The scourge of the grouse moor

Britain’s hunting estates were once beautiful. Walking through the New Forest, we can all appreciate how the purchase of land for hunting can radically protect our countryside. Almost a thousand years after William the Conqueror set aside this wooded wonderland, we can still enjoy its aged oak pastures, Britain’s largest herds of free-roaming grazing animals, and a chorus of birdsong that has been lost in most other corners of our land.

Britain’s original royal forests model is recognised around the world as a commonsense approach to hunting. From Alaska to Scandinavia, hunters, alongside ecotourists, invest huge profits to sponsor the natural world. Hunters take a quota of animals from these special places — and leave the rest. This approach, known as ‘sharing’, ensures landowners make enormous profits, enjoy the respect of society and bequeath to the nation extraordinary biodiversity. A Finnish hunting estate will be hunted for elk, boar, deer and grouse. It will also abound with eagles, cranes, four species of grouse and thousands of wading birds. This is the kind of paradise that any British landowner would love to own.

Sadly, 150 years ago, our hunting estates made a terrible mistake. They decided to turn red grouse into the equivalent of living clay pigeons — and shoot them, without skill, in their thousands. To do so, they created grouse farms in our uplands: wastelands, scorched to feed just one bird.

After more than 100 years of destroying our national heritage, grouse moors have left our countryside immeasurably poorer. Our upland wildlife — an ecological gallery of wildcats, eagles, hen harriers and many other iconic species — has been relentlessly wiped out. One shooting estate’s infamous record illustrates the industrial scale of the killing. On Glengarry Estate in the Highlands, between 1837 and 1840 alone, 27 white-tailed eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 275 red kites, 63 goshawks, 462 kestrels, 285 buzzards, 63 hen harriers and 198 wildcats were killed.