A week ago today it was the ‘glorious 12th’, the day in the year when the grouse hunting season begins. From then until the 10th December, red grouse will be hunted on moors across Britain in driven shoots where birds are ‘driven’ towards rows of guns by beaters. Hunting is always controversial, but the start of the season this year has been particularly so. A concerted campaign, led by Chris Packham, has been calling for driven grouse shooting to be banned by highlighting the environmental damage that the management of the uplands to boost grouse numbers does. Moors are burned and blanket bogs are drained, releasing carbon and other species such as hares and raptors are illegally persecuted and killed. The plight of the hen harrier has been the focus of the campaign, and a Hen Harrier Day at Carsington Water on 11th August drew 1,500 people. The debate over driven grouse shooting has stimulated such attention that Labour has called for a formal review of the practice and a petition to ban it is almost at 70,000 signatures.
Rational arguments have been made by both sides about the environmental, social and economic benefits and impacts of driven grouse shooting. As with a lot of online debate though, as it has roared on it has becomingly increasingly toxic. Each side paints the other as the personification of evil and are increasingly unwilling to engage the other as rhetoric deteriorates to the level of death threats on both sides. Chris Packham and fellow campaigner Mark Avery had their planned appearance at the Game Fair cancelled, with some rumours it was due to threats of violence. Both sides have emotional investment in this issue which means that the slide into mud-slinging has been incredibly rapid. A Daily Mail article even drags Carrie Symonds into the fray, telling her it is her job to be seen and not heard now she is the ‘Prime Minister’s consort’.
Despite the argument being deafening in some corners of the in internet, like many environmental issues this remains a fringe debate and unknown to many people. This is also the case for land policy more generally, even though the statistics over land ownership and access rights in the UK are quite shocking. An easy response that gamekeepers and land owners can give to any criticism of their practices is ‘I know my land better than you, people who don’t live in the countryside don’t understand how it works’, but ecosystems and landscapes do not just provide benefits to those that live in them. City-dwellers enjoy trips and holidays in the country and everyone enjoys flood protection, clean air, clean water and climate regulation. Others simply like to know that they live in a country where wildlife is thriving, even if they never see it. It comes down to the fact that you are not an owner of land, you are a custodian of it, for others in society and future generations. In the same way that doctors go into the profession knowing that their skills are a public good and they feel duty-bound to help in any emergency they witness, it should be an integral part of land-ownership and management that it is done in the public good, for all of the public. How glorious can grouse moors be then, when just a handful of people enjoy using these swathes of land in a way that does such harm to both people and other animals?