Hare culling is necessary to curtail the threat of disease-spreading ticks to birds
Dr Philip Ratcliffe claims a “lifetime experience of land use in the Highlands” (Letters, 2 April). Has he ever noticed the heavy burden of ticks carried by hill hares, among other animals? Has he looked into the nests of curlew, plover, lapwing and, yes, grouse and seen these ticks festooned around the eyelids of the chicks, sucking the blood and killing them off?
Is he unaware that ticks carry Lyme disease, a debilitating condition which is readily passed to humans with potentially serious conse- quences? Sheep can be dipped to help reduce tick numbers, but not hares, deer and the like. Hill hare populations are cyclical and culls merely keep numbers at manageable levels. It is not the “organised slaughter” he claims.
Heather burning reduces tick populations and provides heather at a variety of ages, for food and shelter needed by many creatures. There is no “competition” between hares and grouse for the foods available in our upland areas. The grouse shooting he derides has provided income and jobs, keeping communities alive in areas which otherwise would have emptied of people long ago. It may be that grouse shooting requires further regulation, but Dr Ratcliffe does not specify. Stopping muirburn would see our hills covered in a thick blanket of rank, unproductive heather, not the “diverse ecosystem” he claims. If the latter was financially possible, it would have been put into practice long ago. HARRY MULFORD Gowanbank House Colliston, Arbroath In the 1960s in this glen, everyone with a shotgun joined in the annual, sometimes biennial, walked hare hunts which killed hundreds of white hares. It makes the numbers recently broadcast from covert filming totally insignificant.
I neither condemn nor condone that slaughter, the farmers and gamekeepers were united in their belief that hares spread tick-borne disease. Here, hare culls on this scale are long gone, and there are still plenty of hares.
Tick infestation has indeed since increased considerably, but it would be foolish to blame that on the hares alone. Fifteen years ago, before Cairngorms National Park was formed, our land was one of two demonstration moors in the Cairngorms. Scientists rather than landowners, farmers or gamekeepers, tried to assess the grazing pressure from different herbivores, and the effect of management practices, including tick control, on all species.
A lot of taxpayers’ money was spent on fencing, and surveys; and a good start made on disseminating educative material on moorlands to schools in the larger Cairngorm area. The project did not fit with the politics of the new national park and was dropped, long before useful information could be gleaned.
Without such knowledge, scientifically validated over years, those of us living in the hills carry on as best we can based on our local experiences. We also remain at the whim of urban sentimentality, and politicians who, quite literally, know no better. HECTOR MACLEAN
Kirriemuir, Angus