whoooaaa you saw a RANGER carrying a gun? Mindbending drugs…

Hmm I’ve seen how ‘wild’ pheasants are – you could pretty much kill one by looking at it funny.

Why can’t a sport also be beneficial towards either habit management or food?

With the exception of Pheasants which are reared specifically for the purpose of shooting, all other game is free range and hasn’t been mistreated in anyway based on cost.

Any killing in some way is barbaric as a life is lost but is shooting more so than the ways used in a slaughter houses?

At least (I hope) the people killing the animal know that the meat they will be eating was once an animal and not something packaged in plastic picked up off the supermarket shelf.

Jon – it can be but it is not always – pheasant shoots around where my parents used to live plant and maintain shelter strips of woodland. They also encourage (pheasant shoots) maintenance of the “pretty” rural landscape

Grouse moors are a different situation – burning off the heather destroys one habitat to the promotion of another. Burning off heather destroys biodiversity.

Large deer herds destroy the landscape – the erosion caused by them on the highland estates is awful

without hunting and shooting our landscape will change. How much to the good is a matter of opinion and will vary in different areas.

wysiwyg – not what I have seen and you really think a bird that is not native, has been kept and reared in pens and released for a few weeks is wild?

I have seen pens of birds still penned up while shoots go on over the hill. What you say happens is not my experience.

Please note I am not saying its all bad – but some aspects of hunting and shooting destroy habitat and biodiversity some enhance it.

What about the persecution of raptors? defend that?

Not sure where you are but…..
In Devon there has recently been issued licences to cull deer, I think Dartmoor NP have had to start culling, though can’t remember where i saw that – might have been in my parish mag. The population has exploded, several news reports say there are now more deer in the uk than for the last 1,000 years. I regularly see them daily from my front room in the summer, and a trip round the lanes at night invariably sees several, in any direction. Lovely animals, nice to see but incredibly destructive when a population gets out of control.
He might have simply been carrying out the directive from his local authority.
my tuppence
Q