To not understand the 'Glorious Twelfth?

[Dolcelatte]

I have a lot of grouse in my garden and they are beautiful. I just don't understand how people can get pleasure from shooting them. I am not vegetarian or anything and I do eat game, so perhaps I am being hypocritical; but I can't see anything glorious about killing for sport.

Red grouse only live on heather moorland - are you sure they are grouse?

The main issue with grouse shooting IMHO is the continued illegal killing of birds of prey, especially hen harriers, on grouse moors. This is done to maintain the very high numbers of grouse that the punters require, and as a result we have next to no hen harriers in England today, when there is enough habitat to support at least a couple of hundred breeding pairs. Today is Hen Harrier Day, btw, an attempt to raise awareness of the situation.

Gerund - Having googled 'images', I think they are probably pheasant - to my untrained eye the female pheasant looks a bit like grouse. However, I wouldn't want to shoot them either.

This is how people got their food before supermarkets.

Yes, they killed for necessity, not for sport. Don't you think there is a difference PP?

Pheasants are much more likely to turn up in most gardens. They are similar-looking birds (the females anyway).

Shooting doesn't appeal to me at all, can't see the sport or 'glory' in it at all, but in itself I don't think it's so bad, there are certainly worse ways to kill an animal for food.

But I think it is a disgrace that birds of prey are still getting illegally shot and poisoned on intensively managed grouse moors and shooting estates. And that the pheasant-shooting industry is constantly lobbying to be allowed to kill buzzards, because they take a tiny proportion of the HUGE number of pheasants (about 35 million a year, twice as many as the total population of our most common native bird) that get released into the wild for shooting in the UK.

Oh, I assumed buzzards only ate carrion. You learn something new every day!

Thanks for the link, Gerund.

Password, it's not as simple as that. Grouse hunting is a sport. The heather has to be managed to enable sufficient grouse to breed so that everyone who wants to partake in the sport can have a go. People don't just go out to see if they can find a few grouse to shoot at, it is a big organised event, where beaters encourage the grouse to fly, to give the shooters a much better chance of actually having something to shoot at.

In the past, there was far more moorland covered in heather, and far fewer people wanting to shoot the grouse. It was probably sustainable. Now, not only the landed gentry, but any old Tom Dick or Harry that wants to show they have "arrived" wants to hunt grouse. (Not saying its all right for the landed gentry to do it, not everyone else, just pointing out that this means more people are shooting on less land.)

So, the grouse populations are "managed". You can't breed them, so it's actually really a very inefficient form of food production.

Before supermarkets, there were still food producers, who took their produce to be sold in markets and shops. They didn't choose grouse, as it wasn't cost effective. Certainly, a looooooong time ago, hunter gatherers would have hunted grouse. They didn't have guns, then, though.

Buzzards do eat plenty of carrion but they also take any prey they can catch (esp. rabbits).

I don't think there is any British bird that ONLY eats carrion. The red kite probably comes closest, but they also eat lots of worms .

Thanks for that Gerund. You beat me to it.These days grouse moors are the preserve of the rich, corporate shoots coming up for a day paying a small fortune for the "pleasure" of shooting. The fines given out to game keepers are punative and a drop in the ocean to what a shoot can make a day.
I live in an area where shooting is part of everyday life, so I'm not ignorant of the importance to the rural economy of shoots. But it does seem an anachronism that we have this throwback to feudalism happening, not for necessity but as a symbol of the class divide.
Anyone interested in not just the persecution of raptors but any wildlife crime might be interested in BAWC

Grown men, with guns, dressing up and bravely shooting birds so stupid, you and I could pick them up?

It would be funny if it didnt result in so many other issues, such as poisoning birds of prey. Eejits, the lot of them.

I do understand that a lot of heather burning takes place to encourage shoots for the birds to eat which keeps the tick population down. Not sure i entirely believe this supposed "benefit" tbh.

Thanks Gerund. I was surprises the other day to hear that Golden Eagles also eat carrion. I don't know that much about large birds although I'm getting better at identifying smaller ones.

I'm not a fan of pheasants. They have a tendency to stand in the middle of the road looking gormless rather than moving out of the way of oncoming traffic.

The birds wouldn't exist in the UK without some form of breeding/habitat management so you have to decide whether you want grouse and open moorland or no grouse and scrub/dense woodland. Same for pheasants. They aren't native and the nice woodland we can walk our digs through is often a result of the management of it for pheasant breeding. So pheasants and recreational woodland or no pheasants and dense woodland.

Pheasants and probably grouse wouldn't be around much as they are bred for shooting by the gamekeepers on the appropriate land.

They are allowed to range freely, fed by the gamekeeper but able to forage, not penned in once they are big enough and some do escape shooting and end up in fields and gardens. They also provide food for wild foxes. They are also a low fat, healthy meat and eaten by the shooter or sold to local butchers shops.

Their life seems to be a lot better than chickens raised in pens and slaughtered in a way I personally find distressing, unlike game birds who know nothing more than they are flying and bang!

Thought you were talking about Northern Ireland leaving now. As you were.

Red grouse are wild birds and native to Britain (and in fact occur nowhere else - on the continent there are willow grouse instead, which are a different subspecies). They survived fine before there was shooting, albeit not at the artificially high population densities that a managed moor requires in order to be profitable. (Btw, another thing that is done on grouse moors to try to reduce the tick population is killing off huge numbers of mountain hares, so it's not just predators that are being sacrificed so people can shoot grouse).

Some moorland would be lost - or to put it another way, turn into much more diverse and natural upland forest - without management for grouse shooting, but suitable natural grouse habitat would persist above the treeline.

The plight of the hen harrier is a national disgrace. We get Shiney Dave and Prince William earnestly talking about all the nasty forriners killing tigers and elephants while they merrily support an industry that drives our own enraged animals to the brink of extinction.
Cameron even refuses to increase the fee for a gun licence, meaning police forces have to substitute each application to the tune of £17 million.
That's £17 million taken out of police budgets that could be used to fight actual crime so his mates don't have to pay what it costs for a gun licence.

Stay, I thought it was that ballyawful "glorious 12th" too...

You live and learn

Woodland is not necessarily a more diverse environment BTW. It would be a shame if we had lost moorland, especially as read wildwood land takes centuries, perhaps more to create.

Forestry plantations (usually of non-native trees) can have very low biodiversity. But managed heather moorland is inherently low in species richness compared to natural woodland.

That's not to say that our moorland species are not also worth looking after. But you don't have to have grouse shooting for that. Look at Orkney - lots of moorland, large parts of it protected as SSSIs, Special Protection Areas and nature reserves, and managed accordingly. No driven grouse shooting, loads of moorland-breeding birds including birds of prey like hen harriers, short-eared owls and merlins (and red grouse).

Thanks for all your contributions - I may not be wiser, but I feel that I am better informed!

Almost all game birds shot these days are eaten, so there is no killing for the sake of it. The days of mass killing of game are long gone (Edwardian times). It's just not done now.
If you think of it in this way then all shooters are doing is eating the ultimate 'free range' food, it lives quite literally free.
In addition, grouse shooting is very expensive, guess where the bulk of the cash goes? It goes into the management of the moors where the grouse live and this in turn benefits local wildlife ENORMOUSLY.

Win-win!

It benefits some wildlife, mainly other ground nesting birds like Lapwings but it doesn't benefit other wildlife which are killed legally (stoats/hares/crows/foxes) and illegally (hen harriers and other raptures)

How much money to shooters put into the grouse moors? The taxpayer puts in £56 an acre and subsidises 75% of a gun licence as well as dealing with the fallout from the destruction of bog and peatland such as the flooding that occurs downstream when there is nothing left on the moors to hold water.

Except man like thecage says that gamekeepers manage them exclusively for the breeding of game birds, that other ground nesting birds thrive is a happy co incidence. If they threatened the well being of their cash crop then they too would be persecuted. And the bulk if the money (and subsidies) goes into landowners pockets, as it ever does. Gerund and thecage talk sense.

in terms of welfare before becoming food
being a grouse and being shot out of sky after 5-6 months free range ( proper free range) is preferable to being a chicken ( when even free range is crowded and slaughter stressful

game birds and venison are better options in terms of welfare than chicken bacon beef and sausages,

while sport is involved in the killing it is quick, and involves no transport to abattoirs etc

I too thought this was a NI thread! I was all ready to get stuck in.