SUBSIDISED SLAUGHTER?

Can someone please explain the following conundrum to me?

The Government in its ‘wisdom’, pays farmers and landowners millions of pounds in grants for parcels of land to be left uncultivated under various ‘set aside’ schemes, to encourage wildlife and provide safe havens for birds, deer, hares and so on.

I have an excellent example of this outside my home in Norfolk, which adjoins two large arable fields to the back and side of the property, with the arbitrary strips of overgrown grasses and thistles around the edges attracting goldfinches to harvest the seedheads. The hares and leverets have provided me with the usual annual pleasure of watching their antics. A large family of partridges have used the area to nest and scurry for cover when the buzzards threaten; roe deer sometimes appear from the undergrowth, including young fawns ; the screech of owls at night, hunting the small mammals living in the groundcover suggests a healthy biodiversity. So the plan works! Or does it?

Today, those same farmers and landowners are adding thousands more pounds to their coffers because the shoot is out. Men with red beaters’ flags and terriers are pounding the ‘set aside’ areas with whistles and barking dogs, driving out the partridge and hares from their once-safe havens to be shot for the ‘entertainment’ of a few wealthy gun toters in the name of sport.

It sickens me, and thousands like me, to witness the wanton slaughter of wildlife that taxpayers have paid to preserve. Either stop the farm subsidies or stop the killing.