Hunting’s medicine, now doled out to Game Shooting

The anti-hunt spin-doctors’ next victim, as was predicted. Francis Fulford identifies the first casualty: Truth

NOW that the Hunting Act has passed into law, the League Against Cruel Sports have, as expected, launched their anti-shooting campaign. They have published a lurid 31-page report, which, they state, is ‘the first in a series of League Against Cruel Sports reports about the bloody business of game bird shooting’.

As a first effort it scores little for accuracy (or use of the English language), but that is not the point. Its aim is to attract publicity in the national and local news media and to have its wildly inaccurate claims firmly established as facts in the public mind.

All pressure-groups worthy of the name are aware of the power of the printed word. They know the importance of getting their statistics into print first, so they become the accepted norm. Examples abound, one of the most famous being the gay lobby’s assertion that 10% of the population is homosexual. My favourite is the disabled lobby’s claim that more than 10 million people in the UK are disabled—one in six of the population. Clearly this figure is nonsense; but it has become an established ‘fact’ so that now we have the highly expensive and ridiculous disability rights Act.

League Against Cruel Sports Ltd (a limited company and not a charity, we must remind ourselves, with lifestyles to fund and offices to finance) are wholly concerned with the dark arts of being a pressure-group. Their ‘report’ is littered with emotively phrased assertions, conveniently unsupported by evidence.

For example they claim that, ‘Every year 4.5 million animals (and possibly twice as many) are killed by employees of shooting estates. That’s a minimum of 12,300 mammals and birds shot, poisoned, snared, trapped or clubbed to death every day.’ This is of course hogwash—but can its claimants be the same League Against Cruel Sports who, when pressing for a hunting ban, advocated the shooting of foxes as a humane method of control? Yes, they can.

The report splits into three sections. First, an attack on three specific estates, those of the Earl of Lichfield (cousin to HM the Queen and president of BASC, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation), Sir Edward Dashwood Bt (chairman of the Countryside Alliance Campaign for Shooting) and Mr Andrew Christie Miller (chairman of the Game Conservancy Trust). The League allege that on all three estates ‘Seasoned League Investigators’ found evidence of snares set in a way that contravened the BASC code.

Snaring is an emotive subject, one that lends itself to horrendous pictures of animals suffering needlessly. Proper snares, with a ‘stop’ on them, are humane, and the misuse of snares over the country as a whole will be rare. That there are isolated cases of misuse is regrettable, and all shoot owners must do their utmost to ensure that their keepers keep to the BASC code.

A second strand to the report is what it calls ‘out of control predator control’; here the literary technique is in the best traditions of Britain’s lurid tabloid journalism, with graphic descriptions such as this one on the decidedly humane Larsen trap: ‘Birds are lured down ladders into the wire frame by live decoy birds placed inside the trap. Once inside, the birds are unable to escape, held hostage to whatever fate awaits them … ’ This is instantly recognisable as a load of rubbish, but to a lazy reporter looking for some quick copy to fill a hole in his newspaper, such stuff is manna from heaven. All he has to do is make a phone call for a few quotes, and he is off to the pub for a pint.

Another neat propaganda technique is to present a fact and then leave it hanging in the air, so that the reader will draw an assumption from it. An example is this statement from the report: ‘Only one breeding pair [of golden eagles] is known to exist in England.’ Nothing further is written, but the impression given is that shooting is to blame. This gem of propaganda occurs in the section on ‘Bird of Prey Persecution’, where the League draw heavily on the very few examples of successful prosecutions of gamekeepers to justify their unsupported assertion that illegal control of birds of prey is rampant in the shooting community.

One of the oddities about this document is that it spends so much time and energy on areas where legislation already exists. The League do not have to campaign for laws to regulate types of snares, nor to protect endangered predators; these are already in place. Neither do the League explain why, although they have so many ‘Seasoned League Investigators … who have extensive experience of monitoring illegal predator control on commercial shooting estates throughout the UK’, these investigators have failed to produce evidence that has resulted in a single successful prosecution. If illegal activities carried out by shoots were one-tenth as numerous as the League allege, the courts would be kept busy with cases against keepers (and, manifestly, they are not).

The message is clear. The League Against Cruel Sports are not campaigning for amendments to be made to the law. The intention is to besmirch the good name of shooting, as they did with hunting, with the aim of a total ban on all game shooting in the UK. They have fired the first shot in their campaign.