Blogs

Court papers have revealed that had the Wild Justice legal action to ban gamebird releasing near protected sites reached a courtroom - it would have failed.

Over the next few weeks Defra will be consulting with stakeholders about their plans for licensing gamebird releasing on or near protected sites in 2021. 

Last week the campaign group Wild Justice had to withdraw its legal action in relation to gamebird releases because Defra had found a legal solution to their concerns. However, Wild Justice then decided to describe this as a “victory” and, luckily for them, journalists at the Guardian, Telegraph, Times and the Mail appear not to have checked what Defra had actually said here.

It would appear the legal team at Defra are the real winners – they have avoided costly legal action and significant disruption to those providing the habitat that game management delivers.

GWCT is pleased to have helped provide scientific evidence to inform this issue, which shows that any negative impacts from game bird releasing are very localised to the release site, with positive impacts on habitats and other wildlife at both the local and landscape scale.

We take a closer look at three documents that have been published recently that review the ecological effects of pheasant and red-legged partridge releasing.

A new scientific paper in the journal Wildlife Biology came out this week (12 October), led by GWCT Head of Lowland Research Dr Rufus Sage, which delves into the effects of released pheasants and red-legged partridges on wildlife and the environment.

When it comes to researching the environmental impacts of game shooting, Britain leads the world. However, it’s bizarre that staff at the RSPB decided to use a review process that accentuates the negatives and minimises the positives in order to produce their doom-laden conclusions. 

When it comes to researching the environmental impacts of game shooting, Britain leads the world. This has largely been achieved by those that shoot funding ecological studies, including the hundreds of scientific papers published by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust.

Those involved in game shooting were probably as surprised as me to hear the RSPB speaking on BBC Radio 4's More or Less, focusing almost entirely on the negative views of pheasant releasing – despite explicitly stating that it’s ‘rigorously neutral’ on the matter.