MARK CARWARDINE

“Why should wildlife lose to businesses underpinned by criminal activity?”

- MARK CARWARDINE

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT, AFTER decades of campaigning, driven grouse shooting - and all the affiliated wildlife slaughter and habitat desecration - continues on a truly industrial scale. It's not cheap. People pay thousands of pounds a day for the privilege of killing as many red grouse as possible. Inevitably, shooting estates are obsessed with producing artificially high numbers of grouse to meet the demands of their clients and maximise profits, and annihilating all the predators is central to their entire operation.

Quite simply, predators aren’t tolerated on most grouse moors. Foxes, weasels, stoats, crows and all sorts of other wildlife are mercilessly trapped, snared, shot and sometimes poisoned. Some of this is legal (albeit inhumane - few of the animals are killed instantly) but much of it is against the law. The scale of the illegal killing of golden eagles, white-tailed eagles, peregrine falcons, short-eared owls, badgers, hedgehogs and, of course, hen harriers (a red-listed species whose future prospects rely almost entirely on the proper management of their moorland home) is shocking.