Bog Myrtle & Peat

“Ninety five percent of people who oppose grouse shooting have never been on a grouse moor and have no first-hand experience of moorland management”. 

I just made that up, but the point stands in all its provocative silliness. Listening to the latest tortured exclamations in the old debate about grouse shooting, it feels like reality and accountability don’t really matter now. What I said is probably more or less correct – and the nature of the discussion means that’s good enough.

There’s a well-established notion that one fifth of Scotland’s land mass is managed as a driven grouse moor. It’s supposed to be an offensive intensifier of a wider feeling that Scotland is managed to the exclusive benefit of a tiny minority – but this particular fact is nonsense. It’s nothing like as much as one fifth, and perhaps it’s less than a twentieth. Even this figure is unclear, because it’s hard to think of a single holding where grouse shooting is the only land management objective – every moor has livestock of some kind, and after a string of poor summers for grouse, many “grouse moors” are better described as hill farms anyway. Conversely, once or twice in a decade, grouse will boom and many farmers will be able to shoot on their hills – but does that make them grouse moors? Of course some places are largely devoted to grouse production, but the definition is not straightforward. The “One Fifth of Scotland” idea gets traction because it sounds impressive and unfair – but to understand “grouse moors” as land managed only for grouse is like saying Scotland is obsessed with drinking milk because there are supermarkets in every town. Sure, you can get milk in Tesco, but I’m pretty sure they do other stuff too. 

The “One Fifth” idea gets air time because it sounds compelling, but it’s hard to challenge it in public forums. Push back on this “fact” and the point is often abandoned; if you say “that’s bollocks”, the reply is: “Ach, well – it certainly does take up lots of land – and grouse shooting’s bad anyway”. In that sense, it’s not a malicious lie, it’s just a lazy and ill-founded propping-up of assumption. The same pattern plays out in a range of controversies about the sport – following a discussion online this afternoon, I noticed somebody complaining that grouse are hatched in incubators and released on moorland in excessive numbers. Of course the truth is that grouse can’t be hatched or reared in incubators – the complainant must have got muddled with partridges – but when this was explained later in the conversation, the fact was met with a shrug. So what if grouse aren’t being reared and released? – grouse shooting is bad.

Some of the negative stories about grouse shooting are true – I am slowly realising that part of being a grownup is understanding that very few things are entirely bad or entirely good; we have to make our minds up on a balance between pros and cons. And how many “cons” would have to be exposed as misinformation before the balance would drive you to shift from one side of the argument to the other? If you hated grouse shooting because it takes up “One Fifth of Scotland” and you also reckon it’s cruel to rear grouse in captivity, would you change your mind if you discovered that the former is wrong and the latter doesn’t happen? And changing your mind needn’t be support for grouse shooting – it could be something as simple as saying “hey, it looks like I don’t know enough about this subject to have a strong opinion about it”.

The most disheartening aspect of this debate arises when sillinesses and ignorance are pedalled beneath the noses of people who do actually know better. An interesting coalition of groups now works together to attack grouse shooting, and some have a much clearer understanding of the issues than others. In a startlingly insubstantial “Fact File”, the Animal Rights organisation Animal Aid argues for a ban on grouse shooting to protect our five native “types” of grouse, including willow ptarmigan, a species which has probably not existed in the UK since the last Ice Age. And this is not just a typo – in a pseudo-ecological précis, Animal Aid explains that unlike red grouse (which apparently live in “the Scottish Pennines… Dartmoor and Exmoor”) British willow ptarmigan “occupy Western regions of Scotland, Wales and Ireland”. At this point, we have to wonder if bigger truths can be corroded by an accumulation of smaller falsehoods. In the wider debate about grouse shooting, it shouldn’t matter that there’s no such place as the Scottish Pennines, or that grouse have been more or less absent from the West Country for fifty years… but like small flecks of rust which gradually expand to consume the chassis of an old truck, it’s sometimes important to clean the rubbish back and see if there’s anything actually holding the vehicle together. 

Setting aside fools and deliberate bad actors, the conversation around grouse shooting was originally stirred into life by a handful of professional ecologists and researchers. They really did have a reasonable grasp of the issues and a pretty good working knowledge of what they were up against. I disagree with them, but at least they were worth engaging with. As the debate has been mobilised into a political cause, these ringleaders have been unnervingly willing to abandon accuracy in the name of mob-provocation. When they post their own more-thoughtful campaign materials online, that content is quickly muddled into a madness of nonsense by their own followers.

It’s inevitable that campaigns gather wrong-headedness, but it is scary when the original organisers make no attempt to correct, steer or inform their own support base. They’ll show an astonishing pedantry in defending themselves from their critics, but they’ll allow their supporters to blurt out screeds of nonsense without even the slightest correction or contradiction. They seem to understand that it’s no longer about winning the argument with accuracy or precision. They’re just pouring tubs of grease onto a monstrous piggy-pile-on, and as every gibbering bandwagoneer chants nonsense about incubators full of grouse, the ringleaders pat them neatly on the head and rack up another signature on the latest petition. 

The ups and downs of this old debate are almost worn-out now. My entire day-job is based on practical conservation, and many of my clients and funders do great stuff on grouse moors across Scotland. They’ve given up trying to take part in the conversation, and that’s largely why I’ve disconnected from most of these controversies too. But there’s no denying that it’s been an unnecessarily poor debate, clouded by confusion, misinformation and deliberate distortion. The slow demise of grouse shooting in Scotland is disappointing for the sake of itself, but I am more dismayed by a sense that nobody really cares if what they’re saying is true or not.