As the rain lashed Wiltshire last Friday I joined a group of gamekeepers and shoot managers in a barn high on Salisbury Plain. We stood amid piles of bags of gamebird feed and discussed the imminent death of shooting on the Plain.
What has happened is this. On 1 June, without warning, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced that shoots which operate in or near to Specially Protected Areas (so designated because of rare bird species) would have to apply for an individual licence from Natural England in order to release gamebirds - rather than relying on the General License (GL43) which had regulated them hitherto. The reason given is the danger of Avian Influenza - bird flu - getting into the rare bird population via gamebirds infected by wild birds from abroad.
The problem here is the timing. Shoots order their birds in October for release in June or July. The announcement therefore came at the worst possible moment, with birds paid for and either delivered or on their way from suppliers. Natural England, which was immediately deluged in applications for individual licences, is currently taking up to six weeks to process each one, and many are being refused.
What happens now? There are half a million young birds, mostly pheasants, in England which are currently homeless. They can’t be released without a licence. On welfare grounds, they can’t be kept indefinitely in pens. They can’t legally be culled - yet. The only future for these birds, if they are not to be released into the wild as planned, is for gamekeepers to wait until they grow too big for their pens and start attacking each other, at which point - on welfare grounds - they can be culled.
This is the plan - or the inevitable result of the lack of a plan by Defra - inspired by the policy of protecting rare birds from Avian Flu. Yet as I heard from the representative from the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) at my meeting on Friday, the disease is in retreat across England and especially so on Salisbury Plain where the conditions it needs - lakes and marshlands - are absent. There is no evidence that gamebirds increase the risk of bird flu among wild birds. Whereas there is compelling evidence that rare birds are protected, not put at risk, by the shooting industry.
Research shows that active land management - the presence of a gamekeeper, tasked to keep down predator numbers and generally steward the countryside - enhances the biodiversity of the local environment. The fact is that shooting protects all birds. Creating a good habitat for gamebirds helps the songbirds and the rare birds too. As Ian Bell of BASC, a retired Brigadier and Salisbury Plain resident, puts it plainly, ‘it is our type who help protect the SPA, not the bureaucrats from Natural England’.
The effect of eradicating shooting in Specially Protected Areas, as the current approach will inevitably do, will be to see a surge in the predators - foxes and birds of prey - which feed on the protected species. The irony is that without the rare birds the SPA designation will not apply, and shooting could presumably return - though by then, the shoots will have disappeared.
The Army shoots of Salisbury Plain are many decades old; the Royal Artillery shoot, one of those still awaiting the verdict on its individual licence, was established 96 years ago. They are, in the words of Ian Bell, the ‘social cement’ of the community. They’re not big commercial shoots. They’re all charities, turning over £50k or £80k a year - birds, feed, a gamekeeper’s salary - existing on the goodwill of farmers and a small army of volunteers. They take home and eat the birds they shoot. And they all face extinction. One gamekeeper I met on Friday - of the Infantry Shoot, whose licence application has been refused - has already been made redundant.
The way ahead is clear. The General License to release must be renewed for this season. Licences are needed which allow for immediate release, so the birds which the shoots ordered in good faith last October can be set free, rather than penned up until they are big enough to cull. Then Defra must lead a proper consultation with stakeholders - meaning the people who farm and steward the land, not just the sentimentalist lobby - to get the licensing arrangements right for next season and the future.
I’m not a member of a shoot and I have no personal interest here. But I care very much about the community of soldiers, veterans, their families, and all the many people who live and work around Salisbury Plain. I want to see its rich social history and its amazing ecology preserved for the next generation. I will lobby Defra with all my might to save the Army shoots.
