Grouse Shooting
In this article Wildlife Matters Investigates Driven Grouse Shooting and asks What is it all About? Driven grouse shooting is pretty much unique to the United Kingdom. Red grouse are cosseted on the upland moors – now known as grouse moors – where their habitat, primarily heather, is managed to suit this one species that is ‘protected’ from the local wildlife and any potential predators by the gamekeepers. You may think this sounds like a conservation project, but no, the end game is the Grouse are shot for pleasure!
The grouse shooting season extends from 12 August, often called the “Glorious Twelfth” by shooters, to 10 December each year. A shooting party typically includes 8–10 ‘guns’ , who have paid for the day, who form a line in ‘the butts’. The butts are hides, a series of low wall structures, spaced around 25 metres apart, that the ‘Guns’ stand behind to minimise their profile.
The grouse are ‘driven’ from their cover in the deep heather by a line of ‘beaters’, often with dogs whose purpose is to ‘drive’ the Grouse towards the guns. The guns aim is to shoot the grouse in flight. Some claim this to be ‘a sport’ but most see it as a massacre – The Grouse have no realistic chance of escape.
Grouse Shooter
Up to 700,000 grouse are shot in this way every season. But, that isn’t the end of the devastation. 6000 or so, tons of lead shot is left scattered over the uplands, yes lead, the deadly poisonous substance that has been banned from Petrol and Paint as well as many other products – somehow has not been banned for the shooting industry.
It’s also important to note that lead WILL be in the shot grouse – the bullets are not removed. Some of these shot birds are sold to supermarkets, Restaurants and Butchers as ‘game meat’. We are shocked that lead contaminated meat is being sold to the general public without any warning.
The British tax payer continues to massively subsidise the owners of these upland moors with the purpose of maintaining the unique eco-systems that are vitally important ‘carbon-sinks’ – they draw the poisonous carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the peat bogs to aid our fight against the extremes of climate change.
The shooting estates have been taking the £millions in annual subsidies, but have continued to burn the peat to produce the perfect habitat for the Red Grouse. The ‘peat burning’ releases thousands of tons of the stored carbon dioxide back into the environment – accelerating climate change whilst destroying the biodiversity and eco-systems of the upper moorlands.
There is substantial evidence that the Grouse management of these moors has a catastrophic impact on the lands ability to soak up rainwater, and is the source of the flash flooding of the lowlands that has had such a devastating impact on lowland communities near the shooting estates.
To protect the Red Grouse from predation, the shooting estates employ gamekeepers, whose sole purpose is the massacre of raptors, such as the Hen harrier, eagles and corvids, terrestrial species such foxes, stoats and badgers that would otherwise predate on the grouse.
It’s not hard to see why many people think grouse shooting should be banned in the UK.
Most heather moorland is a mixture of bog and heath habitats, this is a ‘pioneer stage’ on the way to naturally regenerating into a stable woodland. Such forests were the norm across most of the UK before they were destroyed by man in the past. Heather moorland supports a limited range of species but is ruthlessly maintained for grouse and heather by routinely setting fire to the heather. This is called ‘burning’.
Burning on moorlands is widely used to increase the numbers of red grouse that are available for recreational shooting. As patches of heather are burned, fresh shoots come through which are ideal nutrition for grouse. Burning is done in patches to provide a variety of heather heights, (the older, taller heather is used as cover by grouse,) on a rotation of between 5 and 10 years.
Burning heather has a lot of negative consequences on the diverse moorland environment. Burning reduces Sphagnum moss growth and the density of macro-invertebrates which play a vital role in aquatic food chains by feeding on algae, mic, obes and detritus at the base of food chains before they themselves, are consumed by birds, fish and amphibians.
The impact of burning on peat bogs is dramatic as it reduces the ability of the peat to resist acid rain and inhibits plant growth. Rivers that drain burned catchments are more acidic than rivers that drain unburned catchments and have higher concentrations of silica, manganese, iron, and aluminium that are carried into our drinking water.
The routine killing of native wildlife is abhorrent. Classed as ‘predators’ native wild animals like foxes, crows and stoats are routinely trapped and killed. Protected species such as Hen harriers and Eagles are poisoned – illegally – whilst, in Scotland, Mountain hares, who are not predators, are killed because they can carry high levels of ticks and the tick-borne louping-ill virus that is believed to transfer to red grouse.
So why have the Gamekeepers been killing Mountain hares in their thousands every year? Hares are herbivores so are no threat to the grouse and they do benefit from the environment created for the grouse. The gamekeepers claimed that Mountain hare, although protected by law, had to be culled as they carry the tick-borne louping-ill virus and this can be fatal to Grouse. Scientists, having studied the he risk of transmission of the tick -bourne louping virus from Mountain hare to Red Grouse considered the risk low enough that the mass culling of mountain hares was of no benefit to Red Grouse. The Scottish Government are no longer issuing licenses for the annual cull and the Mountain hares legal protection status remains in tact.
Perhaps, we get closer to the truth when you understand that mountain hares are an important food source for larger raptors such as the golden eagle, harriers and peregrines and mammalian predators such as foxes, stoats and the Scottish wildcat. The culling of mountain hares by gamekeepers takes away this food source from the natural predators of grouse.
The Shooting industry in Britain is powerful and well connected but they have been taking public money to conserve the land, biodiversity and eco-systems of the upper moorlands and offset carbon to reduce the impacts of climate change. They have not been held to account by government on the delivery of these benefits. They had instead developed a ‘monoculture’ of heather to support one species – that thrives in a heather rich environment – over and above all other native species and that is wrong. Not that the Red grouse benefit as they are ‘blasted’ from the sky in the name of ‘sport’
Of course, nothing is new. To give an idea of the scale of wildlife destruction carried out by gamekeepers in the past Dr. Mark Avery often quotes an example from the Highland estate of Glengarry.
In the four years between 1837 and 1840 the estate keepers killed 11 red foxes, 198 Wildcats, 78 house cats, 246 pine martens, 106 polecats, 301 stoats and weasels, 67 badgers, 48 otters, 98 Peregrines, 78 Merlins, 462 kestrels, 475 ravens, 285 buzzards, 3 honey buzzards, 15 golden eagles, 27 sea eagles, 18 Ospreys, 63 goshawks, 275 red kites, 68 hen harriers, 109 owls as well as 1,432 hooded crows and 475 ravens.
Whilst this devastation happened nearly 200 hundred years ago, it serves as a shocking reminder of the scale of the destruction that gamekeepers and the estate owners were prepared to inflict upon native wildlife species so they can continue shooting Grouse. At least, back then they had the honesty to record their actions
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Further Reading
Grouse Shooting Fact File by Animal Aid
Moorland Massacres by Hunt Saboteurs
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