Category: News

Intensive grouse moor management not only has catastrophic consequences for the environment (and especially for raptors), but the end product carries serious public health risks, too.

A couple of years ago we wrote a blog about the use of medicated grit to dose red grouse with a parasitic wormer drug called Flubendazole.

There is a statutory requirement to remove veterinary drug residues from food destined for human consumption no later than 28 days before the food is available for sale.

We’d learned that the use of medicated grit on grouse moors was largely unregulated (surprise!), that some grouse moor managers were using a super-strength drug that was 10 times, and sometimes 20 times, the strength permitted for use in the UK, and, most incredibly, that the Government’s statutory agency (Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD)) responsible for monitoring meat to ensure harmful drugs are not entering the human food chain, had not ever tested a single red grouse for residues of Flubendazole because, staff said, they didn’t know where to find dead red grouse (see here).

Photo of a medicated grit tray on a Yorkshire grouse moor, by Ruth Tingay

Prompted by our investigation, the VMD said it would begin to screen recently shot red grouse for veterinary drug residues in 2016, but that VMD staff wouldn’t visit grouse moors to examine whether medicated grit had been withdrawn within the statutory 28-day period because that was beyond their remit. Instead, they would rely on the grouse moor managers to act within the law (ha!).

We followed up on the new testing regime and in 2016 we learned that the VMD had managed to screen a pathetic total of six (yes, six!) red grouse in the whole of the UK (4 in England, 2 in Scotland), out of a conservatively estimated 700,000 shot birds.

Last month, at the end of the 2017 grouse shooting season, we asked the VMD how many red grouse they’d managed to test for veterinary residues in 2017. Here’s their response:

Are they taking the piss? Eight red grouse tested in the whole of the UK? That’s hardly reassuring for consumers, is it?

And once again, the VMD claims not to know the origin of the birds it tested. Talk about incompetent. What if one of those birds had tested positive for residues of Flubendazole? The VMD wouldn’t have been able to take follow-up action because they wouldn’t have known the name of the grouse moor on which the bird had been shot!

So, yet another reason not to risk your health by eating potentially contaminated red grouse. Not only might it contain unknown quantities of the anti-parasitic worming drug Flubendazole, it might also contain:

• Excessive amounts of toxic poisonous lead (over 100 times the lead levels that would be legal for other meat – see here)
• Unknown quantities of the veterinary drug Levamisole hydrochloride (also used in chemotherapy treatment for humans with colon cancer – see here)
• Unknown quantities of the pesticide Permethrin (used topically to treat scabies and pubic lice; probably not that great to ingest – see here)
• There’s also a high risk the grouse will be diseased with Cryptosporidiosis (see here).

Two shot red grouse ready for cooking, yum yum. Photo by Ruth Tingay

Time for the filthy grouse shooting industry to be better regulated? God, it’s well overdue. You can sign this new petition calling for the introduction of a licensing scheme for driven grouse moors, here.

If you think licensing wouldn’t go far enough, you can also sign this new petition calling for a total ban on driven grouse shooting, here.

These two petitions apply only to England. The Scottish Government is way ahead of the Westminster Government on this issue and an independent review of grouse moor management practices has just begun, and many of us anticipate that it will result in the almost inevitable conclusion that licensing needs to be introduced. We know the review group will be examining the use of medicated grit as part of its remit, and we expect the group to find these latest results from the VMD’s inadequate testing regime to be of great interest.

A couple of days ago we blogged about an article in the Gazette & Herald that showed sackfuls of shot pheasants that had been dumped in woodland in the North York Moors National Park (see here).

Here are some of the photographs the newspaper didn’t publish, presumably as they’re too grim. Thanks to the blog reader who sent them to us.

Welcome to the National Park!

In November 2017, a small group of conservationists was invited to visit 10 Downing Street for a conversation about their environmental concerns with Sir John Randall, Theresa May’s recently appointed special advisor on the environment.

There’s nothing unusual about that. Conservationists routinely meet with advisors, MPs and Ministers to discuss such issues. But this was no ordinary group. It comprised a bunch of committed and environmentally aware teenagers, as follows:

Findlay Wilde, aged 15, schoolboy.

Jordan Havell, aged 16, schoolboy.

Josie Hewitt, aged 19, first year ecology student at University of East Anglia.

Georgia Locock, aged 18, first year ecology and economics student at University of York.

Incredibly, and hilariously, the discussion at this meeting, and subsequent correspondence between Sir John Randall and schoolboy Fin Wilde, has resulted in a number of pro-hunting/shooting MPs accusing Ministers of ‘plotting war on fieldsports’!

This was the headline for an article in yesterday’s edition of The Telegraph, heralded as an ‘exclusive’, no less:

The furore seems to have stemmed from somebody reading Fin Wilde’s most excellent blog (here) where he wrote about the meeting at Number 10 and shared some of his later non-confidential correspondence with Sir John.

If you actually read Fin’s blog, and the comments made by Sir John, you’ll see nothing there to suggest a ‘war’ on fieldsports, just a series of concerns held by most reasonable-thinking members of society and a desire for the game shooting industry to clean up its act.

Sir John shared many of Fin’s concerns, including the continued illegal killing of birds of prey on driven grouse moors, other environmentally damaging practices associated with intensively managed driven grouse moors, the need to increase sentences for wildlife crime, the removal of firearms certificates for those convicted of wildlife crime, the problems associated with the industrialisation of some pheasant shoots, the continued use of lead ammunition, educating children about climate change, the impact of Brexit on environmental legislation, and the continued single use of plastics.

You’d think that MPs would welcome such thoughtful contributions from a group of teenagers who care enough about the environment to stand up and exercise their democratic right to voice their concerns, wouldn’t you? These are engaged and motivated youngsters who are a credit to society.

But no! A number of (unnamed) MPs are apparently up in arms, feeling threatened and apparently feeling ‘privately appalled’ by it all!

What are they actually saying here? That they don’t think firearms certificates should be removed from convicted criminals? That the illegal killing of raptors on grouse moors doesn’t need to stop? That the use of lead ammunition doesn’t pose a serious health and environmental threat?

We were particularly taken aback that the Telegraph article noted that Georgia Locock ‘has marched in protest against grouse shooting‘. So what? Why mention it? Are they trying to portray Georgia as some sort of militant extremist whose views should be taken with a pinch of salt? They couldn’t be further from the truth.

It’s a shame the Telegraph article didn’t mention the pro-shooting MPs who were recently photographed smiling at a parliamentary reception held for the Moorland Association with a number of gamekeepers in attendance, one of whom has a criminal conviction for, er, wildlife crime on a driven grouse moor.

Well done Fin, Jordan, Josie & Georgia – keep going, you’re doing a terrific job.

UPDATE 4 January 2018: In response, Fin Wilde has written a brilliant open letter to the Telegraph’s Chief Political Correspondent, Christopher Hope. Read it here.

Two new peer-reviewed papers from the GWCT confirm the significant spread of a disease in red grouse on intensively managed driven grouse moors, transmitted through the unregulated use of communal medicated grit trays.

The disease, respiratory cryptosporidiosis (also known as ‘Bulgy Eye’) has been, until recently, almost entirely associated with captive poultry flocks that have been kept at high density, usually for breeding purposes. It was first detected in wild red grouse in 2010 and since then has spread rapidly and has affected high density red grouse on half of the 150 grouse moors in northern England and has also been recorded in Scotland, although the extent of its spread in Scotland appears to be a well-kept secret. Perhaps we’ll learn more through the Scottish Government’s review of grouse moor management practices, particularly as one of the review group’s special advisors is Adam Smith from the GWCT.

We’ve known about the spread of this disease for a couple of years, and learned a great deal from a GWCT-led grouse moor seminar in 2015 where the preliminary research findings were presented (see here). The latest publications confirm the findings, although it’s worth bearing in mind the disease may well have spread further since these studies were conducted (2013-2015).

The first of the new papers was published in November 2017 and confirms that communal medicated grit trays distributed across grouse moors act as a reservoir for disease transmission via the faecal droppings of grouse visiting the trays:

Baines, D., Giles, M. & Richardson, M. (2017). Microscopic and Molecular Tracing of Cryptosporidium Oocysts: Identifying a Possible Reservoir of Infection in Red Grouse. Pathogens 6: 57.

This paper is open access which means we’re allowed to share it in full:

Crypto_Identifying infection reservoirs_red grouse_Baines et al2017

A typical grit tray contaminated with grouse faecal droppings on a Scottish grouse moor, photo by Ruth Tingay

The second paper has recently been accepted by the British Ornithologists Union journal Ibis and details the impact of Bulgy Eye on red grouse populations and highlights the economic loss this may cause to the driven grouse shooting industry:

Baines, D., Allison, H., Duff, J.P., Fuller, H., Newborn, D. and Richardson, M. (2017). Lethal and sub-lethal impacts of respiratory cryptosporidiosis on Red Grouse, a wild gamebird of economic importance. Ibis: accepted online 26 December 2017.

Unfortunately this paper is not open access so we’re only permitted to share the abstract (although we have read the full paper):

The significant spread of this disease is entirely of the grouse-shooting industry’s own making. If they weren’t so keen on cramming as many red grouse as possible on to their driven grouse moors (sometimes up to x 100 the natural density) and then using medicated grit to prevent the natural strongyle worm-induced grouse population crashes every few years (which they have successfully achieved), then Bulgy Eye should never have been a problem.

The question now is, what, if anything, are they going to do about it?

Presumably they’ll do something, if not in the interests of animal welfare or conservation, then certainly in the interest of stifling the economic losses caused by the widespread prevalence of this disease.

In the concluding remarks of the second paper, Baines et al say: “…. a general reduction in grouse densities, brought about through either de-intensified management, increased shooting rates or both may need to be carefully considered“.

May need to be considered? Good grief, you’ve got a disease epidemic on your hands, all of your own making, and you say these proposals may need to be considered?

We’d say the industry needs to do something pretty damn quickly, and the immediate removal of communal medicated grit trays should be right up there as the first obvious step.

An article in yesterday’s Gazette & Herald reports how hundreds of shot pheasants have been dumped in sacks near Helmsley, in the North York Moors National Park.

The article (here) says a local rambler first found four sacks of dead gamebirds in Hawnby Road on 26 November 2017. The rambler returned to the site last week and reportedly found several hundred more dead pheasants piled up in heaps.

According to a quote attributed to Liam Stokes of the Countryside Alliance, “It is worth pointing out that these birds all appear to have been breasted – the breast meat has been removed. Of course the rest of the carcass should have been disposed of appropriately, but it does appear that the meat from these birds has in fact entered the food chain“.

Amazing how Liam can see that “all these birds appear to have been breasted”. Can he see inside the sacks? Has he examined every one of these hundreds of dumped birds? Or is he in fact just trying to exert some serious damage limitation because he knows how politically damaging these images are for the game shooting industry?

It’s not the first time shot gamebirds have been dumped as waste in the countryside – as we’ve seen before here, here, here. Indeed, it’s a growing problem for the game shooting industry, as we blogged about just last month (see here).

It’s bad enough that an estimated 50 million non-native pheasants and red-legged partridge are released, unregulated, in to the countryside every year (yes, that’s 50 million EVERY YEAR) for so-called sport shooting, including inside our national parks, but then to just dump them as a waste product is a PR disaster for an industry under increasing scrutiny for its environmentally damaging activities.

Have a read of this article written by Charles Nodder of the National Gamekeepers Organisation who revealed in July that even though many shoots are struggling to get their shot birds in to the food chain, they are still releasing (and shooting) more and more and more every year.

Responsible? No.

Sustainable? No.

In dire need of regulation? Yes.

UPDATE 31 December 2017: More shot pheasants dumped in North York Moors National Park (here)

Last week we blogged about the publication of DEFRA’s latest raptor persecution maps (2011-2015), as developed by the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG).

We were highly critical of the maps (here) because we considered them to be inaccurate and out of date, difficult to navigate, and we argued that they would not, as DEFRA had claimed, help tackle wildlife crime. It was our opinion that DEFRA had published these useless maps as a desperate attempt, in the face of growing public concern, to make it look like it was actually doing something to tackle illegal raptor persecution.

The Northern England Raptor Forum (NERF), a member of the RPPDG, shared many of our concerns and publicly distanced itself from the maps (see here).

One of our main concerns about DEFRA’s useless maps was the amount of missing data (i.e. incidents that had been deliberately excluded, such as poisoned baits) and we said we would contact the RSPB to ask how many raptor persecution incidents they had recorded during the same period, for comparison.

It’s now very apparent that we were right to have concerns, not just about the poor quality of the maps but also of the dysfunctionality of the RPPDG, which, remember, is supposed to be a working partnership, but when you read the RSPB’s comments (below) and the statement from NERF, it’s pretty clear that the RPPDG is yet another partnership-working sham.

Many thanks to the RSPB’s Senior Investigations Officer Guy Shorrock who sent us the following insights yesterday:

Dear Raptor Persecution Scotland

Further to your email of the 15 December 2017 asking for details of confirmed raptor persecution data recorded by the RSPB from 2011 to 2015 inclusive I can provide the following information.

For this five year period we have 309 confirmed raptor persecution incidents, 106 of which are pesticide related incidents. Other than the pesticide incidents sourced through the government’s Wildlife Incident Investigation Scheme (WIIS), nearly all of this data (shooting/trapping) for the RPPDG map was supplied by the RSPB. In overview, the RPPDG map has 262 data points, the difference from the RSPB 309 data points is due to: –

• RSPB has 106 confirmed bird of prey poison incidents vs only 66 plotted on the RPPDG map (see below re WIIS data)
• Thirteen confirmed bird of prey persecution incidents supplied by RSPB were not included as they did not fit the group’s criteria
• A few errors in how the RSPB supplied data has been displayed – (there are 6 more incidents than there should be on the map, as four of the incidents we provided have been plotted as ten).

Data from WIIS for this period has been plotted at 66 incidents on the RPPDG map.  RSPB have the same WIIS data as representing 106 incidents, the two main reasons for this difference are that: –

1) incidents such as poisoned baits have not been included on the RPPDG map, and

2) the toxicology data supplied by WIIS has not been separated out into individual wildlife crime incidents.

RSPB use consistent spatial and temporal rules to decide how raptor persecution incidents should be recorded. This same method is applied to the WIIS toxicology data to produce wildlife crime incidents. The Glanusk case you mention in your blog provides a good example. During 2012 and 2013 a number of poison baits and victims were discovered on the Glanusk Estate, Wales over a twelve month period at a number of different locations. Using our rules we have mapped this as a total of 13 incidents. The RPPDG map has not included the poison baits and has grouped the raptor victims into a single incident.

RPPDG members, with the exception of NERF, had agreed the following phrase within a statement to go with the map ‘The inclusion of all categories of confirmed raptor persecution incidents (including e.g. poison baits, confirmed attempted incidents) will be considered for future updates’. We are disappointed that this clarification was not included and only became aware of this omission when the Defra media release was actually put out. I have tried to call Defra this morning to ask why this was omitted but have been unable to contact the relevant person. We were also surprised to see that Defra had linked the RPPDG map as a tool to support their Hen Harrier Action Plan. We were not aware that this was their intention, this was not part of the prepared RPPDG statement, and RSPB do not accept this is a valid claim.

RSPB believes that joint initiatives that help raise the awareness of raptor persecution are highly worthwhile and has invested significant time and resource supporting the NWCU and NE in the production of the RPPDG map. However, we do not accept the claim that this map by itself will enable the police in England and Wales to crack down on enforcement where it is needed most, as it is not providing anything we didn’t know already. RSPB has been publishing maps and details of confirmed incidents for over 20 years, in addition there is a huge amount of intelligence information gathered by RSPB and the statutory agencies plus a wide range of published work on raptor ecology and links to persecution. For example, it is clear that land on and around intensively managed grouse moors in the north of England are areas where species such as hen harrier and peregrine falcon are most at risk from persecution.

We believe the production of reliable and publicly accessible raptor persecution maps is a valuable initiative. Going forward, we hope future maps will include all raptor persecution incidents and that the toxicology results from WIIS will be properly categorised into wildlife crime incident data. Maps should also clarify whether any data has been omitted.

In order to make meaningful inroads into this difficult problem, the RSPB believe the key issue for the government to address is improving accountability on sporting estates. Key recommendations mentioned in our recent Birdcrime report include: –

‘Introduce a system of licensing for driven grouse shooting. Self-regulation has been given a chance but is not working. Therefore we propose introducing a fair set of rules in the form of a licensing system and code of practice, underpinned by law, to ensure shoots are operating legally and sustainably. This would also provide an effective deterrent to criminal activity, including loss of a licence to shoot in the most serious cases’.

‘Ensure shoot owners and managers can be held accountable for the actions of their gamekeepers by extending the vicarious liability legislation employed in Scotland to the rest of the UK’.

Just for the record, our first Birdcrime type annual report started in 1990, and first map of confirmed persecution incidents was in the 1994 report. I have attached a map of confirmed raptor persecution incidents from 1990 to 2016 (including RSPB & WIIS data) – this has 2545 data points (incidents for which we have a grid reference). As these are just the very tip of the iceberg, it is a rather sobering thought that there will undoubtedly have been tens of thousands of undiscovered and unreported confirmed incidents during this same period.

Guy Shorrock, RSPB Senior Investigations Officer