Category: News

Last month we blogged about how Stephen Watson, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, had come under increasing pressure to improve his Force’s responses to reports of wildlife crime in the region following a number of failures to deal with raptor persecution incidents including the poisoning and shooting of protected species.

Criticism of the Force’s approach to wildlife crime had come from various groups including the Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust and the RSPB, supported by Supt Nick Lyall, Chair of the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group.

There was a meeting between all parties in July 2019 which offered an opportunity for a frank exchange of views and Chief Constable Watson was told of the perception that South Yorkshire Police ‘are not interested or active in tackling wildlife crime as there is a conflict of interest between the officers leading on wildlife crime and their personal involvement in the shooting industry‘.

In August Liz Ballard (Chief Exec, Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust) and Mark Thomas (RSPB Investigations) wrote an open letter to Chief Constable Watson to follow up on several action points from the July meeting.

As a result, the Wildlife Trust is reporting a number of ‘encouraging replies’ from Chief Inspector Mark James, South Yorkshire Police’s lead for Wildlife and Rural Crime. Commitments have been made to complete a systems review of wildlife crime reporting and responses, participation in this month’s Operation Owl UK awareness-raising weekend, and an invitation to the Wildlife Trust to attend the South Yorkshire Police wildlife crime conference in October, amongst other things.

Liz Ballard said: “Inevitably, we will only know if the commitments and improvements proposed have had any affect when local people and organisations tell us they feel they are being listened to and getting the right response from the police, and when the statistics show an increase in the reporting of wildlife crime and an appropriate result. The Trusts offers our support to South Yorkshire Police and we hope they will become a leading Force for tackling wildlife crime.”

This appears to be a good response to criticism by South Yorkshire Police – let’s hope they can deliver. Well done Liz Ballard and colleagues, and Mark Thomas and Supt Nick Lyall for holding this police force to account.

Operation Owl originated as a multi-agency initiative led by North Yorkshire Police in 2018, designed to raise awareness of illegal raptor persecution across the county (see here), and especially in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, North York Moors National Park and the Nidderdale AONB, all known to be areas where raptor killing is rife.

Earlier this year, Police Supt Nick Lyall (Chair, Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group) took the brand and expanded it to become a national campaign, fully endorsed by the National Police Chiefs Council (see here).

As a follow on to this, in two weeks time (Sat 21 – Sun 22 Sept) there will be a nationwide raptor persecution awareness campaign under the banner of Operation Owl.

This campaign is being coordinated by Sgt Stuart Grainger, one of the leading lights of North Yorks Police Rural Task Force. In addition to inviting as many regional police forces as possible, Stu is also encouraging participation from non-police organisations and individuals.

The coordinated message from this campaign has been listed by Stu as follows:

The first seven points are uncontentious no-brainers. However, points 8 and 9 look to be clumsily expressed. Sure, educate the public on the difference between legally and illegally-set traps, that’s an important distinction, but the promotion of ‘good estate management practices’ is highly contentious. It’s that word ‘good’. Just because something is lawful doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ‘good’ and definitely shouldn’t be promoted as such by the police!

That minor point aside, this national awareness campaign deserves everyone’s full support. If you have an organisation that would like to get involved, please email Stu Grainger to help him coordinate: stuart.grainger@northyorkshire.pnn.police.uk

If you’re not part of an organisation but would still like to get involved on social media, there’s no need to sign up, just look for the #OpOwl2019 hashtags during the campaign weekend and join in!

‘We’re waiting for Werritty’ has been a tedious and tiresome response for months now.

I wrote a long four-page article on this topic back in July, for the September edition of Birdwatch magazine. I wondered at the time whether the article would still be relevant by September because, surely, the Werritty Review would be published before the Sept edition of Birdwatch, right? It was stupid of me to be concerned; of course the Werritty Review hasn’t yet been published.

[Thanks, Birdwatch, for commissioning this work and continuing to highlight illegal raptor persecution with such prominence. The Sept edition is now available in the shops or online].

Originally due to report in Spring 2019, the Werritty Review (a Scottish Government-commissioned review of grouse moor management) was initially delayed due to health reasons, which is fair enough. Then we heard it’d report in June, then we heard it’d be in July, then we heard from Professor Werritty himself that it’d be ‘during the summer‘.

At the end of July, in response to public fury about on-going illegal raptor persecution on Scottish grouse moors, a Government spokesperson told us the report ‘was due in the next few weeks’ (see here).

Five weeks on and now in to September (some of us consider this to be autumn) and we’re still ‘waiting for Werritty’.

One of the major concerns about this ongoing delay was that the Scottish Government would have insufficient time to factor the Werritty Review in to its 2019 – 2020 work programme and thus any recommendations that Professor Werritty had made in his review would be kicked further in to the long grass and left to rot and fester for another few more years.

However, somebody in the Scottish Government appears to be on the ball. The Programme for Government has been published today (see here) and tucked away on page 59 is this:

That’s promising, sort of, in that we can expect a response before the end of 2020(!).

Wild Justice’s petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting had reached the 10,000 signature threshold required for a Government response within hours of going live on 13th August 2019.

DEFRA has now finally managed to compose a response (see here) and it lives up (down) to what we’ve come to expect from a wilfully blind Government that’s all about protecting vested interests rather than protecting wildlife and the environment.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The response appears to be a series of unconnected and irrelevant paragraphs, some clearly copied and pasted from previous responses, jumbled together in a failed attempt to appear coherent and intelligent. The end result is nothing of the sort, just a magnificent display of uncritical thinking and a refusal to engage with the actual issues raised.

Here it is in its full glory:

It’s very noticeable that this response statement only mentions driven grouse shooting once. The rest of the time DEFRA refers either to ‘grouse shooting’, ‘shooting activities’, ‘shooting’, and ‘game bird shooting’. This inconsistency can be expected when sentences have been copied and pasted from so many different sources, but it makes it look like DEFRA isn’t paying attention or, more likely, that it simply can’t be arsed and, crucially, misses the point that the petition focuses on driven grouse shooting, not the other types of grouse shooting which, arguably, are far more sustainable, certainly in relation to current management practices for driven grouse shooting.

As usual, there’s simply no acknowledgement that the driven grouse shooting industry is dependent upon wildlife crime, to such an extent that it is having detrimental effects on some raptor species at the population level. We’re not talking about one or two individual birds here, we’re talking about impacts on entire populations, sometimes at a regional level and sometimes at a national level. Ironically, the peregrine, used here by DEFRA as an indicator of success, is one of those species adversely affected on a regional (here) and a national scale (here) by illegal persecution on driven grouse moors. DEFRA tries to underplay this by stating ‘there are still individuals who continue to commit these crimes’. It’s classic wilful blindness, refusing to address the extent of the criminality either because of vested interests or for fear of reprisals (in this case, loss of votes and donations) from those involved.

If this DEFRA statement was an essay written by a university undergraduate, it’d be returned with a low grade and a ‘you need to do better than this or you’ll be booted off the course’ comment. The lack of critical thinking skills is startling. Seriously, why on earth would anyone think this was a useful sentence to include:

‘A report by the UK shooting community concludes that the overall impact of game bird shooting is positive‘.

In a strange way it’s actually quite reassuring that the quality of DEFRA’s response is this bad. It tells us that they (Government and its mates in the grouse shooting industry) haven’t developed any new ideas, can’t deal with the mounting evidence, and refuses to budge from a position of obstinate denial. This should provide us with all the motivation we need to continue applying pressure and gathering support for our movement.

For a more detailed deconstruction of DEFRA’s response, have a look at Mark Avery’s blog here.

At 7.32pm last night, less than three weeks after launching, this petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting secured the 100,000 signatures required for it to be considered for a debate in Westminster Hall.

The speed with which this was achieved is simply phenomenal. By way of comparison, the last time a petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting reached 100,000 signatures (in 2016) it took five months to get there.

This speed and this surety this time around will not have gone unnoticed.

A MASSIVE THANK YOU to everyone who has helped us reach the target. This is an ever-increasing movement of motivated and determined citizens and many people have helped spread the word about the petition, resulting in this landslide result.

We await the Government’s written response which was due after the petition reached 10,000 signatures (20 days ago, and counting) and now we also await a decision from the Petitions Committee who will consider our petition for a debate.

The petition is still live (here), for now!

If you’ve got a spare five minutes it would be well spent listening to this radio interview on yesterday’s Farming Today programme on BBC Radio 4. (Starts at 7 min 50 sec)

It pits Ian Thomson (Head of Investigations, RSPB Scotland) against Duncan Thomas (BASC) discussing the ongoing illegal persecution of birds of prey on driven grouse moors.

It’s a masterclass from Ian, who bats away Duncan’s witless nonsense with ease.

Meanwhile, Chris Packham’s petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting is currently on 87,000 signatures – it needs 100,000. If you can help, please sign here.

[Ian Thomson speaking at this year’s Hen Harrier Day in Derbyshire. Photo by Ruth Tingay]