Ban Grouse Shooting Debate June 2025

Like the General Election never took place

At almost exactly 16:30 on Monday 30 June, John Lamont, the first of a raft of Conservative politicians reading from their BASC briefing sheets, stood up to start a ‘debate’ about banning grouse shooting. The government had already responded to Wild Justice’s petition, saying to the 104,342 of us that had signed it that it “considers that well-managed shooting activities can bring benefits to the rural economy and can be beneficial for wildlife and habitat conservation”, but what followed was a stark lesson in just how normalised killing birds is in this country.

The petition and the concerns it revealed were comprehensively swept aside. Three cheers for shooting grouse. Boos to the urbanites dictating to the countryside. ‘Campaigners’ were know-nothings. Ignorant. Grouse shooting was a tradition. It was, misty-eyed Conservatives claimed, ‘British’ (despite being introduced by a German Royal). The UK has globally important regions of heather and peat, why would we not use them to shoot on? Wealthy landowners spend millions on keeping their moorlands in tip-top condition, we were told. No mention that the money comes from public subsidies or that most SSSIs on moorland are in ‘unfavourable condition’. Just the aesthetic glory of those almost sterile, trashed grouse moors…All hail the fabulous, shot over, burnt to the ground, playgrounds of the privileged.

Wildlife crime

Sure, there was the odd downside, MPs conceded. Raptor persecution was a terrible thing, but it was all hugely exaggerated. Never mind that Hen Harriers are 10 times more likely to die or disappear on grouse moors than on land used in other ways, shooters love Hen Harriers. This is bad apples, not rotten barrels. Harriers were (MPs looked down at their notes) actually thriving. Cue the usual sleight of hand, of turning the number of chicks fledging into a thriving population while ignoring the fact that those fledglings are persecuted so hard that the average life expectancy of a young Hen Harrier in the UK is just 121 days. There are, as we all know, three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Let’s add a fourth: shooting industry statistics. There was much derisory eye rolling on the benches at the back of the room where the real experts on raptor persecution sat.

RSPB. June 2023

Pests and vermin

And what about “Curlews and Golden Plovers and Lapwings”? How would they survive if the “pests and vermin” (a list of native wildlife that shooting is constantly expanding) weren’t being eradicated in vast numbers by the ‘conservationists’ on the moors?

Of course, some wildlife benefits if other wildlife is exterminated, but is that what we really want - open air zoos where biodiverse moorlands used to be? We all know that what BASC means by ‘ground nesting birds’ is grouse, pheasants, and partridges, and that the real conservation issue is the massive areas of wet grassland in the lowlands that have been ploughed up and become bird-free, but - hey, we’re talking about shooting here, not a comprehensive habitat plan to restore biodiversity in one of the most nature depleted countries in the world.

God help Curlews if they are ever filmed eating grouse chicks…

Gamekeepers

Anyway, shooting isn’t about animals or wildlife, it’s really all about money. Money in the tills of local pubs and hotels that are so out of ideas that they have to survive on the largesse of a gun-carrying minority, and especially about employment for gamekeepers.

Tory politicians with northern constituencies may not have queued up to save the jobs of Labour voting shipbuilders, miners, or steelworkers, but they were out in force to protect the 1500 jobs of gamekeepers. If grouse shooting was banned what were they going to instead? Gamekeepers are the Schrödinger's cats of the shooting industry: one thing AND the other at the same time. Here MPs reimagined them as a noble blend of both low-waged men with no skills other than killing foxes and stoats, while simultaneously lauding them for being hugely skilled countryfolk who can do just about everything. Expert birders. And front-line firefighters: how the wildlife campaigners in the room managed to resist shouting “of course gamekeepers know a lot about wildfires, they’re the ones that have been setting them for decades” was impressive.

We have apparently got it all wrong. Gamekeepers are the cement keeping the community together, the Hen Harrier’s ’ally’, and not the brutish dangerous men ‘nolling jets’ and following locals around moors daring them to get in their way.

They are used to being the tools of wealthier men, so perhaps gamekeepers don’t mind being used as tools by wealthy parliamentarians working to keep the shooting industry alive. If they think, though, that because a self-serving bunch of BASC-quoting MPs find them convenient props in a pro-shoot argument means that they are respected and admired by the country as a whole they are deluding themselves. The shooting industry clearly believes that privileged MPs on huge salaries plus expenses are convincing champions of gamekeepers, but they might want to watch the debate back and see just how jarring it really is.

No change

The debate was an absolute shocker. It was as if the General Election had never taken place. We may have hoped things would change with the Labour landslide at the last election, but it evidently hasn’t. The Victorians are still here and shilling hard. While some of the faces may have changed, the pro-industry, anti-wildlife attitudes haven’t. The sad fact is that Tories like Rishi Sunak are still MPs in constituencies with grouse moors, and the appalling Jim Shannon is still rambling on about how his farmer father started with just a cart wheel. One MP even attacked Natural England - the much criticised agency behind ‘brood meddling’ - for being ‘anti-shoot’.

Who wields the influence behind the scenes when it comes to a one-sided ‘debate’ like this was made clear when the Conservative MP Robbie Moore name-checked every pro-shoot lobby group in just one shameful paragraph:

“I thank all those in the sector who work enormously hard around the clock to enhance our moorland—our gamekeepers, our groundskeepers, our farmers, our rural estates, our land managers and our stakeholders such as the Moorland Association, BASC, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Countryside Alliance. I thank them for their continued work.”

Olivia Blake, MP for Sheffield Hallam and parliamentary Hen Harrier Champion, has been one of the very few parliamentarians to speak out against shooting. She was a lone voice supporting a ban (where on earth were Labour? The Greens?). A welcome relief from the avalanche of misinformation and cherry picking, Olivia Blake is perhaps a little ‘polite’, giving way when asked and not challenging the ‘statistics’ being read straight from BASC briefings, but it’s hard to imagine how difficult it must be to stand up to such entrenched and reactionary views. She was there when many others weren’t, and we should all be very grateful that she was.

Don’t mention death

One of the most striking aspects of the ‘debate’ on Monday was how Red Grouse didn’t come into the conversation at all. Except as a commodity.

There was no questioning whether killing hundreds of thousands of Red Grouse for ‘sport’ might be morally suspect. In the eyes of the shooting industry (and therefore in the eyes of pro-shooting MPs), there are no grouse per se - there is a ‘grouse shooting industry’. It’s the industry that needs supporting and protecting, not the birds it exploits. Never mind that they were on the moors long before shotguns were invented, grouse are essentially inanimate cogs in the shooting machine. And moors aren’t biodiverse precious landscapes, they are ‘grouse moors’ - run by shooters for shooters, where units of grouse are killed. Any connection between ‘the bird’ and ‘the shoot’ has been entirely severed. In fact, grouse ought to consider themselves lucky to support jobs, and subsidies, and gamekeepers, and landowners.

If a media report features a shooting on a high street, the reaction is - understandably - fear and concern for the victims. But the ‘shooting industry’ has managed to decouple itself from the act of pulling a trigger and putting red-hot lead into a still living body. It talks in euphemisms. There is no mention of death, pain, or a right to life. Listening to MPs babble about shooting is to see how normalised the killing of birds is in the UK. While we might have applauded the setting up of a parliamentary Animal Sentience Committee (established in law by the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022), it has had zero impact on the shooting industry.

It’s impossible to say whether the shooting industry has led that normalisation or has responded to the lack of empathy and morality of shooters themselves, but there it was, laid out in from of us by smug men who in debates on pheasants, snaring, and grouse shooting see nothing wrong in speaking up for the deaths of literally millions of birds.

A long road ahead

Few of us will have much faith in Parliament these days. The unfortunate fact though is that it is MPs who set the rules. They are the nation’s lawmakers. And it appears they just don’t care about birds. How else can the refusal to enact something as simple as requiring Swift Bricks to be put into new builds be explained? The travesty of the habitat-trashing Infrastructure Bill be explained? Perhaps there aren’t enough votes in protecting birds…at least not yet.

When Protect the Wild launched End Bird Shooting we knew it would take many years to achieve what we wanted. Despite our claims that we are a ‘nation of animal lovers’, the truth is that we are a nation that loves some animals and has no interest at all in others. That is reflected in the people we put into office and allow to speak for us.

But that doesn’t mean we will ever stop trying to ‘make change happen’. We all recognise that the environment is under attack. We know that there is so much ‘less’ where there should be ‘much more’. We know, too, that smoke pollution kills. That burning the surface off our most important carbon reserves is nonsensical. And we know animals - including Red Grouse - feel.

Grouse shooting is an anachronism. Revulsion at using so much precious land just to rear one species to kill is growing. Shoots that previously sold grouse to shooters are on the verge of shutting down as moors dry out, and the demand to retake moors back for the good of the community is growing. The tipping point when this repulsive and destructive ‘sport’ causes revulsion rather than indifference will be reached.

When it does, when the public votes for alternatives to the shooting industry, it will be extremely gratifying to see MPs throw away their industry briefings and acknowledge that yes, there is something far better out there than simply shooting animals dead.

• A transcript of the ‘debate’ can found at hansard.parliament.uk

---

Join the fight against the Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Protect the Wild has been gathering signatures on a petition calling on Secretary of State Steve Reed to scrap the PI Bill. It reads:

“The UK is already facing a biodiversity emergency. One in seven species is at risk of extinction, and 41% are in decline. Yet this Bill weakens local environmental protections and turns nature conservation into a pay-to-destroy scheme. Developers will be given a green light to bulldoze through fragile ecosystems for short-term gain, with no obligation to repair the damage where it occurs.”

Resisting this bill will require the strength, unity and creativity of all of our movements. Now is the time to act for Britain's wildlife and precious ecosystems, before it's too late.

We need less than 1500 signatures to reach our 10,000 target. Please sign it here.

• Earlier this month we outlined five key reasons the Planning and Infrastructure bill will be disastrous for British wildlife - read our article here.