Fit for anything

Tips on post-workout food, plus a visit to Bass Rock

Iwas going to discuss Waffle, and her wasp sting, but it’s much better thank you, so, as it’s 12 August I think we’d better talk about grouse. The Scottish Government has ordered an independent (let’s hope) review of grouse moor management in the wake of a worrying number of golden eagles going missing and assumed to have been killed because they eat grouse. As it happens, breeding pairs are up 15 per cent to 508 since the last survey, not including individual birds floating about looking for mates. Still. That’s no reason to kill them, or hen harriers.

Apart from anything else it is illegal. But the sad truth is that no law has ever managed to stop all illegal behaviour. There will always be someone who thinks the law doesn’t apply to them. Which bring us to the licensing of grouse moors, which the review will consider.

Licensing, which could be extended to any farmers’ shoot, is considered by some the key to squeezing all illegal activity out of the countryside. But what can licensing bring to the party that existing laws, volumes of wildlife acts, EU directives, and climate change legislation cannot already deal with? After all, powers now exist to remove agricultural subsidy and fine any landowner found to be misbehaving.

Against the single issue of deliberate golden eagle and harrier killings (in decline according to official figures: worse than ever say the antis) the Government’s independent review body will have to balance the wildlife, conservation, landscape, employment and trickle-down economic benefits of grouse shooting – estimated at £100 million a year in Britain.

Leaving aside the well understood benefits, it might be worth the review board asking: what will the cost be of burdening blameless farms and estates with the extra expense and work of shoot licensing? Fewer employees? Less conservation planting? Indeed, how many more people or hours, will Scottish Natural Heritage need to police a licensing regime?

Because without effective policing there is no earthly point to any law. And it would be unwise to assume that the new sporting rates, which no one yet understands, have yet to be introduced and bound to be subject to endless appeals, will pay for it. So in an era of dwindling and uncertain resources, what do we want to pay for? The things that affect us all daily: education, health, transport? Or strangling grouse moor owners and farmers’ shoots in expense and red tape to satisfy a strident single issue lobby which can never be satisfied as long as one eagle or harrier remains unaccounted for? Conservation is not just for the birds, it’s for humans too. n