GROUSE MOORS
redress for the grouse moors’ lost custom. The fact that Avery’s assertion that grouse
moors ‘reek of criminality’ was allowed to pass virtually unchallenged says much about the tenor of the debate around the ethics of shooting what is, after all, a genuinely wild – and therefore sustain- able – population of game birds. There is no doubt that gamekeepers have in the past illegally killed birds of prey, and that some rogue keepers continue to do so despite a 90 per cent drop in raptor deaths between 2000 and 2012. But the idea that every grouse moor owner is poisoning birds, or getting his gamekeepers to do so on his behalf, is ridiculous. Indeed, not only does the Scottish Gamekeepers Association expel any members who have been found guilty of wildlife crime, it was also a founder-member of the Partnership for Action against Wildlife Crime alongside the RSPB. Yet despite this, the level of pressure faced by
a pursuit worth £32 million each year to mainly remote areas of the Scottish economy is being relentlessly ratcheted up. Just last year, wealthy financier John Dodd sold his Glenogil estate in Angus, with police harassment over allegations of raptor poisoning just one of the reasons for the sale. At least one of his neighbours, fed up at the reputational damage from the constant insinuation of wildlife crime, came close to following his example. It’s not difficult to see their point. Well-fi-
‘If a keeper poisons a bird of prey, his boss will go to jail’
nanced, staffed to the gunnels, and very adept at targeting the levers of power in Holyrood (it has an annual income of £88m, 1,500 full-time staff and 12,200 volunteers), the RSPB and its camp followers have been extraordinarily successful in circumventing the usual individual legal safe- guards in their campaign against grouse moor owners. The most serious step was the RSPB’s successful agitation for the introduction of the principle of vicarious liability, which holds land- owners directly responsible for the actions of people working for them, which means that if a keeper poisons a bird of prey, his boss will go to jail. It is the sort of collective punishment whose only other appearance on the statute books is in a law to deter gang warfare in inner-city areas. As if that wasn’t a significant enough legal
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stick with which to beat landowners, there was an even nastier surprise for landowners and gamekeepers with a new clause that was intro- duced in the 2014 General Licences. This states that where there is ‘reason to believe’ wild- life crime may be being committed, general licences can be removed from those working the land, which would leave any keepers so judged unable to do their jobs. Open to inter- pretation and highly subjective, it arguably breaches keepers’ human rights and is a viola- tion of the sanctity of the legal process because the standard of proof of wrongdoing required
is considerably less than in a normal court of law – there would be no need to prove intent or actions; there would be no presumption of innocence or any nonsense about reasonable doubt. It’s a profoundly disturbing development that lays bare the direction of travel.
Black Isle poisoning If the pitfalls of such a policy were not already
obvious, a recent incident brought the whole issue into stark focus. The poisoning of 16 red kites and six buzzards at Conon Bridge on the Black Isle in late March was the single biggest inci- dent of raptor death ever recorded in Scotland. It didn’t take the RSPB long to point the
finger, with Duncan Orr-Ewing, the organisa- tion’s head of species and land management, claiming that the levels of raptor persecution by gamekeepers on driven grouse moors had reached the same levels as the ‘Victorian’ era. A Parliamentary debate was called, and Scot- land’s Environment Minister came under fearsome pressure to introduce yet stricter regu- lations on grouse moors, with the licensing of grouse moors the RSPB’s end goal. Under the provisions of the 2014 General
Licences, this could mean that any gamekeeper or moor owner with land near to where the birds died could be put out of business without any need to prove their guilt. But there was a problem: the nearest grouse moor was 19 miles away from the spot where the birds were found, so there was no possible way a gamekeeper could be to blame. Indeed, in the absence of the usual culprits,
the RSPB even found itself in the strange posi- tion of being forced to defend itself from ‘outrageous’ claims that contaminated meat laid out at the Tollie Red Kites visitor centre in Ross-shire had caused the deaths. Fortunately the RSPB still benefits from the assumption of innocence, even if it seems reluctant to extend the same protection to landowners. Indeed, there seems to be one rule for one,
and quite another for the RSPB. While grouse cannot be bred or artificially implanted, when raptors like red kites are artificially introduced into sites like Argaty in Perthshire or Tollie in Ross-shire to make headlines and profits, they inevitably affect the local wild bird popula- tion. Despite assertions that red kites only feed on carrion, their arrival has coincided with a dramatic decline in wading bird and songbird numbers, with curlew and lapwing numbers falling by 56 per cent in the past 17 years. So while the RSPB obsesses over the fate of
a relatively small number of iconic raptors, its second-class birds are left to fend for them- selves. Is it any wonder that, if some birds are more equal than others, the organisation applies the same logic to people?
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