A Charter for Appeasement

The RSPB, now managing the Eastern Moors, turned down an opportunity to give us an exciting vision of a wildlife friendly natural landscape. Instead they prefer intervention and fences. It's worth looking at why. A good start could be to read some of the constitutional documents accessible from the RSPB's website and ask why they are the Royal SPB. Once you look at their royal charter things start to become clear. They have to tread very carefully in relation to those who shoot birds among whom of course are the royal family and other wealthy people.

In order to gain the supposed respectability of having a royal charter the RSPB has compromised itself well and truly. An important condition embedded in the charter insists that they can take no position on the shooting of game birds. There's no doubt that this sets the tone for much else. The kind of landscapes shooters like are not natural landscapes. If you promote less impoverished landscapes you will not be popular with shooters. In the uplands and moors it's the treeless hills favoured by grouse where the shooting is easiest to find. So any move towards naturalising these ecologically limited hillsides risks incurring the wrath of the industry and threatens their charter. The charter turns them into the cat's-paws of the game industry. Wouldn’t they be better off just calling themselves the SPB? After all the shooting industry is responsible for the persecution not just of the birds they shoot but their predators, harriers, buzzards, various mustelids foxes and corvines in order to give the ground nesting birds an easy life until the rifles come out in August.

This royal charter has other effects. It makes the RSPB a very conservative part of the establishment which means it’s unable to move forward, always attracting safe conventional figures into its fold who prefer the status quo and favoured ‘country sports’ which always use guns. That’s one reason why the RSPB is branded as appeasers by raptor groups astonished by the charity’s muted criticisms of gamekeepers and their responsibility for the murder of hen harriers.

So it's time for the members of the RSPB to get rid of the R and give itself the chance to be honest about shooting. Then there would be a possibility of working towards better looking more wildlife friendly uplands. The economy is also linked closely with shooting. Sheep farming in the hills does not pay. Any other industry as unprofitable as hill farming would have sunk without trace years ago if it did not give the desired outcomes for the wealthy game industry of cropped heather and treeless vistas. The fence on Wimble Holme Hill is only there because of the power of the establishment to dictate that most high land must remain free from trees so that ground nesting birds can breed - and get shot.