Tag: North Yorkshire

Another day and yet another appeal for information after yet another Hen Harrier disappears in the raptor sinkhole that is the Yorkshire Dales while shooting lobbyists issue yet another piece of classic obfuscation: “Just because yet another Hen Harrier disappears somewhere on a glorious grouse moor in the glorious Yorkshire Dales doesn’t mean we had anything to do with it. Anyway, it could still be alive – there was that one time, you know, when that one bird wasn’t dead, I’m sure I read about that in a memo once…” Etc etc etc…Grouse shooting. It’s nothing but the ritual massacre of wild birds, the slaughter of countless hares, foxes, corvid, mustelids, and an industry’s absolute unwillingness to sort out the infection of criminality that ensure this disgusting hobby is and always will be first in the frame when Hen Harriers ‘disappear’ on a moor in one of the worst places in the country for illegal raptor persecution.

Brazen. Some criminals just don’t care who sees them. That’s perhaps hardly surprising given how incredibly difficult it is to get a conviction in court. But in yet another tale of everyday wildlife criminals working in one of our so-called ‘national parks’ (many of which are actually essentially privately-owned grouse shooting moors, you know those things you can visit under a generous ‘exemption’ the government gave to its donors) a ‘man’ was filmed using a tethered bird as a decoy which is illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act Section 5 (d) – despite what some people would like to claim on social media. Well, we’re always pleased to help, so in case this issue crops up again, here’s what the law says (and we’ve even bolded the relevant text for people who are just too busy killing foxes, weasels, or birds of prey to read the whole page).

North Yorkshire. How sad that for many of us the very name of what is undoubtedly a beautiful and evocative part of the UK, has become synonymous with the illegal persecution of birds of prey. Persecution to protect Red Grouse which moorland landowners flog off to the ‘have gun, will travel, don’t especially care what we shoot, and don’t especially care about your missing Hen Harriers‘ crowd. It’s such a shame. It’s become so bad that even local newspapers like the Yorkshire Post (a daily broadsheet published in Leeds and covering the whole of what used to be Yorkshire as well as parts of north Derbyshire and Lincolnshire) appear to have become highly irritated that wildlife criminals are turning their corner of the country into a byword for raptor persecution.