As of today, we’ve taken the decision to shutter The War on Wildlife Project. The Project was set up to ‘help tackle the war on wildlife’ and was always intended to be a hub, a network of guest posts and campaigns with associated podcasts. Since the launch of Off the Leash Podcasts six months ago, […]

“The majority of Scots are opposed to fox hunting, and so, as the public body responsible for promoting Scotland’s land, FLS should amend its fox control policy to reflect public opinion, as it had previously planned to do.” A Freedom of Information request (FOI) submitted by Edinburgh-based wildlife charity OneKind has revealed that Forestry Land […]

Guest post by Mark Williams. an independent writer who previously served a decade as a columnist and Editorial Board member of long-running Science magazine.   Geronimo: All aboard the express towards scientific reason and compassion. The plight of Geronimo the alpaca has captured media attention and gained undeniable public interest. The extensive legal battle, recent […]

We have consistently described our national parks – supposedly the most important and most precious of our landscapes – as ‘so-called national parks’. We have said that because our ‘so-called national parks’ are – to a large extent – in fact managed not to conserve the magnificence of the Cairngorms, the Peak District, or the […]

  “…not only does [the way the land is managed] not deliver for wildlife, or the environment, or local communities, but it also doesn’t even deliver for the grouse shoots themselves.” Luke Steele, August 2021 Charlie Moores talks with Luke Steele about grouse moors, upland rewilding, and the role peatlands can play in carbon storage. […]

There are a number of ways to end the scandal and disgrace that is industrialised grouse shooting, from books like Dr Mark Avery’s ‘Inglorious: Conflict in the Uplands‘, Hen Harrier Day, blogs like Raptor Persecution UK that focus on wildlife crime, and targeting landowners that allow wealthy shooters to use birds as live targets on […]

During the infamous webinars organised by the ‘Hunting Office’ and leaked across the internet by the Hunt Saboteurs Association, Mark Hankinson, Director of the MFHA (who is due in court this September to answer criminal charges off the back of these webinars) discussed terrier-men. he acknowledged that their presence on hunts that are supposed to […]

Two years ago Dr Mark Avery’s guest spot at the Game Fair was suddenly withdrawn. He had been invited onto a guest panel, but, as he blogged later, he had been dis-invited because “…the high-ups who run the Game Fair – it seems they are the Countryside Alliance, BASC and GWCT – had said that […]

Defra have launched a public consultation which will potentially strengthen the UK’s Ivory Act, by extending protection to include all five CITES-listed ivory-bearing species (hippopotamus, narwhal, killer whale, sperm whale and walrus).rather than just elephants as now. Hippos are targeted by trophy hunters but they are also targeted for their ivory. Narwhals (there are thought […]

“Today, the Telegraph reports that a coalition of all the big shooting organisations has been formed. The mass-membership British Association of Shooting and Conservation, the campaigning Countryside Alliance, along with the public affairs experts of the Moorland Association and the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation have joined forces…We will also give no quarter to the RSPB.” The […]

  “..to do anything other than get rid of the licences would be bad for animals…which is ultimately why we’re doing this, it’s for the animals…” Nick Weston is the Head of Campaigns at the League Against Cruel Sports. Like everyone else at the League (and at other animal welfare/animal rights organisations) he is passionate […]

“It’s such a sad indictment of the current way in which science is conducted and vested interests have infected our society.” Ecologist Tom Langton has been looking at the scientific and legal aspects of the dreaded badger culls since 2016, and this summer represents his fifth year working on what is being described as the […]

So much of the biodiversity loss we discuss on this site results from what we eat. That might seem an odd call to make, but food production is a vast driver of ecosystem change. Human demand for food impacts the rest of life on the planet through the land we take to grow our crops, […]

We’ve posted several times about the plummeting numbers of Monarch Butterflies. Once an abundant species that wintered in vast numbers in Mexican pine forests (check out nature documentaries from just a decade ago that showed whole trees weighed down with hibernating Monarchs), the two populations (western and eastern, divided by the Rockies) are vanishing in […]

There is no such thing as so-called ‘trail hunting’. It was invented by fox hunts after the passing of the Hunting Act 2004 (which banned hunting with hounds) and is a smokescreen for illegal fox hunting – even the Masters of Foxhounds Association seems to agree with that. Hunts up and down the country routinely […]

A ‘tree feller’ and a ‘bird of prey nest’. The headline from the Stroud News today tells just half the story, because the bird of prey in question was a Goshawk (one of the country’s rarest birds of prey – and a species loathed by shooting estates) and the ‘tree feller’ (or ‘agricultural labourer as […]

In mid-May we posted a ‘kudos’ to Keep the Ban, the excellent campaigning group fighting to stop illegal fox hunting. Keep the Ban had been working hard to keep a petition in the news which had arisen from a disgraceful incident where out of control hunt hounds (belonging to the Western Hunt) had mauled to […]

It’s not been a good few months for ex-foxhunting, red-faced would-be Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Jonathon Seed. Having dodged question after question about his past chasing and killing wildlife, having decided that ‘only ‘trolls’ talk about hunting‘, and having merrily told anyone who would listen how he would follow a Countryside Alliance-type line […]

A BBC News report this evening is headlined “Men deny interfering with active badger setts in Devon“. On the surface it’s a rather typical tale of ‘terrier men’ (who stand out even amongst a group of thuggish lawbreakers as one of the nastier forms of illegal fox hunters) blocking the entrances to badger setts. Now, […]

Hello Peterborough Council, this is the 21st Century calling…demanding to know what the actual f are you doing supporting a grubby lobby group like the Countryside Alliance and violent hunt thugs by hosting a so-called Festival of Hunting this month? Fox hunting was banned by the Hunting Act, everyone and their dog knows that ‘trail […]

At the start of June we wrote a post saying that we had been offered a substantial donation and were wondering wjat the most effective way to spend it might be. Make a one-off lump sum donation, perhaps – many organisations we speak with are desperate for finance after lockdown. Or perhaps break up that […]

As we wrote in a post back in May 2020 reviewing Trophy Hunters Exposed (Inside the Big Game Industry, “In a remarkably short time Eduardo Goncalves has brought together a broad coalition of supporters and researchers, become an almost permanent fixture in the media, and – it turns out – has also somehow found time […]

“The Government recognises that some people consider snares to be an inhumane and unnecessary means of trapping wild animals and will launch a call for evidence on the use of snares.”   Both we and guests have written about snares many times on this site (see – Hunt Investigation Team #SnareAware) and our opinion can […]

Shooting’s lobbyists have turned their fire on BrewDog via an article in The Times. The craft beer company bought a climate-unfriendly grouse moor near Aviemore, Kinrara, earlier this year and instead of shooting wildlife is planning to grow a forest on it to offset the carbon produced at its brewery in Ellon. This means that […]