It's US Versus Them' 'About More Than Just Birds' 'No One Listens' 'Same Old Rhetoric

The politics of raptor conservation and red grouse management seem as intractable as ever. So how do you solve the unsolvable? Could frank talking, and listening, be a start?

- Isla Hodgson

Conflicts are part of human nature. But what we’re only just beginning to understand is that they are at the beating heart of most environmental problems. Evidence from cases across the world suggests that while humanwildlife interactions can have negative consequences – the economic loss from the predation of livestock or game, for example, or the damage caused to wild populations by persecution – it is the human-human elements of these conflicts that seem to make such situations so apparently insoluble. And yet, when it comes to ‘conflict management’, we have a tendency to focus on the former.

The conflict around raptor conservation and driven grouse shooting in Scotland, the subject of my PhD, is a great case in point. For decades, a bitter and prolonged controversy has raged over the management of the uplands. On one side is a business that relies on large numbers of red grouse and desires the control of legally protected predators to prevent losses. On the other, are those who wish to conserve raptors and see an end to their illegal persecution.

With this framing in mind, efforts to resolve the acrimonious conflict have largely involved either reducing raptors’ predation on grouse, or using legislative tools to deter the illegal killing of raptors. Examples of the former include collaborative research projects, such as the Langholm Moor Demonstration Project in the Scottish Borders (2008–18), which studied the relationship between raptors and red grouse, including trials of ways to minimise the impact of hen harriers. Unfortunately, none of these projects have worked. Raptors continue to be persecuted, and the two sides remain divided.