Illustrated, for no particular reason, with photos from a recent short walk along the canal at Hungerford, showing a few common hybrid Mallards and a Moorhen.
A new report from the RSPB on the illegal killing of birds of prey, protected by law under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, uses data collected over fifteen years. “…between 2009-2023, there were 1,529 confirmed bird of prey persecution incidents involving 1,344 individual birds of prey.” The crimes are carried out by means of shooting, trapping and poisoning. As with all wildlife crime, it’s important to bear in mind that these are just the ones we know about. If likely and unconfirmed incidents are included, the number jumps to some 5,000.
Bird crime across the UK showing no signs of stopping
The RSPB is unequivocal: “The majority of raptor persecution incidents are associated with land managed for gamebird shooting, where some individuals deliberately target birds of prey to maximise the number of gamebirds available to shoot for sport.” For example, this accounts for three quarters of annual Hen Harrier mortality. Of actual convictions for these offences, some 75% were connected to the shooting industry. Full reports can be found here:
Grouse shoots in Scotland now require a licence which is a step in the right deterrent direction, but I agree with Protect the Wild who argue that the shoots need to be stopped altogether. In what the RSPB describes as a game-changer, secretly recorded footage with unusually high audio quality shown on Channel 4 news exposes three gamekeepers discussing the killing (“nolling”) of Harriers (“jets”), a Buzzard (“bomber”) and Ravens (also a protected species). They curse if they see that a bird is “boxed”, i.e. tagged, but if it isn’t, if it is “clean”, if there’s “f*** all on it” then it should be “biffed”.
A spokesperson for the Moorland Association called Andrew Gilruth says: that “rather than attack rural communities with these sweeping generalisations, why is the charity not celebrating the boom in [the harrier] populations?” but of course there is no boom (quite the opposite) and little if any benefit to rural communities. He also unwittingly makes the case for a total ban, saying that licensing, which he sees merely as red tape, since it hasn’t worked in other industries, won’t work with game bird shooting. In other words, these people simply cannot stop themselves. If licensing is pointless as he says (and of course self-regulation simply doesn’t happen), that only leaves one solution.
Meanwhile in Derbyshire there’s evidence of the level of education in terms of wildlife provided to the police, two of whom who approach and then search a pair of masked hunt saboteurs, sitting in their car, trying to protect badgers from the cull. It is beyond parody. They are accused of “the disturbance, theft and burglary of badger setts”. In addition to the complete betrayal of their promise to bring an end to the cull, the Labour government, as well as allowing the existing supplementary culls to continue, has now added a further 10,500+ for pointless slaughter. They know and have stated, in their manifesto, that the cull does not work. Under a Freedom of Information request from the Badger Trust, Natural England has confessed: ““Neither members of the licensed companies who carry out fieldwork, nor Natural England undertake population estimates.” Local extinctions seem inevitable, but I guess that’s the idea. Also revealed is the cost of the cull between 2014 and 2023 – a staggering twenty-two million pounds (or thereabouts). That is a lot of our money. As Peter Hambly, Chief Executive of Badger Trust, said this is “is the biggest assault on nature and the most unethical approach to animal welfare on record.
Hare coursing also continues unabated – in one local incident, between 10 and 25 carcases were recently discovered.
The Humane League UK is admirably taking the government to court over the matter of “Frankenchickens”, selectively bred to grow unnaturally fast in the most appalling conditions, arguing that “the use of these breeds is already illegal, violating the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007 – which states farmed animals can’t be kept if their genes cause them suffering.” Chris Packham points out that over a billion chickens are killed each year – and yet we hardly ever see them. This is an appeal, the original case was rejected on the basis that it was up to farmers to deal with matters of animal welfare, but they are in fact following guidance on breeds and the environment laid down by DEFRA.
I remember being told when young and travelling that the reason for being careful eating food in certain countries was that it would likely make you ill, since crops were fertilised with human excrement. But that is exactly what has been happening in the UK to the tune of 170,000 truckloads of “sludge” per annum – the water companies are not just polluting our rivers, streams and seas with sewage, but also our land, the crops and the animals which feed on them. The microplastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals in the sludge inevitably work their way back into our bodies. Dr Alastair Boxall, a professor in environmental science at the University of York, says that, especially in comparison with other European countries, our government is complacent and “stuck in the dark ages.” And no one monitors it. The direct effect on communities in terms of the stench from the sludge is something we experienced year a few years ago – it was almost impossible to go outside for several days, the smell literally making people retch. If we bothered to look closely at what is in the sludge, said Dr Boxall, “I suspect … we’d come to the conclusion that sludge shouldn’t go to land in the first place.”
It seems absolutely clear that farming in the UK needs to be completely rethought, and regulated (and, crucially, enforced) literally from the ground up.
Increasingly desperate and panicky fox hunters are once again trotting out the tired old lie that hounds used for hunting, who are treated horrifically, abused, neglected and killed once they outlive their usefulness in any case (or just because they are too playful for example) cannot be rehomed and would therefore have to be done away with. Protect the Wild confirms that this is manifestly untrue. Very recent footage of a fox being killed by hounds has been released, the record of an incident which the police apparently refused to attend. One rider dismounts, retrieves the body from the pack and casually chucks it into a bush, presumably to conceal the evidence.
Megan McCubbin, Chris Packham’s step-daughter, has released a video of her visit to the Faroe Islands, reporting on the grindadráp, the barbaric slaughter of whales and dolphins. She argues for a suspension of our free trade agreement by which we import over £1 billion of fish products annually. The perpetrators argue that is about sustainability and tradition, but Megan makes short shrift of that, coming across discarded rotting corpses, abandoned like so many pheasants after a shoot.
A Facebook post I happened to register celebrates the performances of the Lippizan horses at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, which I was once taken to see by my parents. Horses being forced to stand on their hind legs is described as “an elegant maneuver … a living expression of tradition, art, and the timeless beauty of equestrian mastery.” That last word is quite the giveaway.
Also a powerful quotation from Fyodor Dostoevsky: “People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” One only has to think for example of the outlandishly sadistic and utterly pointless psychological experiments carried out on primates and wonder how the very sick individuals who contrive and execute them them even dream them up in the first place.
Hedgehogs, twenty-three of whom I was privileged to look after yesterday at HART Wildlife Rescue are now classed as “near threatened” on the red list after a terrible decade of population decline. Some are keen to blame nasty badgers, who do occasionally predate them, but the actual causes are all the usual suspects – habitat loss, urban development, the way we maintain our gardens and in particular … the use of pesticides. One in four UK mammal species is now threatened with extinction.
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