Don't mean any personal offence here tamar. As i know u know ur stuff.
Do u find all ur collegues (esp from other uni's not linked to GCT research) are as open minded towards predator/prey numbers/effects or predator control?
But do u not think in the UK esp there does tend to be a lot of instutionalsied bais in many environmental studies and amoung many teaching academic's? As well as making tv programmes and off course in conservation charities and is moving more and more into the mainstream public opinion.
No other country seems to be just so baised and skewed against the countryside
I know i spent 4 years at uni and likes of GWCT was never even mentioned, infact predator control was never ever even touched on. The rest of my course mates wouldn't have a clue about the benefits of selective predator control
I done quite a bit of reading outside my course mainly of grouse/black cock/caper (as i still wanted to be a grouse keeper) but if u compared 2 very similar studies from UK and scandinvia, pretty much all the studies came to similar but different conclusions, almost all the european studies would put declines down to a mix off habitat loss, predation, and fences, while all the uk 1's would only mention habitat loss and fences and not even mention predation.
Esp with this subject badgers vs hedge hogs, i think there was a fairly conclusive study completed a few years ago and even the hedge hog charities were scared to run/publise the results as the badger cull stuf was just goig into over drive.
I would imagine badgers due to the way they live/hunt could be very bad on local wldlife.
Staying in large numbers in 1 sett (as well as satelite setts) so any bird/mammal/bumble bee unlucky enough to nest/jugg down on any of those hedge running out from a sett stand no chance, due to modern farming hadege bottoms are the most likely place for an animal to nest/lay up but also most likely to be predated on.
With a fox/mustleid or even hedgehog it wil be far more oportunist predation as they will move around there territiory far more hap hazzardly not always sleeping in the same area
No offence taken - I've the skin (and some would say the looks) of a Rhino.
I guess that academics are pretty much the same as the rest of the non-shooting population. In my field, Zoology/Animal Behaviour, there is so much material to cover in a 3 year degree course that predator control would probably only get a slide or two at most in the whole course. We have to teach about hormone cycles, learning and memory, mating behaviour, gut morphology, collective movement, cooperation, parental care etc. It's hugely diverse. In a module on ecology, there will certainly be some material on predator/prey interactions and exploration of which is a limiting factor. There might also be material on introductions of exotics, for good and bad. therefore, I don't think that academics are deliberately avoiding such material, but simply it is for most of them and the students just one very small part of a wide field.
I know that GWCT makes an effort to provide lectures at various MSc course around the country. We usually host Nick Sotherton for a seminar for our MSc course and he leads a discussion about grey partridge restoration which encompasses predator control as well as habitat and rearing and release issues. This is usually novel for the students, but in my experience very few are antagonistic and most take to his ideas well.
I've no direct experience of more applied courses such as wildlife management etc. I'd expect there to be a greater emphasis on these more applied issues in those. However, the people that I know who do teach on such courses are certainly not vehemently anti shooting and I doubt whether they deliberately skew their teaching to avoid this area.
In my experience, academics are no more biased than the general public. I know a few who shoot, stalking and game, and many who are supportive of it, if only because of the venison I give them! When I worked in Australia and South Africa, I shot to supply meat for the research groups there - up to 40 academics at a time. Not only did very few object, but most actually helped with the butchery and several were keen to join in the hunting. Of course, some do have strong objections, perhaps based on their time spent watching animals. To some extent, I can sympathise - having done some work with corvids and seeing their 'personalities', I don't particularly like shooting them. Some keepers get the same way with 'their' pheasants.
To my mind, the problems come when academic research is taken up by lobbyists with agendas. Research on its own is generally fairly balanced. It's how it's interpreted that causes problems. This can happen with the usual suspects who may pick and choose or even twist results produced by others to suit their agenda. I think that it happens not just with environmental campaigners, but also with some conservation organisations. Their scientists may produce carefully balanced and nuanced research, but the PR side of the organisation cherry-picks, over simplifies or distorts results. I suspect this happens with the RSPB - their scientists are not corrupt or disingenuous and generally produce robust studies. The trouble comes when the PR team are let loose and convey results to suit their agenda. I also suspect that a similar thing happens at GWCT. Both are membership organisations and so to some extent have to play to their crowd. That is why in some of my posts on here, I try to provide links to the original papers for anyone interested to see the source material and draw their own conclusions.
To your point on Scandinavian vs. UK research findings - one explanation could be that actually in the UK, predation IS less of an issue than in Scandinavia. We have fairly intensive keeping and predator numbers may simply be lower here, even though for any single shoot/keeper the local effects may be serious. In contrast, we have huge pressures on habitat with growing population and recreational disturbance, something much less common in Scandinavia. Consequently, I could believe that effects in the two areas ARE due to different primary causes with predation being less important in the UK compared to the effects of habitat disturbance. I'm don't believe its because UK academics are scared of investigating or mentioning predation.
Re: badger predation - I agree that it's likely to be much more widespread and damaging than we perhaps acknowledge. I hope that someone will be making use of the next round of cull extensions to test this - by measuring wildlife numbers pre and post cull and contrast them with control areas. Unfortunately DEFRA is not facilitating such work, wildlife organisations are too beholden to their membership to want to risk supporting such work, and for most academics, it's simply not in their area of interest.
One last point on academics and academia: There is a common view that either the research is 'so obvious it's not worth doing' or 'bears no relation to reality'. Scientists are usually looking for general rules that capture universal truths. They also are interested in situations where apparent general rules are broken. Consequently, research, especially in ecology/biology involves broad generalisations. For the man on the street reading such work, if their own limited experience agrees with the general rule invoked by the scientist, then they give the 'bloody obvious' response whereas if they have experienced one of the small instances where the rule is broken, they give the 'all academics are morons' response. For example - if we look at rates of buzzard predation on released pheasants, ON AVERAGE the rate is low, I would guess across the UK at <10%. For my birds, I know through tagging, that I lose <5% to raptors. However, I also know that on a shoot who I gave some birds to, they lost 30% of their birds to a pair of buzzards who learned to specialise on them. So we have a general rule; a situation where something about my keeping or local environment means that the rule is broken being about half as likely to explain my losses, and another situation where the rule is broken in a different way. Further research can then look at what factors explain these anomalies. An so science progresses, standing on the shoulders etc etc.