Tag: bob berzins

Guest Post | Mountain Hares – Can they survive alongside Driven Grouse Shooting?

Posted on June 22, 2021June 23, 2021 by Charlie Moores

“The fate of mountain hares is subject to the same spin, falsehoods and lies we hear regularly from those champions of conservation: the grouse shooting Industry. Just as every gamekeeper is supposedly a friend of raptors, we also hear they’re the friends of hares. A propaganda video from the Gift Of Grouse has a caption of “There’s no shortage of mountain hare on land managed for grouse shooting due to predator control and healthy moorland” – all in an area with a well-documented history of large scale mountain hare killing. Some of the online moderators at Hare Preservation Trust thought the video showed hares being rounded up for slaughter and wanted the video to be deleted. Instead it was the moderators who were removed from their posts. The list of species which gamekeepers leave alone is a short one indeed: waders of course, but not much else. For raptors, statistics are selectively used: for a bird like peregrine, they’d happily quote the thriving populations in the White Peak, not the lack of birds in the grouse shooting Dark Peak. Merlin are generally left alone – sometimes weighing as little as 160g they’re not seen as a threat to grouse..” Guest post by Bob Berzins

Guest Post | Hunting on Protected Sites – Another Natural England Cover Up?

Posted on April 27, 2021April 29, 2021 by Charlie Moores

“In October 2020 I saw a pack of hunting dogs rampaging over open moorland above Bradfield, South Yorkshire. Almost all Pennine moors are designated as conservation areas, administered by Natural England, the key Government adviser for nature and the environment. Bradfield Moors is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Special Protection Area for ground nesting birds and a Special Area of Conservation for rare blanket bog habitat. The landowner has banned the public from taking dogs onto this moor because of the threat to wildlife, so what was going on? I will be appealing to Natural England and the Information Commissioner to find out why enforcement action was not taken and ask Olivia Blake MP to get on the case as well. In my opinion, this is yet another example of Natural England overlooking illegal activity by rich landowners.” Guest post by Bob Berzins

Language Matters | Guest post: Bob Berzins

Posted on November 4, 2020December 4, 2020 by Charlie Moores

“One definition of vermin is people perceived as despicable and as causing problems for the rest of society and another definition is wild animals that are believed to be harmful to crops, farm animals or game or which carry disease. So vermin people and vermin animals really couldn’t be any worse. And no wonder our relationship with animals and birds follows much the same pattern I’ve described above, we split them into good and bad, with corvids in particular firmly in the “bad” camp. No matter what we do to corvids their numbers keep increasing, giving us permission to kill even more, because if we don’t they will cause us untold harm. In contrast, Ed Douglas’s Country Diaries in The Guardian are vivid experiences of wit and the joy of experiencing our natural world free from the prejudice of terms like vermin.” Guest post by Bob Berzins in support of our ‘Language Matters’ campaign.

‘Snared’ audiobook now available

Posted on August 21, 2020August 22, 2020 by Charlie Moores

As visitors here will know, wildlife campaigner Bob Berzins recently published ‘Snared’, a book which we said “absolutely nails the unsavoury workings of the intensive grouse shooting industry to the wall. While carrying the usual legal disclaimer that ‘any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental’, the book is packed with evocative descriptions of the uplands and the people that live there – from venal estate owners to lawless badger baiters and angry, violent gamekeepers locked in battles with their families and the local wildlife. It feels authentic from the first line to the last.” And now we’re extremely pleased to share in announcing that an audiobook is available for a suggested donation of just £5, with 100% of profits going to Yorkshire’s Independent Domestic Abuse Service (IDAS).

Guest Post | All Wild Birds are Protected – except when they can be killed in Unlimited Numbers

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Charlie Moores

“But the Secretary of State disagreed – to give yet another example of the government blindly supporting shooting interests. Grouse moor managers never tire of telling us how great wader numbers are on their land. But you don’t have to look far to realise the mass destruction of predators on grouse moors is exactly what leads to huge numbers of grouse to shoot on the 12th August.” Guest post by Bob Berzins

Snared Audio Version | Chapters 01 – 08

Posted on June 11, 2020June 11, 2020 by Charlie Moores

Recently Charlie reviewed Bob Berzin’s new novel ‘Snared’ and loved it! As we also explained earlier, we’d offered to help produce an audio version. Now, we’re not professional ‘audiobook’ producers but with several hundred edited podcasts to our name we’ve got more than a little experience in cleaning sound up, listening out for (and correcting small stumbles), and outputting the files as an mp3 which anyone can download and listen to. Now, we know that a good many listeners loved the chapter we put online last week, so we figured that maybe putting the first eight chapters online – or just over 90 MINUTES of edited and lovingly curated audio – would help more listeners get the ‘Snared’ experience (and hopefully go on to buy the book of course).

Bob Berzins’ ‘Snared’ – Audio version: Chapter One

Posted on June 4, 2020June 4, 2020 by Charlie Moores

This week we’ve posted twice about Bob Berzins’ new novel ‘Snared’. The first was a book review, the second a blog post by Bob himself. He asked what other ways there might be to help ‘Snared’ to reach a larger audience. What did we know about producing an audiobook for instance…? If you’ve someone who could read it, we could certainly help out with the editing, we said. I know just the man, he replied. And so a plan was hatched…

Guest Post: Bob Berzins | ‘Snared’ – why it matters

Posted on June 2, 2020June 4, 2020 by Charlie Moores

“Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was photographed with a grouse shooting party in North Yorkshire on 19^th August 1960. The location was Barden Moor, owned by the Duke of Devonshire and this was a typical scene for the ruling classes. This was just a few months after I was born and it’s taken nearly the whole of my lifetime for us to understand what grouse shooting is all about.” Guest Post by Bob Berzins

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