Blood Sports

Grouse moors make up roughly 20 per cent of all land in Scotland. The ecological impacts of the techniques for managing them, which include regular burning of heather, draining water-storing soils and peats, and medicating the grouse, are subject to renewed focus. The price of a single day’s grouse shooting for one person can apparently reach as high as £10,000 on some estates. By the end of the season, some half a million grouse will have been shot in the UK.

Hundreds of thousands of animals including foxes, weasels and stoats are being legally killed in the UK to protect grouse moors, naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham has claimed. 

Packham was speaking to The Independent following a spate of illegal killings of protected species on grouse moors in Scotland, including a case last week in which a gamekeeper from the Longformacus Estate in Berwickshire pleaded guilty to killing two goshawks, three buzzards, three badgers and an otter. The case was described by a wildlife official as the “biggest cull of protected species” they had ever seen. Other recent cases include the deaths and mysterious disappearances of golden eagles and hen harriers over grouse moors.

Packham and his group Wild Justice have been instrumental in highlighting the forces driving illegal raptor persecution in the UK, the TV presenter has also drawn attention to the extent of largely undocumented legal animal deaths carried out on private estates to maximise numbers of grouse on moors where expensive driven shoots take place.

“Legally they are allowed to get rid of weasels, stoats, foxes, and they do this relentlessly. And we have no idea how many of these animals are killed, but we know that obviously it runs into the hundreds of thousands. “f you abide by certain rules and if you own the land or have the landowner’s permission, then you can trap those species at any time of the year – there’s no closed season. And that’s what they do 365 days a year. They purge those predators,” he said.

Mountain hares are the UK’s only indigenous lagomorph species – brown hare and rabbits are modern introductions by humans. The distinctive species, which turns white in winter, are now rare where they were previously abundant. 

Mountain hares are being “ruthlessly” targeted, Packham said, due to gamekeepers’ belief they spread a tick carrying a virus called “louping ill”, to the grouse.

“As far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence this actually happens,” Packham said. “But because of a fear of it they ruthlessly cull the mountain hare population. In some estates they’ve exterminated them completely. They’ve gone for a complete hare genocide.”

Robbie Marsland, the director of the League Against Cruel Sports, pointed out,  “We do know from government figures that an average of 26,000 mountain hares are killed each year as the estates worry that they spread ticks to the grouse, and a recent report shows that 130,000 animals are killed under government species licences, though not all on grouse moors. On top of this, snares and traps litter the moors targeting foxes, stoats, weasels, crows and other birds. These devices are indiscriminate and commonly kill non-target species such as badgers and hedgehogs. People’s cats and dogs are also caught in snares.”

Bob Elliot, director of One Kind, a Scottish animal rights organization, detailed the slow and painful deaths these animals often endure.

“Animals such as weasels and stoats are caught in spring traps. Crows are caught in cage traps and then must endure stressful confinement until somebody comes to shoot or beat them to death. Foxes are caught in snares and can spend hours struggling before being found and killed, or succumbing to their injuries.” He added: “One of the most shocking issues for me is that there is very little information for the public to scrutinise how many foxes, stoats, weasels, crows are killed on grouse moors each year. It’s a free-for-all with no requirement to have proven other [control] methods have been tried first, nor any real requirement by gamekeepers or land managers to report anything to the authorities or the interested public – most of these species have no real protection in law at all.”