RSPB Scotland calls for end to Mountain Hare culls

02/09/2019

New data published by the EU, revealing the condition of Scottish protected species and habitats, has revealed the country's Mountain Hare populations have experienced major declines.

As a result, the status of Mountain Hare has been downgraded to unfavourable, meaning that special conservation action needs to be undertaken to arrest further declines and aid their recovery. The main cause of this reclassification has been identified as hunting and game management. Lesser pressures include the impacts of agriculture and habitat loss.

The Article 17 Report requires the Scottish Government to give information on the status of European protected habitats and species. Scottish Natural Heritage, the government's own natural heritage advisor, has taken the action on the back of new evidence revealing catastrophic Mountain Hare declines particularly in areas managed for intensive driven grouse shooting activity.

RSPB Scotland has lobbied for many years to improve the protection for the hares in Scotland, including calling for a moratorium in 2015 on the unregulated culling. Since then, shocking new evidence has shown the species – a true emblem of Scotland's wild places – has declined by more than 90 per cent in some sites managed for driven grouse shooting in spite of claims from the shooting industry that numbers remain healthy.

Duncan Orr-Ewing, Head of Species and Land Management at RSPB Scotland, said: "We have been extremely concerned about the state of our Mountain Hare populations for many years. In the last 12 months new, robust evidence has shown that populations have declined precipitously, chiefly in areas managed for driven grouse shooting. This reclassification to unfavourable status demands urgent action.

"The recognition from Scottish Government's own advisors that Mountain Hare population is now unfavourable means that increased protection of this iconic species is needed. Self-regulation and claimed 'voluntary restraint' from culling by the industry has been nothing short of a pitiful failure.

"We urge the Scottish Government to take action where the industry has not and to urgently increase the protection of mountain hares in Scotland until their status is secured."

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Is it right to kill millions of animals if it protects others?

19 October 2016

Culls are routinely carried out around the world in the name of upholding biodiversity and animal welfare. Are they ethical and do they work, asks Alice Klein

By Alice Klein

HIPPOS in South Africa, cats in Australia, deer in the US, badgers in the UK. Across the world, governments are announcing plans to cut back the numbers of some of our most-loved animals. The latest is a proposed cull of 250,000 Siberian reindeer – which could spread anthrax – just before Christmas.

Such mass slaughter invariably sparks fierce debate between politicians, conservationists, farmers and animal-rights activists. Is it reasonable to kill animals if they threaten other species or are under threat themselves?

There are three circumstances that justify lethal wildlife control, says Bidda Jones of animal welfare group RSPCA Australia. The first is if culling will save animals from an even worse fate. For example, South Africa announced last month that it would kill some 350 hippos and buffaloes to prevent herds from suffering food shortages while the country endures a severe drought.

Culling can also be necessary if other animals are harmed by a species out of control. Feral cats are culled in Australia to protect native wildlife. Kangaroos are also lethally controlled when their numbers balloon, to prevent them from destroying vegetation that supports other species.

Finally, animals that threaten livestock or human safety may need to be eliminated. In the US, overabundant deer are culled to prevent car collisions and Lyme disease transmission to humans. In the UK, badgers have been culled to slow the spread of bovine tuberculosis among cattle. And Norway has recently approved a plan to cull two-thirds of its native wolf population to reduce attacks on sheep.

Read more

Norway plans to cull more than two-thirds of its wolf population

Environmental groups criticise plan that will allow hunters to shoot up to 47 of an estimated 68 wolves living in wilderness


Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent

Friday 16 September 2016 18.53 BST Last modified on Friday 16 September 2016 22.49 BST

Norway is planning to cull more than two-thirds of its remaining wolves in a step that environmental groups say will be disastrous for the dwindling members of the species in the wild.

There are estimated to be about 68 wolves remaining in the wilderness areas of Norway, concentrated in the south-east of the country, but under controversial plans approved on Friday as many as 47 of these will be shot.

Hunting is a popular sport in the country. Last year more than 11,000 hunters applied for licences to shoot 16 wolves, a ratio of more than 700 applicants to each licence.

The government has justified this year’s planned cull – the biggest in more than a century – on the basis of harm done to sheep flocks by the predators. Environmental groups dispute this, saying the real damage is minimal and the response out of all proportion.

The government did not reply to a request from the Guardian for comment.

The government has taken action to prevent illegal wolf hunting. Wolves are also an attraction for some tourists to the country. But the new legal hunting limit is beyond anything that the wild population can withstand, according to Norway’s leading green groups.

Under the arrangements, 24 wolves will be shot within the region of the country designated for wolf habitat, while another 13 will be shot in neighbouring regions and a further 10 in other areas of the country.

According to environmental groups, the number of wolves the government plans to kill this year is greater than in any year since 1911.

 

Continued  

Deer culled by RSPB 'suffered slow deaths'

Birds charity embroiled in row over switch from traditional lead to copper bullets

By Emily Gosden

12:01AM BST 08 Aug 2015

A former RSPB marksman has accused the charity of putting ramblers in danger and causing suffering to deer after switching to new 'environmentally-friendly' bullets.

Colonel Johnny O’Brien, a former armoured regiment commander who was hired by the RSPB as a deer stalker, said the animals suffered slow deaths after the charity instructed him to use copper bullets instead of traditional lead ones.

The charity made the switch in 2010 amid concerns that the traditional bullets fragmented within carcasses and could result in toxic lead entering the human food chain as venison, or poisoning birds.

But Mr O’Brien, who had been culling deer at the RSPB’s Arne reserve in Dorset since 2005, said the copper bullets he used instead failed to kill the deer quickly.

Whereas the lead bullets killed deer within four seconds, and often instantly, Mr O'Brien said that 26 out of 39 deer culled with the copper ammunition during the 2010-11 season survived for at least 10 seconds after being shot, with some running for 40 seconds or more before collapsing.

Continued ...

Why a ravening wolf is a sheep’s best friend

Wolf culling disrupts the cohesion of the pack, say scientists

TOM BAWDEN

ENVIRONMENT EDITOR 

Thursday 04 December 2014

Culling wolves doesn’t save the lives of the sheep and cattle they feed on, according to new research which found that the more wolves that are killed the greater the risk to local livestock of being eaten.

Washington State University researchers discovered that it is counterproductive to shoot and trap wolves because losses in their numbers change the animals’ social behaviour, and encourages them to eat more sheep and cattle.

Writing in the journal Plos One, the wildlife biologist Rob Wielgus and the data analyst Kaylie Peebles say killing one wolf increases the odds of depredations by 4 per cent for sheep and 5 to 6 per cent for cattle, the following year.

Continued ...

Dogs in Sochi, Swans in New York: Culling Must End (Op-Ed)

Marc Bekoff | February 07, 2014 07:38pm ET

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Bekoff's latest book is Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed (New World Library, 2013). This Op-Ed is adapted from two that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Human-animal relationships are ... all over the place.

Dogs are our best friends. Well, yes and no. Numerous studies show that many people consider dogs to be family members who often are treated better than human companions. However, this is not always the case. Witness the mass killing of dogs at the 2014 Olympic games in Sochi.

Continued

To cull or not? ‘Brumby’ wild horses divide Australians

For many Australians, the brumby – or wild horse – symbolises the romance and adventure of the outback.

To others, though, brumbies are pests which trample fragile vegetation and threaten native flora and fauna. Recently their numbers have soared, prompting an agonised debate about how to control populations.

Last month, more than 7,000 horses on two cattle stations in Western Australia’s East Kimberley region were killed by marksmen in helicopters. Aerial culling is regularly carried out in the Northern Territory, while in New South Wales the government – which imposed a moratorium in 2000 after photographs of a cull sparked a public outcry – is considering reintroducing it.

Further reading

Why it is ethical to kill deer but let the badgers live

Culling wildlife has a bad name right now. The government's badger cull has been a disaster on its own terms and a catastrophe by any sensible assessment. But Britain is divided, and not just over badgers. While the culling of badgers in the West Country is condemned by conservationists, in the Highlands wildlife charities are seeking to dispatch large numbers of another majestic native: red deer. And many nature-lovers would cheer an intensified cull of deer populations across the country. To philosophers of animal rights, "conservation culling" is an Orwellian atrocity – "speciesism" in action. And conservationists – and I include myself in this group – sometimes flounder in the face of such clear and principled thinking.

Continued

Targeted Culling of Deer Controls Disease With Little Effect On Hunting

Oct. 21, 2013 — Chronic wasting disease, the deer-equivalent of mad cow disease, has crept across the U.S. landscape from west to east. It appeared first in captive mule deer in Colorado in the late 1960s. By 1981, it had escaped to the wild. It reached the Midwest by 2002. Little is known about its potential to infect humans.

The effort to keep chronic wasting disease in check in Illinois is a success, report researchers Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, left, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey; U. of I. animal sciences professor Jan Novakofski; and postdoctoral researcher Michelle Green.

Now researchers at the University of Illinois offer a first look at the long-term effectiveness of the practice of culling deer in areas affected by CWD to keep the disease in check. Their study appears in the journalPreventive Veterinary Medicine.

Each year, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources tests 7,000 (hunted, culled or incidentally killed) deer for CWD infection, conducts aerial surveillance to see where deer congregate and sends in sharpshooters to cull deer at the sites with disease, said Jan Novakofski, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois and an author of the study.

"We know a lot about how far deer typically move," he said. "If they're sick, they're going to spread the disease that far. So if you find a deer that's sick, you draw that small circle and you shoot there."

Read further

Elephant contraception possible to save from culling

Contraception May Save Future Elephants from Culling

In South Africa they have a problem, a big one: too many elephants.
For most of the 1900s extensive poaching threatened to wipe out the country’s elephants. In response, conservationists established reserves throughout the region and relocated as many herds as they could. Now those herds are doing quite well. So well, in fact, that they’re causing problems. Wildlife managers are currently facing a dilemma: how to deal with too many elephants. While some advocate for culling the giants, a group of scientists has outlined a different plan to control their populations: contraception.

Rather than simply setting a quota and culling the extras, immunocontraception could be a tool to allow land managers to control elephant populations in response to conditions on the ground such as food availability. "The approach now has to be much more dynamic and look at the influence the animals are having on the land," says Robert Slotow, a biologist at the Amarula Elephant Research Program in Durban, South Africa. His team recently published a paper in PLoS ONE describing how scientists might be able to use immunocontraception—a vaccine that gets the body to make antibodies that target sperm receptors on the surface of the egg cell. Slotow and his team outlined an immunocontraception schedule that would halt the growth of herds in a South African park and even out their population structure.

The problem
In the wild, two things control elephant populations: natural mortality and environmental conditions. Calves and full-grown animals get sick and die from all kinds of things, from predation to viruses. And when the environment is unfavorable–during years of drought or food shortages, for instance–females will put off having babies. In closed systems like conservation parks, however, neither of those controls is in place. The fences around the park keep out new animals and pathogens, and controlled park conditions make sure that there is ample food. Mothers keep having babies, and the death rate seems to slow to a crawl

Read more here ...