Les Wallace has asked us to provide details of the petition he has launched seeking the Scottish Parliament to ‘urge the Scottish Government to sponsor a comprehensive and independent study into the full economic impacts of driven grouse shooting’. You can read Les’s petition HERE. You are able to sign the petition on line HERE, but bear in mind the closing date is 18 July 2017, so you have not got much time to support this important petition.
Please we urge everyone to share this important post to as many people as you can, both on twitter and facebook.
What people need to ask themselves is what is the alternative to grouse shooting……very likely subsidised commercial FORESTRY, the very thing that’s pushed raptors out onto area’s where they’re more vulnerable in the first place so just be careful you’re not pushing them out of the frying pan into the fire !
Ian Newton highlighted the fact in his book on the Sparrowhawk, hundreds of years of persecution by gamekeepers had little impact on its population, it was an environmental issue that nearly wiped them out. Today it’s the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of natural habitat, mostly where raptors could live in peace, now destroyed for ever, not only for raptors but also prey species such as waders, pipits etc. Why are there under 20 pairs of Peregrines in the Scottish Highlands and Moray, around 12k square miles, very little intensive grouse shooting but lots of commercial sitka spruce destroying habitat and the availability of prey species.
I have a passion for raptor conservation but this blinkered vision that it’s all the fault of grouse shooting is ignoring the wider picture.
Just to add to my last comment, instead of wasting all this energy going after grouse shooting it would be far more constructive to pursue the Government on their non compliance of the Aarhus Convention in which they have an obligation as signatories to accommodate access to the courts for issues on environmental matters at “reasonable cost” to anyone who has an issue.
If all those who care about our wildlife and the environment that supports it could make this their main focus it would be far more constructive than lobbing Government, it would give access to the Courts and that would give people a real say in what’s happening.