The Glorious Twelfth has passed. Which means that for the next 25 weeks droves of white, upper-class, tweed-adorned cronies, sharing in their conceited politico-moral sensibilities, will make to the Scottish Highlands, the Peaks and North Yorkshire (and anywhere else that’ll entertain them) to take part in a legalised blood frenzy.
It’s not that I have anything against the upper-class per se. It’s the corrupt, plutocratic manner by which many of them reign financially supreme that I detest. Yes, I’m sure many less-advantaged folk fancy the idea of blood ‘sports’ too, but that shouldn’t deflect from the fact that, for the most part, game shooting just isn’t an activity accessible to the masses. With a day’s shoot likely to cost £20,000 to £40,000 (in some cases up to £70,000), membership to this exclusive club is granted almost solely to the conservative financial elite.
This wouldn’t be so bad if ordinary taxpayers weren’t forced to foot the bill for their fun – or at least a large portion of it, as I discovered with a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: Throughout England, Scotland and Wales there are roughly 300 grouse moors. The average size is 2000 hectares. Notwithstanding moorlands used for field sports other than grouse shooting, with moorland subsidies being ~£54 per hectare taxpayers subsidise this faction some £33,600,000 per year (in 2011 Animal Aid calculated a figure closer to £37,000,000). Is this some sort of sick joke?
Ironically, for some of the beneficiaries, oracularly denouncing benefits claimers has become a casual past-time. They conveniently fail to recognise that they’re the same as those they condemn. You see, despite the fact that they’re given a different name, subsidies (in this context at least) are nothing more than benefits for the rich. Benefits exploited by incredibly wealthy grouse moor proprietors, such as the Daily Mail’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre (who earned £5.36m in 2014-15) and pub-chain owner Michael Cannon (who’s net-worth is £240m), who’ve evidently already been heavily advantaged by a vastly disproportionate wealth distribution system. These plutocrats just don’t need the help. While benefits are cut and living standards for the lower classes continue to decline, the country’s richest are given pocket-money and told to go out and play. Adding insult to injury, these subsidies propagate financial inequality and miss-educated bigotry. It’s entirely unnecessary, offensive and damning to the every-day taxpayer.
What’s more, these ‘sports’ wreak havoc upon our environment, consequent to the pseudo-conservationist land management techniques used to maintain their requisite landscapes. One main such technique is swailing: the burning of mature heather shrubs in order to make way for newer shoots (which many gamebirds feed upon). Yet, despite that “[t]he burning… can lead to increased flooding, decreased biodiversity, more carbon being released into the atmosphere and increased water pollution. And [that] we have to pay for the water to be treated, and we pay higher home insurance bills because of that increased flood risk.” (Which is far from the propagandist assertion it has been described as (1, 2, 3)) – Despite that, the British Association of Shooting and Conservation (BASC) insists that the pros of this archaic practice by far outweigh the cons.
But their arguments are about as logical as those in favour of witch-dunking (i.e., they’re incredibly illogical). In their recent white paper, the BASC insinuates that unscorched terrains are bad for the environment; that any collateral damage resulting from land management, however immense it may be, is positively justifiable on the basis that denser populations of some red-listed wader species are found on moorland sporting estates. It’s absolute poppycock! Socio-economic injustices aside, what about the rest of our natural world? Why does the BASC disregard our depleting populations of hen harriers (1, 2), skylarks, or whinchats, of which all are red-listed also? What about the meadow pipit, the golden eagle, buzzard or carrion crow (1)? What about foxes, badgers, moles, voles, pine martens, weasels, pole cats, adders, mountain hares? All of these creatures suffer to the prevalence of blood sports, despite their legal protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
Since the establishment of gaming estates, the continuous decline of this country’s wildlife has been less attributable to collateral damage and more to all-out assault (as is eloquently detailed in Roger Lovegrove’s Silent Fields: The long decline of a nation’s wildlife). Indeed, there is much intention to the BASC’s general omissions of the wider facts.
Why does the BASC value some creatures less? The answer is simple. They find them economically undesirable. They’re a hindrance to gamekeeping. They out-compete and at times prey upon gamebirds, ransack nests and feed upon their young. Unhabituated to human linearity (the human obsession to organise and manage everything), and unfamiliar with the concept of arbitrary borders, they wander, nest and predate wherever they please. Consequently, gamekeepers regard them as vermin, failing to recognise that the backbone of our world economy relies heavily upon a relatively healthy and stable global ecosystem. Yet, in our progressively liberal world, with laws prohibiting the senseless killing of wildlife, groundskeepers, the BASC, indeed all blood sports enthusiasts cannot risk being seen to denigrate any creatures, given the possibility of wide-spread public denouncement. Instead they sell falsities, hoping to foster a culture of ignorance, so that they can continue to exclusively quench their everlasting thirst for blood.
Occasionally, when they realise they’re opposition is qualified enough to expose their quasi-logics (as Chris Packham recently has) they resort to elementary politico-economic arguments, appealing to fear rather than reason. They argue that particular rural communities would fall apart if the shooting industry ceased to exist, since much of their income relies upon the industry. But this line – that there exists no alternative method of financial stimulation in rural areas other than by the running of killing estates – is a fear-mongering fallacy. We don’t permit human trafficking because failure to do so would put many people out of work. We disallow it because it’s wrong, inhumane, entirely immoral. And the same logic should apply to blood sports. They form a barbaric and damaging industry, and ought to be relegated to the history books.
When I first heard of this day, the glorious twelfth, I wondered what I’d been missing out on. I was ready for some sort of personal enlightenment. Instead I found disappointment, a deep sense of discomfort. For me the glorious twelfth celebrated something exceptionally inglorious. It celebrated wide-spread naivety, extreme social and environmental injustice, and a common indifference to the needless slaughtering of hundreds of thousands of birds.
A.C. Stark 
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