apparently you can be a member of PAW, and pick and choose your own terms of engagement. Marvellous.

Anyway, back to Chairman Hogg’s musings on life. Here’s his column:

Apart from having to point out to Chairman Hogg (not known for his grasp of factual accuracy) that, contrary to his claim, the hen harrier is red-listed precisely because of ‘poor management actions by gamekeepers’ in Scotland (and of course in England), what really intrigued us was his confusion about why gamekeepers are so maligned.

It’s a tricky one alright. Maybe, perhaps, we’re not entirely sure, but might it have something to do with the fact that of all those convicted for offences related to raptor persecution in Scotland between 1994-2014, 86% of them were gamekeepers? (Source: RSPB 2014 annual review)

Or that of all poison abuse incidents reported in Scotland between 2005-2014, 81% of them took place on land managed for grouse and pheasant shooting? (Source: RSPB 2014 annual review)

Chairman Hogg also uses his column to whip up a spot of scaremongering (as was regurgitated by a gamekeeper’s wife in the Mail on Sunday last weekend) about the introduction of game shoot licensing claiming that “law abiding people will be at the mercy of the extreme fringe that want nothing other than grouse shooting stopped. For them, the removal of a few licences (and a few gamekeepers and their families) is a means to an end; a stepping stone“.

Why is licensing such a difficult concept to understand? If you break the terms of the licence, you get penalised. If you abide by the terms of the licence, you won’t get penalised. It’s really pretty simple. Perhaps by using the term ‘extreme fringe‘ Chairman Hogg is suggesting that gamekeepers will be ‘set up’ or framed. Has there ever been a case of this happening, where a gamekeeper has been wrongly convicted by the action of somebody else? We can’t think of one. Members of the ‘extreme fringe’, whoever they might be, have no need to ‘set up’ gamekeepers because gamekeepers keep on breaking the law all by themselves, time and time and time again.

To be fair, Chairman Hogg does have a point about all gamekeepers being tarred by the same brush. The reason this happens is because it’s virtually impossible for observers to distinguish between the law-abiding gamekeepers and the criminal gamekeepers. Even industry leaders don’t differentiate, so why should we? The criminals within the ranks are repeatedly shielded and protected by the game-shooting industry, until the point of conviction. Once they’re convicted, the leading organisations within the industry are put under strong public pressure to react, (e.g. a membership expulsion), but this is a fairly recent phenomenon and it doesn’t always happen (e.g. see here) and actually we’re still waiting for the SGA (and Scottish Land & Estates and Wildlife Estates Scotland) to comment on the membership status of convicted gamekeeper William (Billy) Dick who committed offences on the Newlands Estate in Dumfriesshire. We’ll come back to this case soon.

However, as everybody knows, convictions for raptor persecution are as rare as hens teeth (especially when the Crown Office refuses to accept what appears to be clear cut evidence of alleged crimes) and so the SGA and others within the industry spend their time concocting the most fantastical explanations for what might have happened to the crime victims (e.g. see here, here, here, here) instead of focusing on the blindingly obvious suspects. That isn’t going to earn Chairman Hogg et al any respect, and will simply engender the commonly-held view that many (not all) gamekeepers are nothing more than irredeemably archaic luddites.

Here are some top tips for earning back some respect:

  1. Stop killing raptors
  2. Er
  3. That’s it

There’s nothing ‘draconian’ about licensing game shooting estates

There were a couple of articles published in the Scottish Mail on Sunday yesterday about the possibility (probability) of the introduction of game shoot licensing in Scotland.

The first article didn’t bring anything new to the story; it was just a re-hashed version of who’s said what since Cabinet Secretary Roseanna Cunningham announced a package of new measures to address the on-going problem of raptor persecution and unsustainable grouse moor management. Lord David Johnstone of Scottish Land & Estates talked about maintaining the status quo (i.e. no licensing scheme required), James Reynolds of RSPB Scotland talked about the necessity of introducing a licensing scheme because self-regulation by the grouse-shooting industry has failed, and an unnamed spokesman from the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association talked about how licensing could have serious consequences for gamekeepers and their families. The two journalists who wrote the article described the Government’s proposed review as ‘the latest blow to landowners following draconian land reforms and the abolition of tax breaks’.

What ‘draconian land reforms’ are those, then? And why should multi-millionaire landowners, whose grouse moors are already subsidised by the public purse, be entitled to tax breaks?

Here’s a copy of the article, and for those who struggle to read it, here’s a PDF version so you can zoom in and increase the font size: MailonSunday1_July162017

The second article was a commentary column written by Carrieanne Conaghan, a gamekeeper’s wife who coordinates the ‘Speyside Moorland Group’ – one of several regional moorland groups closely affiliated with the Gift of Grouse propaganda campaign.

The headline begins: ‘As Draconian new land laws loom…’ These words probably weren’t Carrieanne’s but nevertheless, it’s clear from her commentary that estate licensing isn’t welcomed by gamekeepers because, she says, “For the vast majority of estates who have done nothing wrong and are resolute in their fight against wildlife crime, they would be penalised by strict new controls“.

Unfortunately she doesn’t explain why or how she things law-abiding estates would be “penalised by strict new controls“. The fact of the matter is, they wouldn’t be penalised at all, as the penalities would only be felt by those who continue to illegally kill protected raptors. And quite rightly so. Law-abiding gamekeepers, and their employers, have absolutely nothing to fear from the introduction of a licensing scheme, and you’d think they’d be welcoming it with open arms because if anything, it’ll protect them from being lumped in with the criminals.

Here’s the article and here it is as a PDF: MailOnSunday2_July162017

Carrieanne also claims that, “More worryingly, it [licensing] also brings the potential of gamekeepers losing their homes and livelihoods if a licence to operate was withdrawn“. This is just emotional scaremongering, probably encouraged by the same tosh spouted by SGA Chairman Alex Hogg earlier this year (see here). The only reason gamekeepers would potentially lose their homes and livelihoods would be if they’d broken the conditions of the licence and the subsequent withdrawal of that licence. That principle applies to everybody else in society whose activities are licensed. It’s the risk you run if, for example, you’re a professional driver and you commit road traffic offences leading to the loss of your driving licence. Why should gamekeepers be exempt from regulation when everyone else’s lives are governed by such rules?

Carrieanne claims that the licensing proposal has been brought about by “activists who object to the very existence of grouse moors, whether their opposition is based on a dislike of shooting or the ‘toffs’ who they believe are the only ones who participate“. Actually, the proposal was brought about by ordinary members of the public who are sick to the back teeth of criminal gamekeepers and their employers getting away with the illegal slaughter of protected wildlife, particularly on driven grouse moors.

Carrieanne claims that raptor persecution is “in decline” and that “tough new legislation has had a positive effect“. She also thinks, because her gamekeeper husband told her, that gamekeepers “desire to manage moorland for the interests of all species, whether it be grouse, ground-nesting birds, mountain hares or birds of prey“. Good grief.

She must have missed the Golden Eagle Satellite Tag Review, the findings of which were the final straw for Roseanna Cunningham and which led directly to the current proposition of a licensing scheme. She must also have missed the news that the hen harrier population continues to spiral downwards, thanks in large part to illegal persecution, and the news that peregrine populations continue to decline in areas dominated by driven grouse moors, and the news that the northern red kite population continues to suffer from the impact of illegal persecution on driven grouse moors, and the news that five prosecutions for alleged wildlife crime (all involving gamekeepers or their employers) have all been dropped in recent months, and the news that raptors continue to be illegally shot, even in recent weeks (see here, here) or illegally trapped (see here) on grouse moors up and down the country.

Did anyone see any gamekeepers or any moorland groups condemning these incidents? Where was their uproar? Where was their outrage? How many gamekeepers or members of moorland groups have provided information/intelligence to the police about any of these recent crimes? We’ll take an educated guess – none of them.

Carrieanne is right to be concerned about her family’s livelihood, but it’s not at risk from a licensing scheme, which is neither draconian or unnecessary; it’s actually a long overdue and pretty measured response to decades of criminality and unsustainable practices. Carrieanne’s livelihood is only at risk from those criminal gamekeepers and their employers who refuse to reform and continue to stick up two fingers to the law.

UPDATE 25 July 2017: SRSG response letter here