During the last session of the Scottish Parliament the Scottish National Party (SNP) government announced that they would be bringing in a grouse moor licensing system. The announcement was made reluctantly under pressure from the Green Party MSPs and some other external pressures which we will be blogging about once it is legally permissible to do so.

With the new session of Parliament under way the Green Party are already increasing the pressure to get moves under way. Even without Fergus Ewing in the cabinet the Scottish Government is clearly reluctant to take any measures that might upset any of the pro shooting bodies and in particular the hysterically vocal Scottish Gamekeeper’s Association (SGA). Sadly they are going to have to grasp the nettle or loose both credibility and possibly any real power.

The problem with driven grouse moors is two-fold. First they have an unfortunate but undeniable association with wildlife crime such as raptor and badger persecution and secondly because their legal trapping and ‘controlled’ burning creates a species free sink into which neighbouring animals expand. This means that when an estate kills the animals that normally reside there a vacancy is created and filled by suitable animals from the neighbouring area. The more animals an estate kills the more vacancies it creates, the more animals move in, and the more animals it then has to kill. This constant cycle of destruction has by far its greatest effect on land mammals who lack much of the freedom of movement of birds.

The criminal activities of raptor killing, badger baiting and otter persecution are disgusting and well documented but constitute a minute fraction of the damage to our natural heritage that actually occurs during the routine management of these estates. The vast majority of species routinely killed on driven grouse moors are slaughtered legally. Foxes, stoats, weasels, hares, rabbits and corvids amongst others are killed in a relentless cycle of death to ensure that game birds will be available in industrial numbers for a few individuals to shoot. So vital is this constant killing to running a successful driven grouse moor that even during the Covid lock down when almost all countryside activity other than food production stopped gamekeepers were still out killing. In spite of what some advocates of driven grouse shooting suggest it is not a system of food production and in many cases the dead birds are simply dumped unwanted or given away.

Moorland burning, a routine activity on driven grouse shoots, causes air pollution and the drainage ditches and vehicle tracks installed these moors increase run off causing flooding downstream. But burning also exterminates insects, small mammals and herpetofauna causing untold damage to the environment. There was much horror at the destruction caused by the Australian bush fires which will take decades to heal but those fires were accidental. Deliberate fires are started in Scotland by gamekeepers perfectly legally every year. In the year when the UK government is hosting the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in Glasgow sanctioning this type of environmental pollution does not look good.

The countryside is not some separate entity, cut off from the rest of society much as some might like it to be. Activities in the countryside have consequences outside it. Air pollution from grouse moor burning, flooding of homes and businesses caused by the drainage systems and the loss of hundreds of thousands of animals and birds killed legally or otherwise are matters that affect us all.

It is time to rigorously control an industry that happily does untold damage to the environment of the country in which we live so that a few thoughtless individuals can boast that “mine is bigger than yours”.