High Court Grants gamekeeper go-ahead to challenge Natural England

[countrryboy]

A very very goood reply tamar, and i totally agree with u and wot u have said.

But i think shooters and the organistions to do with it need to join together and get out like they never have before and try to educate as many people as possible rural and urban.
I'm not talking about convincing them shooting is great but even to convince them that shooting is a neccessary evil would be a start.
Shoots do an awful lot of postive work that is often unoticed. All the purdey and silver lapwing competitions and awards etc should be far better publicised esp to the general public.

The general public and many in acedemia believe predators have no impact on anything and if u just leave stuff to its own devices it will be ok.
Habitat management alone will not help most of the falling/rare birds species as has been proved by the last 30yrs of mismangent and agri-enviro grants, often doing more harm than good by concentrating birds in an area making it easier for predators

No one is talking about open seaon on BoP's but when it is 'normal' to see 10 or 15 soaring on the same thermal or more following the plough it just becomes a bit much.
I'd say BoP's are a success story of the last 20 years there numbers are soaring beyond belief.
1 farm near me now has 100 plus Red Kites at feeding time, is that natural? they have spread right throu the district, yet i was on that farm 13 years ago balancing on a fuel bowser dangling of the digger boom over an unlit fire and there was NO red kites then. So in 14 years they have 100+ on that 1 farm plus all the rest spread elsewhere, that is phenomal breeding, wish grey partridges or may other bird species bred like that.
Fair enough red kites will eat mainly carrion etc but if there hovering up all the carrion that leaves less for the buzzards, foxes badgers etc, the more mouths the more food it takes for them to survive, at some point there will be more food being ate than wot is produced


Ask any keeper, yes a fox may get in a pen and kill as many as it can (but u hope it is a very rare occurance, and it will only happen the once) but buzzards will visit a pen every day day after day killing birds and eating very little and stressing the rest. Must admit buzzards dinae bother our pens too much now with the ammount of cover and other things we've tried etc (touch wood) but there is only so much u can do.
Goshawks are the worst if ur unfortunate to have any near, we have effectively lost a whole pen for the 3rd yr on the trot due to goshawk and the panic they cause, giving up on the pen next year only 5 yrs old and taking it down
3yrs ago a we lost over 20 in 4 night of almost fully grown birds in mid/late sept all found headless at bottom of roosting trees, most likely a tawny never took a bite ourt of any bird
We're only a small shoot so to lose 20 shortly before shooting season is like losing a whole shoot day bag

Ps tamar was the fox stat on adults or poults or was it nest predatation?

 

[Mark23576]

I haven't read the full thread but I cant understand why buzzards are so protected. They are everywhere now and need to be controlled if causing problems just like other animals that are pests, but for some reason the government won't accept that previously threatened species have recovered and are now at pest levels.

 

[landkeeper]

i have had buzzards nesting in a release pen afaik they didn't touch a poult, certainly the poults weren't too bothered by them after a few days ,sparrowhawks however never leave them alone a buzzard is a very obvious bird a sparrowhawk far less so whose to say one's not getting blamed for the deeds of the other
100+ kites on one farm even at a feeding station is ridiculous is that a scenario set to continue or will the feed be reduced to encourage them to disperse

 

[countrryboy]

Wot worries me most about the whole BoP thing licence thing is it is a very dangerous precedent to set, wot happens if public opinion moves more and more aggainst killing things (which is very likely, esp when u look at some of the other threads stop the boar cull, 100% legal yet we are made out to be the criminals) if we only allowed to control things that a majority off the population agrees with we're in very big trouble.

This is esp when u look at Buzzards due to their massive population size there is no reason why PROBLEM birds could not be shot under very strict critera, it would not dent the general population and not every buzzard will pose a problem esp in well designed pens with good habitat/cover but some can and at the momnet there is no where legally to go for the keeper.

But if we carry on trying to appease the general public wot happens in 30 years time? Wot if the majority no longer think it is ok to shoot foxes, deer, pigeons or pheasants?

In the last 30 yrs thing have changed massivily and i would get chased if i dome half of wot i used to as a kid.

Going back slightly further it was not that much further back and it was perfectly legal to dig badgers and hunt otters and that was the norm (70's), no one batted an eyelid about it. Even some wildlife crime which was still illegal was pretty much turned a blind eye too and not enforced

Yet we u look further afield to Europe or USA, OZ, NZ hunting is far more accepted part of the culture and doesnae seem to be this class envy thing, i dare say france or germany will not be that much more rural based than the UK but things are changing here very very quick. U look at OZ and NZ and there governments are actually dropping poison all over the place by planes

We do need to stand up and fight (but i do think they have made a big mistake backing this appeal on paticular) as well as trying to educate as many people as possible esp jorno's and environmental type courses.

Ps For u legal types.
If this appeal is lost will it then become a legal benchmark/precendent/test case so making future licence applications even harder to apply forsuccessfully and less likely to be able to appeal?

 

[countrryboy]

Landkeeper at the moment u pay to see them feed the kites, god knows wot'll happen if they ever stop. Now spread about 50miles in all directions, amazing how fast they breed. So god knows how many there actually is, i think 140 is the record at a feeding time

As an aside this is sort of wot a few shooting folk are blaming all those (22 BoP poisoned) up north on, these feeding stations where birds are getting a massive proportion of there food from any contaninated carcass's will build up in the birds system's over time

 

[Tamar]

Thanks Countryboy. I also fully support education and trying to demonstrate to 'the public' the benefits of shooting and game management. Perhaps, bit, by bit, we may be able to demonstrate that in a disrupted countryside, predator control CAN be a good thing, and when conducted by keepers etc, is actually a free beneift for society, making more songbirds, hedgehogs, butterflies, cuddly kittens, teddy bears etc etc. However, as you say, that is the angle that needs to be taken. I don't know the full details of the case that is being supported, but the appearance of the arguement does not seem to be one which elevates these particular aspects, but rather one based on 'fairness' (and sticking it to the antis). I don't think that this is an especially astute way of going about things. If I was in the unenviable position of dealing with this, I'd look for an exemplar case in which there were clear public goods to be had (happier bunnies, more dormice) AS WELL as the economic benefit to the shoot concerned (bringing benefits to an especially disadvantaged part of rural Britain blah blah). As an aside, I'd also be looking for a case where there was a keeper with clearly demonstrable 'green' credentials, working on a faultless estate on which there had already been demonstrated substantial benefits of predator control AND effective demonstration of non lethal attempts to mitigate predation. Perhaps this is the situation in this case, but from the little that I've read about it, it doesn't seem to be so.

I've been fortuanate not to work anywhere with a substantial goshawk popualtion, so I don't know what their effects are. I accept that they are likely to attack fit adults more than do buzzards.

The work on fox predation is from a currently unpublished thesis looking at releases from 6 sites over three years. There are several other studies that are far worse, indiciating that up to 60% of released birds are dead, predominantly to foxes, before the start of the shooting season.

 

[NGO1]

To answer a few questions posed above:

The NGO is funding this case; no monies have been received from CA, BASC or any other organisation. They have all been regularly briefed about developments in the case over the last three years, however, and we welcome their strong public support now.

The decision to fund the case was taken democratically by the gamekeeper members who comprise the NGO committee, as with all key decisions in the NGO. They have a good feel for the views in their regions. Individual like Sinistral are of course free to differ but in the NGO we go with the majority view, which on this occasion was particularly strongly held. You will see elsewhere on the web the extent and the depth of the support we now are getting for the case from members and others. People are donating and joining the NGO because of it.

The previous conviction was long since known about. It has been public knowledge since 2007. It was not for a wildlife crime it was for possession of banned pesticides. Many, perhaps most, gardeners and allotment holders sheds would not pass muster in that respect. The long spent conviction has no relevance to the likely outcome of the case as it is not the applicant whose actions or character are being questioned; it is Natural England who are being judicially reviewed. It is a technical case about whether the existing law on licensing has been correctly followed. The NGO would not have taken it on without first having had top quality legal advice that the case was sound.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion but the NGO’s decision, democratically taken and informed by experts, is that this case is both important and winnable. That is why we have decided to back it.

 

[iknownothing]

NGO1 thank you for the update, keep up the good work and glad to see you finally post on this forum. DavidBASC usually has all the fun!

 

[countrryboy]

Aye cheers NGO.

I am 100% behind wot ur trying to do and think it is about time someone stood up and fight this.
I'm in absolutely no doubt that NE does not issue licences in a fair and just manner and i dare say u should have a very very good chance of winning. On a legal side, but unfortunately it will come down to far more than legal arguments alone
I also think ur are right there will be masses of people incorrectly storing pesticides if they ever got investigated

However if u honestly think this conviction will have no bearing on the case ur living in cloud cuckoo land, when the r**B PR juggernaut gets a hold of this it will be twisted and turned so many ways by there pet press puppets who never let the truth get in the way of a good story/headline esp if it is wot the readers want to read
U do not start a fight with the hardest meanest ugliest bloke in the pub and offer him a free kick to the goolies or fight with 1 hand behind ur back. And esp when it has the money behind it that it has

I agree totally with wot tamar has said above and wot i said in my first post the estate/individuals involved should have been whiter than white, that would stand up to any scrutiny and possibly on an estate with a great record for consrvation that is doing a lot of good work for non game species

I personally think ur doing the right thing but have backed the wrong case, if u cannae convince someone like me who actually is on ur side i think ur really giong to struggle.
The pesticide conviction may be totally innocent, and if he was caught with out of date round up it would be, but he as caught with an often used pesticide which may be coincidence but doesnae look good no matter wot the circumstances are