Labour looking into grouse shooting

[Scully]

33 minutes ago, Papercase said:

Doesnt suit there pockets either. Can anyone please explain to me why grouse moors would trap Hedgehogs?

To protect the eggs of ground nesting birds? 

Edited August 12, 2019 by Scully

[JohnfromUK]

Over the last 50 or so years I have visited the moors at least annually, more frequently in Wales in my younger years, more recently Scotland. I guess I have walked many hundreds of miles as I only really have done walked up shooting.   I have seen much wildlife includng golden eagles, ospreys, black game, ptarmigan, golden plover, snipe, adders, lizards, hares, foxes, deer,  - even the odd grouse - but I can't recall ever seeing a hedgehog on a moor.

[ShootingEgg]

37 minutes ago, JohnfromUK said:

Over the last 50 or so years I have visited the moors at least annually, more frequently in Wales in my younger years, more recently Scotland. I guess I have walked many hundreds of miles as I only really have done walked up shooting.   I have seen much wildlife includng golden eagles, ospreys, black game, ptarmigan, golden plover, snipe, adders, lizards, hares, foxes, deer,  - even the odd grouse - but I can't recall ever seeing a hedgehog on a moor.

Hedgehogs live in a broad range of habitats.

Apart from very wet areas and extensive pine forests, they live in most parts of Britain.

They are also often scarce in upland areas such as moorlands and mountainsides. Hedgehogs enjoy living on the edge of woodlands. They thrive in the mosaic of hedges, fields and woodlands that characterise the British countryside.

---------

So like you say, not likely to be on the moors..... 

[JohnfromUK]

A bit more; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7350433/Labour-gets-roasting-countryside-groups-declaring-war-grouse-shooting.html

[Papercase]

Ian Bothams Article today in the Telegraph - bang on!

The press release detailing the Labour Party’s proposed review of grouse shooting deserves a place in the National Archives. It will speak to generations to come as an example of how policymakers living in posh London postcodes can get so many basic facts about the countryside spectacularly wrong.

Exhibit one. It claims that grouse moors are putting the environment at risk by drying out moorland. Only one problem with that: gamekeepers make huge efforts to keep the moors wet, because grouse love the heather that flourishes in damp conditions. A basic Google search reveals dozens of expert sources on how grouse moors are being “rewetted”. And if Labour’s environment team doesn’t trust experts, they should try walking on a grouse moor. Every time their Islington loafers plunge knee-deep into the boggy ground, they can consider it evidence that they have been misled. The moors were drained 50 years ago because the government told moor owners to do this. Then the policy was reversed. Labour is merely a few decades out of date.

Exhibit two. Labour says that grouse moors receive £3 million of taxpayers’ money for grouse shooting. Not so. The vast majority of this money is for the sheep farming which takes place on moorland used for shooting.

 

Exhibit three. This is my favourite. The press release says that driven grouse shooting should be replaced by “simulated shooting”, which would be a “viable” alternative for the rural economy. But why would people travel for hours to the remote uplands to shoot clay pigeons when they could do that on the outskirts of any big city? Why would owners spend millions on the upkeep of our heather-clad hills? They would simply become ecological deserts for want of investment.

Labour’s proposed ban on driven shooting would simply drive up unemployment. It would impoverish working-class communities which rely on shooting to keep the local hotels and taxi companies going when the summer tourism fades away.

How has Labour got this so wrong? One clue in its press release is its reliance on the RSPB. The charity has form for twisting the facts. A team of scientists were so concerned about this that they wrote a paper for the Royal Society, saying that the charity’s claims about grouse moors carried only a “passing resemblance” to the facts.

The RSPB is a campaigning business run by activists who hate shooting. For evidence, look no further than their vice president, Chris Packham, who has called grouse shooting “satanic”. He is the man who earlier this year used lawyers to force Natural England to ban predator control during the height of the breeding season. That meant farmers and gamekeepers were unable to shoot crows. The result was the death of thousands of songbirds, as well as countless lambs having their eyes pecked out by crows.

 

There’s another reason the RSPB loathes grouse moors: they are awash with birds. Gamekeepers are so good at keeping predators under control that ground-nesting birds breed in huge numbers. Newcastle and Durham universities estimated that if game-keepers stopped work – as Labour’s policy implies – the result would be 
87 per cent fewer curlew chicks and 
95 per cent fewer golden plover.

The RSPB has long accused gamekeepers of killing not just foxes and crows but also hen harriers, which eat grouse. Yet that excuse has run out. Last weekend, Natural England revealed that a record number of hen harriers had fledged in England – 47 chicks, most in nests on land managed for grouse shooting.

Yet what about on RSPB reserves, where little predator control happens? Government figures show that hen harriers do less well on RSPB land than elsewhere. If Labour wants to encourage birdlife, it could ask the RSPB to say how many birds it has on its 200 reserves. It stopped publishing the numbers in 2012. I wonder why.

Given that grouse moors have become Britain’s best bird sanctuaries, you have to question why Tony Juniper, the chairman of Natural England, has called for grouse-moor owners to be charged for crimes committed by gamekeepers. He thinks society should assume owners would know about illegal activity by their gamekeepers on remote hillsides. Assuming guilt is never a good idea. Yet Mr Juniper is a former leader of Friends of the Earth. So ideological posturing goes with the territory.

 

Nature does best when it is managed by pragmatists who live in the countryside. Every farmer and gamekeeper knows that it is full of unavoidable choices. We either have fewer foxes or fewer curlews. Fewer crows or fewer songbirds. I would like to invite Labour’s team up on to a moor, with wellington boots on, to discuss these choices. We could then sit down for a delicious lunch of grouse – a bird which will have spent its entire life in the wild before being shot, unlike the chicken sold in an Islington supermarket, which would have lived just six weeks in desperately cramped conditions before being slaughtered.

Sir Ian Botham is a grouse shooting enthusiast and former England cricketer

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Good writing from Ian Botham, it is all about the Liebour Party's hate of what they view as people of higher classes enjoying themselves.

[ShootingEgg]

39 minutes ago, TIGHTCHOKE said:

Good writing from Ian Botham, it is all about the Liebour Party's hate of what they view as people of higher classes enjoying themselves.

I hate that it's all about class. No one I shoot with, would ever put them selves I. The upper class. I've shot longleat and even there no one would sit in that category on the shoot days. 

Yes there are high paid well to do people who shoot, but so what, why should it ever come down to that..

Winds I up

[Yellow Bear]

2 minutes ago, ShootingEgg said:

Yes there are high paid well to do people who shoot,

I bet there are more "high paid ,well to do" people at the top of the Lieboor party virtue signaling .

[Smokersmith]

Nice work Sir Ian … not for the first time, glad he's on our team :-)

[ShootingEgg]

3 hours ago, Yellow Bear said:

I bet there are more "high paid ,well to do" people at the top of the Lieboor party virtue signaling .

Exactly that

[islandgun]

This might be of interest

http://www.langholmproject.com/news.html

[markm]

18 minutes ago, islandgun said:

This might be of interest

http://www.langholmproject.com/news.html

What happened to the nests last year makes for interesting reading. 

[norfolk dumpling]

Bottham's article spot on - saw it on Facebook this am. Packham on C4 really lost it and his extreme statements lost his argument. I think he needs to up his medication. Clear to me 'care in the community' just doesn't work - he needs a padded cell.

[Papercase]

17 hours ago, islandgun said:

This might be of interest

http://www.langholmproject.com/news.html

Cheers islandgun - I've often heard the project mentioned by GWCT but never seen the website. Thanks

[islandgun]

20 hours ago, markm said:

What happened to the nests last year makes for interesting reading. 

Yes it does, not what packam wants to hear

3 hours ago, Papercase said:

Cheers islandgun - I've often heard the project mentioned by GWCT but never seen the website. Thanks

The moor is up for sale and it looks like it may be a community buy out, lets hope they look at the project and decide on continuing the management that is working so well.. and that avery and his desciples dont crowd fund it and turn it into a safe haven for foxes and ravens with intermittent summer muir wild fire, to clear out the last of the curlew