Pheasants
I don’t read Hello! magazine, but someone at Protect the Wild does and has reported with great wit on a piece which records that Charles (king) is “devastated” and “livid”. I am stealing from the PtW writer’s style, but about what could it be? The rise of the Far Right in Europe, the war on nature being waged by our government, the power of the tech oligarchs, Trump’s proposed annexation of Canada, the climate crisis? No, none of those. It’s about the potential end of a “key royal family tradition”. The distribution of alms perhaps, as PtW sarcastically suggests? Again, no. It’s the possibility that the Boxing Day mass pheasant slaughter on the Sandringham estate is under threat. Why? Not enough pheasants. So livid is he that he has fired a gamekeeper. It was queen Victoria’s husband, prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha who was in large part responsible for the introduction of driven bird shooting to the UK. Charles’ hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Patron of the Wildlife Trusts since 1977 and the RSPCA (shame on them) since 2024 and having lobbied Tony Bliar (sic) not to ban fox hunting, these things hardly sit well with his penchant for portraying himself as some sort of conservationist. 72% of the readership of Hello! when asked thought that the tradition should simply be discontinued.
So, how many pheasants (it is very tempting to leave the “h” out of that word sometimes) would he like there to be? The standard ‘bag’ for a day is between 350 to 500 birds between eight guns according to PtW. “King Charles would regularly host shooting parties on the Sandringham estate during his student days. He may now have assumed Prince Philip’s former role of “hunt leader”, although he is unlikely to try to match his father’s kill in 1993, when he apparently struck 10,000 pheasants during a seven-week stay at Sandringham. ‘Struck’? What a pathetic euphemism for ‘gunned down’…” So the king will be unable to satisfy his lust for blood and killing and injuring ‘gamebirds’* (a term which really should be done away with in the 21st century) as they fly in panic from the beaters this year. Oh dear. Poor king.
*From Animal Trust:
The word ‘game’ troubles me too. EIA, the Environmental Investigation Agency, the fearless undercover whistleblowers and campaigners, advertised a fund-raising competition or raffle with a “big game safari” as one of the prizes. I telephoned and wondered if they were not perpetuating an unpleasant and unhelpful wordage. It was all very amicable – they confessed that I had had them all scratching their heads, all morning, but in the end neither they nor I could come up with a better way of putting it with sufficient concision.
Organic farming
I wrote in my previous post about the decline of Starlings being largely due to intensive agricultural methods – massive monocultures stripped of hedgerows and pesticide use. But we have seen at Knepp and can see at many other farms that a natural, organic approach is not only good for wildlife and the planet but can actually increase profitability. This video about a collective of farmers and scientists in France is worth a watch:
Chemical-free farming brings life back to rural France | Watch
Licence to kill
I wrote at some length in Animal Trust about the granting of licences to kill protected birds (I usually use italics for quotes from the books but haven’t done so here for obvious reasons):
“Here’s a list, from Natural England, of bird species for which licences were issued to control them (i.e. kill them, always with the euphemisms – I use euphemisms myself in this book, such as “put to sleep” or “that painful decision”, but those sad deaths are brought about to end suffering, not for human convenience or twisted pleasure) between 2013 and 2018. I see that air traffic safety is a priority, but some of the justifications given are ludicrous. For completeness, I’ll mention that the ruddy duck is also listed as an invasive species.
Agricultural or fishery damage only (the italics are mine to indicate special disbelief): Brent goose, raven, starling (a special case, starlings can not only be killed but “taken or injured” as well), cormorant, goosander, moorhen, bullfinch.
Air safety only: curlew, oystercatcher, kestrel, peregrine falcon, red kite, stock dove, golden plover, skylark.
Combinations of reasons including public health or safety, air safety, conserving fauna, and agricultural damage: greylag goose, black-headed gull, herring gull, great black-backed gull, lesser black-backed gull, buzzard, grey heron, house sparrow, Egyptian goose, mallard, pink-footed goose, Canada goose, wigeon, mute swan, ringed plover, fantail dove, barnacle goose.
Of these last, the following are considered a threat to public health or safety (although there is often an “and/or” between reasons, muddying the water): Greylag goose, all of the gulls, house sparrow, Egyptian goose, mallard, pink-footed goose, Canada goose, wigeon, mute swan, ringed plover, fantail dove, barnacle goose.
Finally, licences are issued for these birds on the sole grounds that they are a threat to public health or safety: robin, wren, blackbird, great tit, coot.”
NatureScot is now considering allowing farmers to shoot young Ravens in Orkney. Farmers there have been heavily subsidised and are claiming that Ravens lie in wait to attack lambs and calves. And: “In Scotland itself, Conservative MSP Douglas Ross and Fergus Ewing joined forces in Holyrood this week to call for licences to kill gulls, telling the SNP government that residents are “at the end of their tether” and that “serious injury or fatality could arise from massive gulls swopping [sic] down on elderly and infants”. A fatality? Really?
From BirdGuides I learn that Cormorants (pictured above) are as ever also in the firing line: “A draft proposal from the United Nations (UN) to allow widespread Great Cormorant culling in Europe has been met with criticism.” They are not the cause of falling numbers of fish – those are “overfishing, pollution and habitat degradation”. In 2018 the Angling Trust in Britain “publicly urged fisheries and fishing clubs to submit more applications for licences to control Goosander and Great Cormorant numbers.”
A couple of depressing cases of vandalism are included in the BirdGuides newsletters too, of a site designed to protect nesting Ringed Plovers in Norfolk and of a bird hide in Cambridgeshire destroyed by arsonists (as happened during lockdown of a hide at a reserve local to me).
Protect the Wild also reports that their excellent searchable website
now lists over 1,000 businesses which means that there a lot of people providing information who want customers to be able to make informed choices about whether or not to patronise them (hospitality, retail and more) or not.
Camels and horses in Egypt
PETA reports growing success with its campaign to persuade travel companies not to include camel and horse rides in their tours of the pyramids at Giza. I have been to the camel market in Cairo and saw some pretty horrific things but nothing approaching the levels of cruelty witnessed and reported by PETA.
Badgers and Woodcocks
Wild Justice reports further on its legal challenge to the granting of badger cull licences. It is all very confusing. “STOP PRESS: On 2 June 2025 Natural England’s lawyers advised us that Natural England has just authorised nine supplementary Badger cull licences.”
An e-mail from the Badger Trust the day before said that “A recent FOI response from Natural England has revealed that “no licences have been granted or reauthorised in 2025”, including supplementary cull licences, new intensive cull licences and licences for so-called ‘hotspot’ areas.” It would be terrible if they were deliberately not giving us, their customers and employers, the full story.
On their efforts to extend the Woodcock shooting close season, begun in 2022 at least it looks as though some vague promise of progress has finally been made after two years of silence from DEFRA.
Plastic
UK households get through 1.7 billion pieces of plastic packaging per week. And we know we’ve been lied to – huge amounts are not recycled but exported, 598 million kg in 2024, up 6 % from the year before. There’s an excellent piece by Walter Isaacson here:
Why I No Longer Recycle—And Why You May Want To Stop
He now focuses instead on reduction and reuse and buying products which use refillable or minimal packaging.
Water
I have been thinking a lot about the £100 bn it would apparently cost to renationalise the water companies. The government can find money for stuff they want (prisons, nuclear missile carrying planes) but not for this. But why is it such a huge figure anyway? Of course a massive amount needs to be spent on infrastructure, but that’s what the privatised companies should have been doing all along instead of lining the pockets of their executives and shareholders. The bulk of the money would be to buy off the shareholders. I suggest a different approach, with the starting point that the present state of affairs, the sewage discharges, cannot under any circumstances continue. Don’t just not compensate the shareholders at all, demand that they and the executives repay their dividends and salaries and bonuses. And fine them all, to a far greater extent than the companies have so far been. They have after all sanctioned and been party to criminality. Change the law if necessary. We know they can do that quickly if they want to, as with protest laws just before the coronation. Drug dealers’ profits and bank accounts can be frozen and the money seized, why can that not apply to these people?
Update. I may be onto something here: bidders for Thames Water have now said that they will require immunity from prosecution for environmental crimes. You really couldn’t make it up.
Animal sentience
Finally from NBC News: “Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient. Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration — including fish, lobsters and octopus.” No shit, Sherlock. Of course other animals have consciousness as PETA CEO Ingrid Newkirk said during her HardTalk interview. How is that in any way surprising? If it needs saying and improves our attitude to our fellow inhabitants of the planet and perhaps even has legal repercussions in their favour, then that’s all good, but I am sick of the continuing influence of Descartes who thought that animals were merely automata and of behaviourists with their appalling experiments. I am not saying that animals are exactly like us, but that we are animals too and we all come from one root. Often we are ‘wired’ in extremely similar ways. It is hardly surprising that we share the abilities to think and feel. I am not going to be bothering to justify what some might describe as anthropomorphism any more. I shall just refer those people to Charles Darwin.
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