It's Time to End Canned Bird Shoots in the UK

A small dead cat in a well can poison a lot of water. 

By the same token, entities that lie and paper over the holes in the field of hunting, conservation, and environmental protection make a lot of what they serve up unpalatable and suspect. 

Video is powerful and the “game keepers” need to pay attention!

 
The RSPB video seen below is a powerful indictment of ALL the apologists and deniers in the UK.  

The criminal shown on the game camera is "gamekeeper " John Orrey killing buzzards at Hall Farm, Kneeton, Nottinghamshire by clubbing them to death.

Orrey pleaded guilty to all charges in December 2021 and was sentenced on January 28th at Nottinghamshire Magistrates’ Court.  

He only received an 18-week suspended sentence for each bird, to run concurrently, and a £500 fine for each bird. He was also ordered to pay £650 costs, a £50 victim surcharge, and £180 compensation to the Wild Justice Raptor Forensics Fund.

The penalty is ridiculously low, and is little more than a "big wink" to the wholesale slaughter of birds of prey in the UK -- birds that are rare, in steep decline, and which are supposedly protected by law.  

Some law!

To put a point on it:  Hawks, harriers, kites, owls, buzzards, and eagles have clearly been killed wholesale for years in the UK by those in the canned bird-shooting-for profit industry. 

Larsen traps have supplemented shooting, poison, and pole-set leghold traps. 

The tepid "we are shocked" press releases from the gamekeepers association and the Countryside Alliance and the British Association for Shooting and Conservation which mumble that "this does not represent us" are pure nonsense and an indictment unto themselves. 

The time for change is well passed, and if the gamekeepers and shooters and their putative representatives will not see the light and **demand** that more substantive penalties be actually imposed, then I am fine with the entire potted-chicken industry in the UK being swept away and tipped over a cliff.  

It was never hunting anyway.  

It was always pretentious pretenders engaged in dress up and fakery, and it's time to put an end to it if it will not quickly reform itself.

Will it cost a few jobs?  

Yes, but so what?  

Banning slavery and whaling cost jobs too, as did replacing liveries with motorized cabs, and replacing chimney sweeps with electric baseboard heat.  

The world changes, and only a fool or a madman fails to recognize it. 

Pull the plug on the canned bird shoots in the UK.  

Will pulling the plug put a serious crimp on what little legal terrier work still exists in the UK? 

It will, but again, so what?  

If the shoots will not patrol their own, then it's time for the hammer to fall from the outside.  

Enough is enough.