Shifting baselines: lessons from the past to inform the future of shooting

A colleague shared their copy of Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald's 1946 New Naturalist book on British Game.  It is a fascinating book, written by "a countryman of wide experience, a wild-fowler, Vice-President of the Gamekeepers Association, a friend of gipsies [sic] and we suspect of poachers".  

In it, there is a chapter called "Enemies of Game".  Here he describes a range predators from eagles to crows and concludes each section with a statement about how the keeper should respond to the presence of the predator.  On the common buzzard for example, he writes "Too slow on the wing to harm game birds.  Takes many mice, moles and young rabbits, and also insects.  Altogether beneficial and should never be shot."  On hen harrier, he writes "Will undoubtedly take game chicks occasionally, but is almost wholly beneficial and should not be shot".  Similar sentiments are applied to other birds of prey.

Clearly, the context, land use and status of raptors was very different in 1946 than today (70 years ago, for example, buzzards were restricted to the north and west of Britain) but so was the style of shooting.  Then, the grey partridge was the main target while pheasants made up a small percentage of the 'game bag'.  As the grey partridge declined, the importance of releasing pheasants and red-legged partridges grew.  

Modern shooting has changed significantly since this book was published. Persecution was clearly much more widespread then than it is today. We know that without a reduction in persecution in lowland areas, buzzards would not have recovered as they have, red kite reintroduction would not have worked and peregrines would not be gracing most of our cities.   And many lowland shooting estates make significant contributions to conservation as I saw yesterday in the Brecks where stone curlew conservation is dependent on willing landowners and well funded agri-environment schemes.

Yet we also know that in some areas, persecution remains a serious problem.

It’s fascinating how perceptions of what is normal change and what society deems acceptable. A lot has changed since the 1940s in our society, yet it feels like some intensively managed driven grouse moors haven’t caught up.  Wouldn’t it be nice if gamekeepers on driven grouse moors still considered hen harriers "almost wholly beneficial"?

In my previous blog on hen harriers, I reiterated why we see licensing as a mechanism for driving up standards of grouse shooting and ensuring that practices are acceptable to what our society wants from uplands, many of which let’s not forget are in our National Parks. Many of the comments on that blog and questions I’ve received since focus on exactly what a licensing system would encompass.

The short answer, is anything we as a society decided we wanted to include. Obviously compliance with the law and an end to bird of prey persecution would be line number one. Beyond that, we would certainly suggest some of the potentially more environmentally damaging practices could be encompassed – for example the end of inappropriate burning on peatlands, preventing drainage or creation of damaging tracks.  As new evidence emerged about the environmental consequences of practices such as mountain hare culling and medication of the grouse, those could be addressed.

And this is why licensing grouse shooting is so attractive to me and could, if properly implemented (yes, obviously that’s a big if, as it is with anything), drive real change. It can be as broad or as focussed as we want to make it, but it can be targeted at specific areas of land and management types where damaging practice is occurring. 

There are two stark choices facing the shooting community. It could acknowledge the environmental challenges linked to current shooting practices and accept the need to reform for example by embracing a system of licensing that would drive up grouse shooting standards in line with what modern society expects.  Or, it could expect bag sizes to grow indefinitely and so continue to intensify management including a growing intolerance of predation, however insignificant it may be on the overall number of gamebirds that are taken.

I would encourage the shooting community to be bold and embrace the need for reform.   Indeed, I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with driven grouse moor owners to talk about how licensing would work.  This is the only way to give confidence to the public - many of whom will be participating in Hen Harrier Day events this weekend - and potentially secure a future for their sport.  

I'll leave the final word to Mr Vesey-Fitzgerald and his dislike of the use the term "vermin" to describe predators.  He wrote "It implies in us, and the game we preserve to kill, a superiority we do not in fact possess.  We call these creatures vermin for no other reason than that they interfere with our pleasures, a poor enough excuse for bestowing upon them so degrading a title, and one which becomes even less valid when we realise that these pleasures of ours have, almost without exception, been born within the last 150 years..."