BLOODY GROUSE MOORS?

       

DAYS AFTER THE INGLORIOUS TWELFTH

     I have this morning I searched several sites and the mornings news programmes for any of the rhetoric of past years of the skies of our moorland being being blasted by leadshot. It will have happened but maybe to a lesser extent this year. Not through a lack of blood lust, or tradition or even culture but because the seasons and nature have ‘conspired’ in their own way to make it ‘difficult’. Wildlife exists due to the kindness of nature it self. This year we have had in the UK cold wet springs and Avian Flu. All, is not well out there and, hopefully, all will not be well for the shooters. These are my comments and should not be attributed to anyone else.

 I have lifted this from Elisa Allen’s article of the Yorkshire Post of 12th August.

Stop turning moors into bloody killing fields in the name of 'sport' - Elisa Allen

Over the next four months, many Yorkshire moors will become bloody killing fields. The ‘Glorious Twelfth’, as the start of the grouse-hunting season is known, opens the county’s picturesque landscape to those who get their jollies from blasting birds out of the sky.

Some pay up to £14,000 to join a shooting ‘party’, with whom they prowl the moors gunning down defenceless animals. Many have no shooting experience or training, so almost half the birds don’t die outright and are instead mutilated and left to endure lingering, painful deaths.

No sport in the UK has such a devastating impact as the game bird shooting industry, in terms of the number of animals killed. During the shooting season, hunters kill more than 5,000 grouse a day. If dogs and cats were shot for fun, we wouldn’t call it sport – we’d call it abuse. And that’s exactly what it is when it’s done to birds, who feel pain and fear just as much as any animal does. It is unconscionable to allow them to suffer for someone’s pleasure – and it must end.