I’m back to talk about NatureScot but this time it’s not about the Guga hunt. Unfortunately, it’s just as grim though.

NatureScot are currently launching a consultation into their General Licensing system, which allows people to carry out certain activities involving protected wildlife that would otherwise be illegal, without having to apply for individual permission.

The vast majority of NatureScot’s 16 General Licences allow wild birds to be killed, held captive, traded, sold or turned into commercial products. Stoats can also be killed, while other General Licences allow mountain hares and geese killed by hunters to be butchered and sold as meat, dead birds to be traded whole or in pieces, including their feathers, and captive-bred wild birds to be bought, sold, confined and trained for competitive shows. There’s even a licence allowing wild red grouse to be caught and medicated to maintain populations for grouse shooting.

Have your say

NatureScot say this is an efficient way to manage wildlife. But in reality, these blanket licences make it remarkably easy to kill protected species and prop up abhorrent industries built on animal suffering.

And just imagine how easily a system like this can be abused. People can operate under these blanket licences without having to justify what they’re doing to NatureScot, and in many cases there are no mandatory returns telling NatureScot how many animals were killed or taken. That means we may have no complete picture of how much wildlife is actually being exploited or killed under these licences every year. That sets a very dangerous precedent.

Have your say

We’re urging you, our supporters, to fill out the consultation and have your voice heard. Guess who’s also doing that? The hunting and shooting industries.

They and their supporters are out in force defending a system that works in their warped interests. So we really need you to counteract their twaddle and be the voice of reason and compassion for wild animals.

We are recommending you object to all the General Licences except GL05 and GL06, which allow wild birds to be taken into care for rehabilitation or veterinary treatment before being released back into the wild. For GL13, which allows unsuccessful eggs to be removed from nest boxes, we have taken a neutral position. We recognise there may be legitimate reasons for this, but believe stronger safeguards are needed to prevent the licence from being misused or abused.

To us, it’s common sense that the only appropriate use of General Licensing is for activities that genuinely benefit wildlife and safeguard their welfare.

Below are our answers for inspiration, but please only use them as inspiration, and write your own words or else your view may not be counted. We know that with 16 General Licenses to respond to, this takes some time. But please know this has the potential to save thousands upon thousands of lives from cruelty, mistreatment and needless killing. If you’re short on time you could also just pick which of the General Licenses you feel most strongly about.

Respond to the consultation

Broader questions on General Licensing

Question 1: If you’ve used any of the General Licences, which have you used?

Never used one.

Question 2a: Do you think the current approach to General Licensing works well?

No

Question 2b: Please explain your answer:

I do not consider the current approach to General Licensing fit for purpose. I strongly oppose the use of General Licences to reduce the legal and administrative barriers to killing or commercially exploiting wild animals. Many of the licences under review provide broad permissions for lethal control without case-by-case scrutiny of whether it is necessary, proportionate or whether satisfactory non-lethal alternatives exist. This creates significant scope for misuse and, where meaningful reporting is absent, provides inadequate transparency or accountability.

I believe the current approach is not consistent with the direction wildlife management should be taking. Greater emphasis should be placed on preventing conflict, encouraging coexistence and developing non-lethal solutions, rather than relying on routine derogations from wildlife protections.

Question 3a: On a scale of 1-5 (1 Strongly disagree, 5 Strongly agree), do you support the principle of General Licensing?

2 – Disagree

Question 3b: Please explain your answer:

I do not support the principle of General Licensing where it is used to authorise the intentional harming, killing or commercial exploitation of wild animals.

General Licences authorising the killing or commercial exploitation of wildlife are inherently problematic because they transform activities that would otherwise be unlawful into routine management practices. Rather than treating the intentional harming of wild animals as an exceptional derogation requiring robust justification, they create broad standing permissions that normalise lethal intervention and exploitation.

I do, however, support the use of General Licences where they facilitate activities that directly benefit wild animal welfare, such as rehabilitation or veterinary treatment (GL05 and GL06), and where removing unnecessary administrative barriers is clearly in the interests of the animals concerned.

Question 4a: Should all General licences include a condition to provide annual returns?

Yes

Question 5a: Should new General licences be considered for any other purpose, species or legislation?

No

Question 5b: Please explain your answer:

I do not consider there to be a need for additional General Licences. Instead, I believe the existing framework should be refocused so that General Licensing is primarily used to facilitate activities that protect and care for wild animals, rather than authorising activities that intentionally harm, kill or commercially exploit them.

GL01 – To kill or take certain birds or destroy their nest and eggs for the conservation of wild birds

Question 1: On a scale of 1-5 (1 Strongly disagree, 5 Strongly agree), do you agree with a General Licence to control wild birds for the conservation of wild birds?

1 – Strongly disagree

Question 2a/b: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

Question 2b: Comment on species you have selected above.

I do not agree with any of these species being listed. I do not support the use of a General Licence to authorise the intentional killing or taking of one group of wild birds for the perceived benefit of another. While I recognise the importance of conserving native species and restoring ecosystems, I do not believe that routinely derogating from wildlife protections through broad standing permissions is an appropriate or proportionate approach.

Decisions to intentionally kill protected wild birds raise complex ecological, ethical and welfare considerations that vary considerably between locations and circumstances. These decisions should not be made under a blanket General Licence, particularly where the statutory test of there being "no other satisfactory solution" cannot be independently assessed in each case.

Genuine conservation problems are far better addressed through habitat management, nest protection and reducing the underlying pressures (including predator numbers artificially inflated by game-bird releases) rather than through the killing of wild birds under a blanket licence available to any landowner or occupier. Therefore, I believe greater emphasis should instead be placed on preventing conflict, restoring habitats and addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, alongside the development and implementation of effective non-lethal approaches wherever intervention is considered necessary.

Question 3: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which species and why.

No. I oppose any expansion of the list of species that may be killed under this or any other General Licence.

Methods

Question 4a/b: Do you agree with these permitted methods?

No

(select all)

Question 5a: Comment on methods selected above.

I do not agree with the permitted methods because I do not believe it is appropriate for a General Licence to authorise interventions that intentionally harm or kill wild birds. Many of the proposed methods raise significant animal welfare concerns, including the potential for pain, distress, injury and prolonged suffering.

Question 5b: Are there any other methods which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which methods and why.

No. I propose narrowing, not widening, the methods permitted.

Conditions

Question 6a/6b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

The proposed conditions do not require independent assessment that a specific conservation need exists, nor do they provide sufficient assurance that non-lethal approaches have been fully explored. These shortcomings illustrate why this type of intervention is unsuitable for a General Licence and should instead be considered through an individual licensing process and limited to preventative, habitat-based and non-lethal measures that support long-term coexistence with wildlife.

Proposed GL02 – To kill or take birds listed or damage or destroy their nest and eggs for the prevention of serious damage to livestock, foodstuffs for livestock, crops, vegetables and fruit

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to control wild birds for the prevention of serious damage to livestock, foodstuffs for livestock, crops, vegetables and fruit?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a/b: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all species)

Question 2c: Comment on species you have selected above.

I do not agree with any of these species being listed. Modern agriculture has a wide range of well-established non-lethal means of protecting crops and feed from birds. NatureScot’s own evidence base for how much serious damage is actually prevented by killing feral pigeons, wood pigeons, corvids and geese, as opposed to using these non-lethal measures, is thin.

Question 3: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which species and why.

No

Methods

Question 4a/4b: Do you agree with these permitted methods?

No

(select all)

Question 5a: Comment on methods selected above.

I do not agree with the permitted methods because I do not believe it is appropriate for a General Licence to authorise interventions that intentionally harm or kill wild birds. Many of the proposed methods raise significant animal welfare concerns, including the potential for pain, distress, injury and prolonged suffering.

Question 5b: Are there any other methods which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which methods and why.

No

Conditions

Question 6/6b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

As with GL01, I consider the conditions inadequate because they do not require evidence of actual, serious, current damage, and do not require non-lethal deterrents to be demonstrably exhausted. I ask that this licence be withdrawn in favour of an individual licensing process and limited to preventative, habitat-based and non-lethal measures that support long-term coexistence with wildlife.

Proposed GL03 – To kill or take or damage or destroy nest and eggs of certain birds for the preservation of public health, public safety and preventing the spread of disease

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to control wild birds for the preservation of public health, public safety and preventing the spread of disease?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a/2c: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

Question 2c: Comment on species you have selected above.

I do not agree with either species being listed for this purpose. I recognise the importance of protecting public health, public safety and preventing the spread of disease. However, I do not believe a General Licence is an appropriate mechanism for authorising the routine capture or killing of wild birds for these purposes.

The level of risk posed by wild birds, the evidence supporting intervention and the availability of effective non-lethal measures will vary significantly between locations and circumstances. These are inherently case-specific assessments and should not be authorised through broad standing permissions. Where intervention is proposed, it should instead be considered through an individual licensing process supported by robust scientific evidence, independent scrutiny and clear justification.

Preventative measures should be the primary response to public health and disease concerns. Improved waste management, reducing access to anthropogenic food sources, biosecurity, exclusion techniques and public education can all reduce conflict without harming wildlife and should be fully implemented before any intervention is considered.

I am also concerned that the term ‘public safety’ is not clearly defined within the licence, creating scope for inconsistent interpretation and the risk that relatively minor issues or perceived nuisance could be treated as sufficient justification for lethal intervention. Where a genuine and evidenced public health or safety risk exists, I do not consider routine lethal control to be an appropriate response. NatureScot has not demonstrated that killing wild birds provides a lasting or effective solution - suitable preventative and non-lethal measures should be used.

Question 3: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which species and why.

No

Methods

Question 4a/4b: Do you agree with these permitted methods?

No

(select all)

Question 5a: Comment on methods selected above.

I do not agree with the permitted methods because I do not believe it is appropriate for a General Licence to authorise interventions that intentionally harm or kill wild birds. Many of the proposed methods raise significant animal welfare concerns, including the potential for pain, distress, injury and prolonged suffering.

Question 5b: Are there any other methods which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which methods and why.

No

Conditions

Question 6a/6b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

I consider the conditions inadequate because they do not require evidence of actual, serious, current risk, and do not require non-lethal approaches to be demonstrably exhausted. I ask that this licence be withdrawn in favour of an individual licensing process, supported by robust scientific evidence, independent scrutiny and limited to preventative, habitat-based and non-lethal measures that support long-term coexistence with wildlife.

Proposed GL04 – To take red grouse using certain methods in order to administer medication or collect samples

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit red grouse to be taken by certain methods, in order to administer medication or collect samples?

1 – Strongly Disagree

Methods

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with these permitted methods?

No

(select all)

Question 2c: Comment on methods selected above.

I do not object to these methods solely because of the techniques themselves, but because of the purpose for which they are authorised under this General Licence. In practice, this licence exists to support the medication and disease surveillance of red grouse on managed moorland, in order to keep grouse populations productive for driven grouse shooting. I do not accept that maintaining artificially high densities of a game bird for a shooting ‘sport’ is a legitimate purpose for a general licence to catch and handle wild birds.

Question 2d: Are there any other methods which should be included on this General licence? If yes, please provide justification and evidence for the potential inclusion of this/these methods:

No

Conditions

Question 5a/5b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

I do not consider the proposed conditions to provide sufficient safeguards. Capturing, handling and medicating wild red grouse to support populations managed for shooting should not be authorised through a blanket licence in the first place.

Proposed GL05 – To keep unregistered disabled, wild-bred Schedule 4 birds for rehabilitation

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the keeping of unregistered disabled, wild-bred schedule 4 birds for rehabilitation?

5 –  Strongly Agree

Conditions

Question 2/2b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

Yes

I encourage NatureScot to keep the conditions under review in consultation with wildlife rehabilitators and veterinary professionals to ensure they continue to reflect best practice and support positive welfare outcomes for birds undergoing rehabilitation.

I would welcome the annual publication of anonymised, aggregate data on the use of this licence, including the species admitted, numbers of birds received, rehabilitation outcomes (such as release, transfer or death), and, where known, the primary causes of injury or admission. This would improve transparency, provide valuable insight into the pressures facing Scotland’s wild birds, and help inform future wildlife conservation, welfare and policy decisions.

Proposed GL06 – To keep unregistered disabled, wild-bred Schedule 4 birds for veterinary treatment

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the keeping of unregistered disabled, wild-bred schedule 4 birds for veterinary treatment?

5 – Strongly Agree

Conditions

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

Yes

As with GL05, I encourage NatureScot to keep the conditions under review in consultation with wildlife rehabilitators and veterinary professionals to ensure they continue to reflect best practice and support positive welfare outcomes for birds undergoing rehabilitation.

Proposed GL07 – To rear unregistered chicks from captive-bred Schedule 4 birds

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the rearing of unregistered chicks from captive-bred schedule 4 birds?

1 – Strongly disagree

Conditions

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

I do not agree with these conditions, as we do not agree with the purpose of the licence itself. This licence exists to administratively support the captive breeding of birds of prey for falconry and aviculture. The keeping and breeding of wild birds in captivity raises significant animal welfare and ethical considerations, including the lifelong confinement of birds whose biological and behavioural needs are difficult to meet fully in captivity. I do not believe the General Licensing framework should be used to legitimise or facilitate the captive breeding of wild birds for falconry, aviculture, showing or other private purposes. These activities do not benefit wildlife and are not an appropriate use of General Licensing.

Proposed GL08 – To permit the competitive showing of certain captive-bred live birds

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the competitive showing of certain captive-bred live birds?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

Question 2c: Comment on species you have selected above.

I object to the inclusion of every species listed. I strongly oppose the use of a General Licence to facilitate the competitive showing of captive-bred wild birds. Competitive showing subjects birds to confinement, transport, repeated handling and unfamiliar environments purely for human recreation, with associated risks of stress and compromised welfare.

I do not consider removing legal or administrative barriers to such activities to be an appropriate use of General Licensing.

I am also concerned that legalising showing for a wide range of species creates demand that indirectly sustains wild-bird trapping and trading pressure more broadly.

Question 3: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which species and why.

No. I propose that no species be shown competitively, and that this licence be withdrawn entirely.

Conditions

Question 4a/4b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

No set of conditions can justify the use of a General Licence to facilitate the competitive showing of captive-bred wild birds.

Proposed GL09 – To keep certain captive-bred live birds in show cages for training purposes

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the keeping of certain captive-bred live birds in show cages for training purposes?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

Question 2b: If no, please provide your reason for not supporting the inclusion of any captive-bred wild bird species, including which species should be included

I do not support the inclusion of any captive-bred wild bird species in a show-cage training licence. No species should be included; the confinement of birds in show cages unnecessarily restricts their movement and natural behaviours, raising significant welfare issues. Wild birds should not have their welfare compromised simply to satisfy a human hobby or competitive spectacle.

Dimensions

Question 3a/3b: Do you agree with the proposed dimensions?

No

(select all)

Question 3c: Comment on dimensions selected above.

I do not agree with any of the proposed dimensions. The minimum dimensions proposed provide insufficient space for birds to express natural behaviours or experience an appropriate standard of welfare. However, my objection is not simply to the dimensions. I do not consider it appropriate to keep wild birds in show cages for training or exhibition, regardless of their size.

Conditions

Question 6a/6b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

Rather than safeguarding bird welfare, the proposed conditions establish a framework for the routine confinement of captive-bred wild birds in show cages for training purposes. I do not consider this to be an appropriate use of General Licensing and ask that this licence be withdrawn.

Proposed GL10 – To sell certain live captive-bred species of wild bird

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the selling of certain live captive-bred species of wild bird?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

Question 2c: Comment on species you have selected above.

I object to the inclusion of every species listed. It is fundamentally inappropriate for a General Licence to facilitate the commercial trade in protected wild birds. It not only raises significant welfare concerns for the birds involved, but also creates commercial incentives for continued breeding and increases the risk of illegal wild-taken birds being laundered into the captive population.

Question 3: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which species and why.

No

Conditions

Question 4a/4b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

No set of conditions can overcome my fundamental objection that the commercial sale of protected wildlife is not an appropriate activity to facilitate through the General Licensing framework.

Proposed GL11 – To sell feathers and parts of certain dead birds which have been captive-bred or legally taken from the UK

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence permitting the selling of feathers and parts of certain dead birds which have been captive-bred or legally taken from the UK?

1 – Strongly disagree

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

Question 2c: Comment on species you have selected above.

I object to every species listed. It is fundamentally inappropriate for NatureScot to propose a licence whose sole function is to make it easier to buy and sell the remains of protected wild birds. The existence of a market for feathers and body parts perpetuates the commercial exploitation of protected species and undermines the principle that protected wildlife should be afforded greater, not lesser, protection from commercial interests.

Question 2d: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, please provide justification and evidence for the potential inclusion of this/these species:

No

Conditions

Question 4a/4b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

No set of conditions can overcome the fundamental inappropriateness of using the General Licensing framework to facilitate the commercial trade in protected wildlife or their parts.

Proposed GL12 – To sell certain dead birds which have been captive-bred or legally taken from the European Union

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence permitting the selling of certain dead birds which have been captive-bred or legally taken from the European Union?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree with the proposed species listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

Question 2c: Comment on species you have selected above.

I object to every species listed. Many of the species listed are routinely shot for sport, and this licence enables birds killed through recreational shooting to be subsequently sold. The ability to sell shot birds gives them an additional financial value and risks further entrenching shooting interests within wildlife management.

More broadly, I do not consider facilitating the commercial trade in protected wild animals to be an appropriate use of General Licensing, particularly where this may create additional incentives associated with their killing.

Question 2d: Are there any other species which should be included on this General licence? If yes, please provide justification and evidence for the potential inclusion of this/these species:

No

Conditions

Question 4a/4b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

No amendment to the conditions would address the fundamental concern that facilitating the commercial trade in protected wildlife is not an appropriate function of the General Licensing framework. This licence should be withdrawn.

Proposed GL13 – To take unsuccessful eggs laid by wild birds from nest boxes

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the taking of unsuccessful eggs laid by wild birds from nest boxes?

3 – Neutral

Conditions

Question 2/2b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

I recognise that removing genuinely abandoned and unsuccessful eggs can help ensure nest boxes remain available for future breeding attempts, and that requiring individual licences in every case may be disproportionate. However, I believe stronger safeguards are needed to ensure the licence cannot be misused, including safeguards to ensure that eggs cannot be treated as abandoned where human disturbance or deterrence has caused or contributed to the adults’ absence.

Therefore, the proposed conditions would benefit from greater clarity. The licence should define ‘unsuccessful’ and ‘abandoned’ eggs using objective, evidence-based criteria, rather than leaving this determination entirely to the operator’s discretion. For example, collection should only be permitted after a minimum period of confirmed inactivity has demonstrated that the breeding attempt has failed.

The licence should require reporting of the species, number and location of eggs collected, and confirmation that the eggs were demonstrably unsuccessful. This would improve transparency, enable NatureScot to monitor the use of the licence, and help ensure that collections continue to serve genuine conservation purposes.

Proposed GL14 – To use certain traps to kill stoats for the conservation of wild birds or for prevention of serious damage to livestock

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit the use of certain traps to kill stoats for the conservation of wild birds or for the prevention of serious damage to livestock?

1 – Strongly disagree

Conditions

Question 2/2b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

I do not believe killing stoats for the conservation of wild birds or prevention of damage to livestock is appropriate for a broad General Licence. Preventative and non-lethal measures should be strictly prioritised, including improved husbandry, exclusion and proofing, habitat management and, where appropriate, relocation. Any intervention requiring a licence should instead be considered individually, allowing NatureScot to assess the circumstances, evidence and non-lethal alternatives case by case.

The proposed conditions do not address the fundamental problem of killing stoats being authorised through a broad standing permission, nor provide sufficient case-by-case scrutiny or ensure non-lethal approaches are prioritised.

Proposed GL15 – Sale, advertisement, possession, transportation of Greylag geese, Greylag goose meat by hunters, caterers and retailers

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit sale, advertisement, possession and transportation of Greylag geese and Greylag goose meat by hunters, caterers and retailers?

1 – Strongly disagree

Species

Question 2a/2b: Do you agree that this General Licence is restricted to Greylag goose only?

No

I disagree with the whole premise of a commercial licence for the sale of goose meat, whether restricted to greylag goose or not, so I cannot support extending it to further species.

Creating a commercial market for wild birds killed under licence risks attaching financial value to their killing and undermines the principle that wildlife management should not be driven by commercial interests and based on preventative, non-lethal approaches.

Areas

Question 2a/2b/2c (Areas): Do you agree with the proposed areas listed on this General Licence?

No

(select all)

I object to the inclusion of all three areas and any other areas.

Question 3: Are there any other areas which should be included on this General licence? If yes, tell us which areas and why.

No. I propose that the areas covered be reduced to none, i.e. that this licence be withdrawn.

Conditions

Question 5a/5b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

The conditions fail to address the risk that allowing the sale and advertisement of wild birds creates commercial incentives that are incompatible with the purpose of responsible and ethical wildlife management. In my view, wildlife management decisions should never be influenced, or appear to be influenced, by the potential for commercial gain.

No set of conditions can overcome my fundamental objection that General Licensing should not be used to facilitate the routine killing of wildlife nor commercial markets for them.

Proposed GL16 – Sale, advertisement, possession and transportation of mountain hare and mountain hare meat by controllers, caterers and retailers

Question 1: Do you agree with a General Licence to permit sale, advertisement, possession and transportation of Mountain Hare and Mountain Hare meat by hunters, caterers and retailers?

1 – Strongly disagree

Conditions

Question 2/2b: Do you agree with the conditions proposed under this General licence?

No

As with GL15, the conditions fail to address the risk that allowing the sale and advertisement of hares creates commercial incentives that are incompatible with the purpose of responsible and ethical wildlife management. Wildlife management decisions should never be influenced, or appear to be influenced, by the potential for commercial gain and should be based on preventative, non-lethal approaches.

Mountain hares were given specific legal protection in Scotland in 2020 following long-standing concern, which I share, about large-scale culling on grouse moors and evidence of declining populations and unfavourable conservation status. Introducing a commercial market for mountain hare meat under this licence risks re-creating exactly the financial incentive to kill hares in volume that the 2020 protections were intended to reduce, by giving culled hares a saleable value. As with GL15, this normalises and monetises a cull rather than addressing the underlying land-management practices (in particular driven grouse shooting) that drive the perceived need for hare culling in the first place.

Welcome to the 13th edition of Eye on the Wild, our weekly roundup designed to keep you up to date with the latest stories concerning British wildlife.

Tired of bad news? Scroll down for some GOOD NEWS!

If you have a story you think we should cover, email us at contact@protectthewild.org.uk

A developer wants to destroy precious green belt land in Lancashire, and locals are asking you to help. Huge warehouses could be built on a site next to the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, home to otters, kingfishers and more. The two warehouses would each be the size of Wembley Stadium. With the site running 24/7, there would be an estimated 2,000 HGV movements a day. Given their location, there’s also concern that the warehouses could be transformed into an AI data centre complex.

Chorley Council refused planning permission, but the battle is far from over. Council refusals are often overruled, and the developer is in the process of appealing against the decision. Locals say they need “heavyweight legal representation”.

Friends of Finnington Residents Group says:

“This is a part of Lancashire steeped in history with many heritage assets which are of both local and national importance. In order to fight this, we urgently need to raise money in order to instruct legal representatives to act on our behalf.”

Please donate to the locals’ legal costs. Even £2 will help with the fight to save green belt land.

Donate here

Tunnel collapses at zoo, killing meerkats, including pregnant mum

The tragedy took place at Tropical Birdland in Leicestershire. The meerkats dug a tunnel for a new litter, but heavy rain made it collapse, trapping them inside. Only one meerkat survived. Until this week, Tropical Birdland had been profiting from offering the public a ‘meerkat experience’.

In the wild, meerkats regularly move between multiple burrows. Captivity took away their options.

This is the THIRD UK zoo in just two and a half months where animals have either died or had their lives risked. Zoos only survive because people buy tickets.
Boycott all zoos! No animal belongs in a cage.

Pigeon loses her life after being thrown around by teenage boys

A pigeon was euthanised in Treharris, Merthyr, this week after a group of male teenagers threw her around, breaking her wing.

A dog walker witnessed the cruel incident on Thursday, rescued the pigeon and called the RSPCA for help.

RSPCA Deputy Chief Inspector Gemma Black said:

“This must have been very upsetting and shocking to see, with the witness reporting that the pigeon was thrown in the air back and forth between themselves.

The member of the public was able to collect the injured pigeon and contacted the RSPCA. We’d like to thank them for their help and compassion.”

Black continued:

“We’re appealing for anyone with first hand information to get in touch to help us with our enquiries. The youths were described as male and aged between 15 and 18. Our Inspectorate Appeal Line can be reached on 0300 123 8018 and incident number 1888430 can be quoted.”

And finally, lots of much needed good news!

Animals have been spotted on Dunwich Heath

The habitat was absolutely ravaged by wildfire some weeks ago, with 370 acres burnt. A National Trust spokesperson said:

"We're hearing from staff on the ground that they've seen muntjacs, rabbits, butterflies, birds and some reptiles."

Record numbers of choughs have nested in Cornwall

The RSPB said 161 choughs have been counted. The species died out in Cornwall in the 1970s but returned in 2001.

Britain's rarest bird of prey has bred

Two female Montagu's harriers have raised six chicks with one male on English farmland: the second successive year of success at this secret site.

Wild beaver kits have been born in Norfolk

Two beaver kits have been born at Pensthorpe Nature Reserve: the first in over 500 years!

Twenty-one storks have been released into the wild in Cornwall

Cornwall Stork Project released the storks and hopes the birds will return to breed.

Red-listed barn owls breed in Northern Ireland

Ulster Wildlife has announced that two barn owl pairs have successfully bred, each raising five chicks.

If you like the work we do at Protect the Wild, please consider donating a couple of pounds per month.

Donate here

Listen up! It’s that time again where we offer you all a big old discount in the Protect the Wild shop! To celebrate August Bank Holiday weekend we’re giving you 25% off everything! (From now until end of Bank Holiday Monday)

You don’t need to enter a code or anything, just add your items to the basket and the discount will be automatically applied.

Protect the Wild Shop

Our work so far this year

Every purchase helps fund our campaigns, investigations and frontline work for animals. So far in 2026, we have helped stop the Guga hunt and bring the English badger cull to an end, completed the largest undercover investigation ever undertaken into the British bird-shooting industry, and seen 50,000 of you use our online tool to respond to the government’s consultation on hunting.

We have also helped protect animals through individual interventions, from getting blocked swift nesting sites reopened to helping stop planned pigeon culls.
We have funded more than 65 mental health sessions for animal activists, supporting some of the people carrying out incredibly difficult and emotionally exhausting work for animals.

We have also used elections and headline-grabbing public stunts to force animal issues into the political conversation, including securing the front page of the country’s biggest newspaper while calling out Nigel Farage’s support for fox hunting.

Meanwhile, our campaigning films have reached more than 100 million views across TikTok and Instagram, taking animal-rights messages far beyond the usual echo chamber.
That is just some of what your support has made possible, and we have so much more in the works.

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On Friday 26th June, at Southsea pier in Portsmouth, teenagers were reported to have been firing metal ball bearings at pigeons, using slingshots. Once the injured pigeons fell, the teens cruelly stamped on them.

These horrific actions caused the death of 12 pigeons, with two more severely injured but left alive. Wild Hearts Rescue were called, and raced to collect the pigeons, hoping to save them. Both pigeons suffered painful injuries, including a broken wing, a broken leg, and severe head trauma.

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The injuries

Two days later, Wild Hearts rescue went back to the pier to check the area. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending how you look at it), five more injured pigeons were found, each having the same injuries as the previous 14 - slingshot injuries, broken bones, and head trauma, consistent with being stamped on.

Sadly, for two of the five pigeons the only kindness Wild Hearts Rescue was able to offer was euthanasia, to stop their suffering. The remaining three were admitted for rehabilitation. The road to recovery will be a long one. One pigeon needed surgery to remove debris fired into their chest during the slingshot attack, and all three had broken wings, as well as open wounds where they had been struck.

What is heartbreaking about this, is that none of the pigeons experienced a quick death. All suffered long periods of time before either succumbing to their injuries, or being euthanised out of kindness. Even more devastating, the pigeons were innocent animals being deliberately targeted and deliberately crushed for “fun”.

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What it does to the people who pick up the pieces

These unnecessary acts of cruelty place a strain on rescues that are already overrun, like Wild Hearts Rescue. Rescues are left with the animals who suffer, and they are often the ones to make the impossible call to euthanise when nothing else can be done. Rescues do this out of the goodness of their hearts, out of empathy for the animals we share this world with.

Pigeons deserve the same protection as any other animal. Feral pigeons are among the most maligned and controversial birds in Britain. Some write them off as vermin, as a nuisance, and somehow less deserving of care. Others defend pigeons, they care for them, take string off their feet, and feed them. At the end of the day, a pigeon feels pain exactly as a swan does. A pigeon with a broken wing suffers exactly as a fox with a broken leg suffers. The species does not change the cruelty, suffering, pain, and fear they experience.

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Why the law must protect every animal

This is precisely why the offence we are campaigning for must apply regardless of species.

We are calling for legislation in England making it a specific offence to intentionally or recklessly use, discharge or attempt to discharge a catapult at or towards any animal.

Reportedly, two of the boys responsible, aged twelve and thirteen, were arrested and have been bailed until September. We are hoping they understand that wildlife is not target practice. Catapults must never be used as weapons against animals, no matter the animal.

Please support Wild Hearts Rescue

As we write this, Wild Hearts Rescue are still treating and working to rehabilitate the surviving pigeons, alongside every other animal in their care. So please: donate to them, and sign the petition.

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There is a month each summer when greylag geese cannot fly. They moult their flight feathers, and for a few weeks are grounded. On Orkney, humans take advantage of the geese’s vulnerable state and start culling them en masse.

The birds are herded into pens on shore. Once penned, they are killed by cervical dislocation. The neck is stretched until the vertebrae separate and the spinal cord is severed from the brain. The practice is called corralling.

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In July, the Scottish Government published meeting minutes of the National Goose Forum, a Scottish Government body that brings together the organisations involved in goose ‘management’. This particular meeting was chaired by the Scottish Government, with NatureScot providing the secretariat, while four other NatureScot staff attended. Bird conservation bodies RSPB and BTO sat round the table, as well as shooting and farming interests, and representatives of Local Goose Management Groups.

Respond in two minutes

Alastair Watston, of Orkney Local Goose Management Group, stated:

“Corralling is proving an efficient method allowing large numbers of geese to be culled – 1,200 geese in a single morning.”

Asked about the method, NatureScot told the Daily Mail corralling is

“a humane and efficient method for controlling geese.”

In 2025, Orkney killed 4,052 greylag geese. 2,489 were shot and 1,563 were slaughtered by corralling.

Watson stated:

“Control efforts are keeping a lid on numbers but are not bringing the population size down.”

At the meeting, Tiree and Coll’s Goose Management Group announced that it plans to attempt corralling, learning from the experiences on Orkney, while Islay discussed using the method (even though corralling isn’t achieving its desired outcome on Orkney). More corralling is likely to have happened this summer - within the last few weeks when birds have been moulting - although there is currently no public evidence published.

Answer the consultation

In the minutes, NatureScot stated that it has allocated £700,000 to local goose management groups around Scotland for greylag ‘management’. In the Uists, that money pays shooters £8 for every goose shot. The legal permission comes from NatureScot too: General Licence GL02/2026 permits the killing of greylag geese year round.

NatureScot exists to look after Scotland's nature. But it has licensed the killing, funded the killing, provided the secretariat for the forum where the killing was reported as a success, and then described the method as humane.

NatureScot is currently consulting on the general licences that permit wild birds to be killed without needing individual permission. This is the same licensing system that allows this monstrous greylag slaughter. The public consultation is open to anyone, not only to shooters and land managers.

The organisations that use these licences are actively encouraging their members to respond. If the only people who reply are the ones doing the killing, the licences will be written for them.

Please take two minutes to fill in NatureScot’s general licences consultation.

Take action for the geese

Sign our Catapult Petition

Across the country, animals are being deliberately targeted with catapults. Swans on the water. Geese and ducks on the riverbank. Pigeons, magpies, squirrels, and, in some cases, people’s cats. Ball bearings and steel shot, fired at living creatures for nothing more than someone’s idea of fun. Much of it fuelled by videos passed around online, glorifying the harm and daring others to copy it.

The injuries are horrific; broken bones, blindness, internal damage, and all too often a slow death.

None of this is a specific crime

Right now, in England, none of this is a specific crime.

It is perfectly legal to own a catapult. Legal to carry one in public. The laws we already have, the ones meant to protect wildlife and prevent cruelty, were never written with this in mind, and they leave those who target animals facing minimal consequences, or none at all. When campaigners have asked the government to act, they have been told the current law “strikes the correct balance.”

Those protections are also spread across different pieces of legislation, and whether an attack is covered, and how seriously it’s treated, can depend on the species involved and the precise circumstances - which creates loopholes.

Sign our Catapult Petition

Why we launched the campaign!

We want to see legislation introduced in England making it a specific offence to intentionally or recklessly use, discharge or attempt to discharge a catapult or slingshot at or towards any animal.

The offence must apply:

• Whether or not an animal is struck, injured or killed. The act of taking aim at a living creature is the wrong we are naming.

• Regardless of the species targeted. A pigeon’s life is not worth less than a swan’s. The law should protect all of them.

• To attempts as well as completed attacks. No one should escape because their aim was poor.

• Without exemptions for sport, recreation, pest control or land management. There is no context in which firing a catapult at an animal is acceptable.

This is not about criminalising a fishing tool or a target-shooting hobby. It’s about stopping wildlife crime and animal harm, by being able to hold culprits to account.

Sign our Catapult Petition

Exactly what the petition would change

Today, someone who fires a catapult at wildlife can only be pursued under a scattered set of existing laws, and only if the circumstances happen to fit. Whether they face any consequence at all can turn on the species they targeted, whether the animal was found, and whether the harm can be proven after the fact. There is no single, clear offence that says the act itself is wrong.

The petition would change that. It calls for one specific, standalone offence in England: intentionally or recklessly using, discharging or attempting to discharge a catapult or slingshot at or towards any animal. That means a clear rule that applies to every species, closes the gaps between the existing laws, removes the exemptions, and gives the police and prosecutors an unambiguous line to enforce. Instead of asking “does this fit an older law written for something else?”, the question becomes simply: did someone aim a catapult at an animal?

Why attempts must be covered, even when an animal is not struck

It might seem that the real harm is only done when a projectile lands. It isn’t. A ball bearing fired at a swan and missing by an inch was still fired with the intent to maim. The animal was still terrorised. The only difference between a miss and a shattered wing is luck, the shooter’s aim, a gust of wind, the animal moving at the last second.

A law that only bites when an animal is hit would reward the lucky shot and punish the accurate one, and it would force rescues and police to find an injured or dead animal before anything could be done. That is the wrong test. The wrong we are naming is the act of taking aim and firing at a living creature, and that wrong is complete the moment the shot is taken, whether it connects or not. Covering attempts is what makes the offence enforceable in the real world, and what makes clear that no one escapes simply because they missed.

Sign our Catapult Petition

Add your name

Animals cannot report what is done to them. They cannot testify, and they cannot run from a ball bearing travelling faster than they can see. All they have is us. So we are asking. Sign. Share. Tell your MP that wildlife deserves better than a legal grey area.

Wildlife is not target practice. Catapults must never be used as weapons against animals.

Sign the petition to ban catapult attacks on animals here — and share it far and wide.

Sign our Catapult Petition

Nine women are taking action against the Metropolitan Police after being wrongfully arrested and mistreated by the force.

The women, aged between 20 and 64, were arrested at an Animal Rising training event during the King's coronation in 2023. Police claimed that the animal advocates planned to disrupt the coronation, even though they were miles away from the event.

Those attending the training wanted to learn about the principles of non-violent direct action. Louisa Hillwood, who was coordinating the training session that day, said:

“We had just started the session when the police stormed in and arrested all of us, saying they had ‘intelligence’ we were planning to disrupt the King’s coronation. They were wrong.”

They were arrested by 15-20 mainly male officers, handcuffed, taken to cells, subjected to full body searches and detained for 14 hours. They were then released late at night without their phones, which had been confiscated.

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Louisa continued:

“We learned later that they had chosen to arrest us because we were in a building previously used by anti-monarchy protesters. We had been caught up in an attempt by the police to unlawfully and pre-emptively silence peaceful protest that day.”

Each of the women remained under investigation until the end of August 2023, when they were handed back their phones and told there was insufficient evidence for further action.

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The Met says intelligence suggested the women were part of Just Stop Oil and planned to disrupt the coronation. The women are now crowdfunding a legal challenge to that claim.

Louisa explained:

“We are taking the police to court to hold them to account for our unlawful arrests and to protect our right to protest in the UK.

We need to raise £20,000 by 1st September to be able to progress with the case. Any amount you can donate, large or small, would be hugely appreciated. This is not just about me, it’s about protecting democracy and protecting people from police abuse of power in the future.”

Susie Labinjoh, head of civil liberties at law firm Hodge Jones & Allen, said:

“The vast majority of these women suffered a host of issues following the unlawful arrest, including panic attacks, depression, anxiety and paranoia.

Surprisingly, the Metropolitan Police has denied any wrongdoing, so legal action is the only recourse to justice for these innocent women.”

Please give what you can to help these women hold the Met to account.

Donate here

We’ve just released a powerful new animation to launch our campaign against catapult attacks on animals, and to ask you to add your name to our petition.

Across the country, animals including swans, ducks, gulls, pigeons and squirrels are being deliberately targeted with catapults firing stones, ball bearings and other projectiles. Those struck can suffer broken bones, blindness, internal injuries and death.

I won’t say too much more, I’d rather you see it for yourself.

Sign the petition!

Right now, protections are scattered across different laws, and whether an animal is covered can depend on the species and circumstances. We believe the law should be clear and consistent: catapults should never be used as weapons against animals.

That’s why we’re calling on the Government to make it a specific, standalone criminal offence to intentionally or recklessly use, discharge or attempt to discharge a catapult or slingshot at or towards any animal.

Sign the petition!

This is just the start. We’ll be gathering evidence, amplifying wildlife rescues, securing support from MPs and experts, and backing others campaigning on this issue.

Please watch the animation, share it, and add your name to the petition.

With thanks to the brilliant Fire Lily Studio for putting it together for us.

A few weeks ago we published footage from inside a pheasant hatchery, showing workers ‘sorting’ very young chicks and dropping them onto a moving conveyor belt - treated, as we put it, as “just one more item to be sorted, moved, processed.”

Readers probably hoped that was the worst of it. It wasn’t. What follows is an account of what happens to chicks once they are ‘sold on’ to another farm, and it’s just as heartbreaking…

The investigations team placed a camera inside a rearing facility on a different farm and left it for two days. It was pointed at what amounted to a ‘ring’ of sawdust and heat lamps inside a dark shed, and it clearly captured the moment when chicks are ‘introduced’ to their new home…

A worker carries plastic rearing trays into the shed, walks into the centre of the ‘ring’, and simply tips the tray, upside down, letting dozens of chicks fall from a height onto the sawdust below. They land in a pile, scrambling over one another, wings flapping uselessly, before slowly finding their feet and scattering across the floor in search of somewhere - anywhere - safe.

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He repeats this several times. After a few minutes, presumably because the floor of the shed is now so littered with chicks frantically running around and he wants to avoid squashing the ‘profits’ with his metaphorical size twelve boots, the worker simply stands by the door and scoops up handfuls of chicks from a tray which he tosses away like he’s bailing water from a boat.

This is, to use a metaphor the industry might recognise, decanting ‘stock’ from a delivery crate as quickly as possible. Everything happens (as it always seems to happen on farms like these) at speed, almost casually, the way you might tip a crate of potatoes onto a shop floor.

In a later clip, the camera filmed the same worker picking up the corpses of chicks that hadn’t survived the fall or the impact of bodies landing on them…

It might be fine to handle vegetables like this. It’s not okay to handle fragile, very young sentient chicks like this under any circumstances…

What the industry itself says should happen

We’re deliberately publishing this just after the hatchery footage. Different farms, different workers, separate visits - but the same underlying story.

The shooting industry will dismiss a single clip as one bad moment, caught on one bad day, by one careless individual. The ‘rotten apple’ defence gets harder to sustain when the mishandling appears to be routine, recorded across farm after farm.

As a reminder, let us state once again what the industry’s own rulebook actually requires.

The rearing of birds for the gun in England is governed by the Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes, issued by Defra under the Animal Welfare Act 2006. It applies to every bird bred and reared for release to be shot, from the moment they hatch until they leave the release pen. It covers exactly the kind of handling shown in this clip.

Clause 3.1 of the Code states plainly that birds “should not be handled more than is strictly necessary,” because as non-domesticated species they “may be more prone to stress than domesticated farmed poultry,” and that “where handling proves necessary this should be done in an appropriate manner.”

These aren’t throwaway lines. They exist because Defra, in consultation with the shooting industry itself, recognised that rearing happens at a pace where corners get cut and animals get hurt - and wrote a rule specifically to stop that happening.

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A day-old pheasant chick, weighing perhaps 30 to 40 grams, with bones that haven’t hardened and legs not yet reliably load-bearing, is about as vulnerable to a fall as an animal gets. Tipping dozens of them out of a tray from height on top of each other is not “handling in an appropriate manner” by any reading of that phrase. It’s the opposite of what the Code says should happen - and it’s happening here on camera, not as a rumour or an allegation, but as recorded fact.

A pattern, not an anomaly

As we say above, the industry’s response to this will be the same as always: this is one bad worker, at one farm, on one day - not representative, not systemic, nothing to see here.

But look at what we’ve actually published so far. Adult breeding birds mishandled and chicks manhandled along a mechanical sorting line on one farm. Eggs harvested at industrial scale and dumped unlawfully on another. And now chicks tipped bodily out of trays on a third farm entirely, filmed on a completely separate visit.

Our investigative team are highly skilled, but they didn’t know in advance what they might film. Nobody handed them a shortlist of “bad farms.” If potential breaches of the industry’s own Code were rare, freak events - isolated to a handful of careless individuals - then finding them again and again, at farm after farm, on ordinary working days, would be a statistical near-impossibility.

Recording this footage isn’t down to chance - and we have plenty more to reveal yet…

It’s a system-wide issue

This footage, this casual lack of care, isn’t being captured because our cameras have been extraordinarily lucky in where they ended up. It’s because this is what the system produces, routinely, when nobody expects to be watched.

That’s the point we keep coming back to, because it’s the one that actually matters: this investigation is not about ‘catching’ individual workers. It’s about a system. It’s what an industry does to the animals passing through it when those animals exist, from day one, only as ‘stock’ - units to be hatched, sorted, tipped, released and ultimately shot for entertainment.

Millions of pheasant chicks go through hatcheries and rearing sheds like these every year. This will be how a great many of them start their short lives. The industry might insist that footage like this is unrepresentative, but it’s worth asking how the system it represents keeps generating more of it, farm after farm, whenever anyone happens to be filming.

If this wasn’t on a so-called ‘game farm’

As a final thought, just imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if a rescue centre or a member of the public were filmed treating just one vulnerable chick like this. All hell would break loose. Social media would demand action. But birds bred for the gun? Outside of a few of us trying to raise awareness, there will be deflection, denial, dismissal. A collective shrug. ‘Yeah, well, it’s pheasants; that’s just what happens…’

Even MPs from all sides of the House seem willing to stand alongside this appalling industry, listening to its economic arguments while apparently trusting it to stick to ‘guidelines’ that are tossed aside - like day-old chicks - whenever it thinks no one is watching.

We have said it many times, but this is an industry that can’t simply be nudged into caring with a few polite conversations and ‘gentlemen’s agreements’. It is far too big, far too arrogant, and its practices run far too deep. If we genuinely care about animals then the only response is that it must be shut down. For good.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Campaigners in Scotland are joining together for a protest against AI data centres on 3 September. 14 grassroots groups from local communities organising against data centres across Scotland have joined together to co-organise the demonstration.

Activists have invited their Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) to join the rally outside the Scottish parliament. The campaigners will attend the parliamentary session to hear questions raised over the rapid expansion of data centres.

Protect the Wild would like to raise our voice in support of the protest. These AI campuses are a significant driver of global dependency on fossil fuels and rely on the mining of large quantities of rare earth minerals, as well as requiring new road and power infrastructure. The climate change consequences of the global ‘AI boom’ will affect all animals on our planet.

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The Scottish hyperscale data centres already in the planning system will require more than 7000MW of electricity, in a nation whose winter energy needs currently amount to 4000MW.

The urgency of the current AI data centre construction drive is being driven by wealthy individuals and corporations pushing for more profit for themselves. The needs and desires of communities, the environment and the wildlife that depend on it are being sidelined. The Labour government is aggressively backing data centre construction, despite the protests of ordinary people.

The huge footprint of these data centres will be devastating for British wildlife, fragmenting habitats and generating noise and light pollution that will disrupt nocturnal life and migratory birds. Research has shown that living close to a data centre can even disrupt hormone levels and breeding in some species.

We join with Scottish campaigners in demanding a moratorium.

Sign our petition

Skipping over planning regulations

Lanarkshire has been designated an AI Growth Zone by the Westminster government, meaning that data centre planning applications are being rushed through the system. The British government has been pushing hard to incentivise companies to establish AI data centres in Scotland. There are currently 20 Scottish hyperscale data centres working their way through the planning process. Three more are on the cards, but not yet in the system.

14 of the communities affected have joined together to protest. They are:

• Larbert, Falkirk

• Hurlford near Kilmarnock

• Auchtertool, Fife

• Chapelhall

• Ravenscraig

• Annan and Dumfries

• Aberdeen (Blackdog)

• Bishopbriggs and Lenzie

• Hunterston, West Kilbride

• Edinburgh (Gyle)

• West Edinburgh (Hermiston/Currie)

• Lammermuirs (Longformacus)

• Dunbar

• Cockenzie

In four of those applications, local authorities had ruled that a full Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) would not be required. However, the Scottish government has just this week ruled that EIAs must be conducted before new data centre projects in Fife and Edinburgh are approved and that ministers must be notified of any new data centre applications exceeding 50MW. Activists are clear that this is not enough. They are calling for a full moratorium.

We don’t need mitigation, we need prevention

To illustrate the devastating effects of these schemes on wildlife, the ecological impact assessment carried out for the Larbert AI data centre found a significant population of narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moths throughout the western part of the site. The proposed development location is at the northernmost limit of their UK distribution and they are otherwise scarce in the region. At the same time, the surveys also found something more troubling elsewhere on site: if its grassland turns out to be groundwater-dependent, the report states that loss of this habitat "cannot be mitigated". Destruction like this doesn't just need evaluating, it needs preventing.

“We need a moratorium”, say campaigners

Campaign group Stop AI Data Centres Scotland wrote on Instagram:

“We need a moratorium. We need a definition of a green data centre. We need communities to be considered and heard.”

The group’s statement called out the concept of a ‘green data centre’. Developers in the UK are deploying this vague notion to make their projects seem more palatable, with little explanation of what the term actually means.

Sign our petition

Global Justice Now, who are also supporting the protest on 3 September, have produced a briefing on the need to resist AI data centres in Scotland. They wrote:

“Big tech corporations are facilitating the roll out of new hyperscale data centres across the UK. The US tech giants need this new infrastructure to store and mine vast amounts of data as they seek to entrench their monopoly hold over the technology – and insert it into all parts of our lives.”

Sign Protect the Wild’s petition calling for a moratorium on all UK AI data centre building: ‘No to Data Centres, Yes to Wildlife’.

Action to Protect Rural Scotland has provided a handy map of all the data centres planned in Scotland.

Check out Global Action Plan’s map of UK data centres. Please note this resource is a work in process and may be incomplete.

Read our article on Labour’s aggressive backing of data centres, and the dire consequences for British wildlife.

Photo Credits: Photo of anti-AI placard in Kansas, US via Catboy69/Wikimedia Commons, image of Holyrood via Dun_Deagh/Wikimedia Commons.

On the 24/10/2025, Welsh Border Wildlife Protectors (WBWP) caught the Flint and Denbigh Hunt on camera filling in an active sett. A tale as old as time, and one hunts still try to deny, despite video evidence emerging year after year across the country, is the blocking and destruction of badger setts and fox dens.

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This is not accidental. It is not incidental. It is deliberate.

A so-called “legal trail hunt” has no reason, none whatsoever, to involve terriermen. There is no justification for men digging, blocking, or filling in setts. No legitimate trail requires the prevention of a wild animal reaching safety underground. And yet, time and again, we see it. We see terrified foxes chased to exhaustion, desperately seeking refuge, only to find their escape routes sealed. We see badger setts interfered with, protected habitats unlawfully tampered with, all to ensure that a fox cannot go to ground and evade the hounds.

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This is not trail hunting. This is intent; intent to pursue, and kill. Intent to break the law, to be criminals. Sadly, the case was dropped as the person who filled in the set was unidentifiable.

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It is not the first time the Flint & Denbigh Hunt have shown what they are reportedly doing, that being fox hunting. In 2021, the very same hunt killed a fox and allegedly attempted to battle a Welsh Border Wildlife Protectors volunteer for the body.

That case was, sadly, dropped, as so many are under the Hunting Act 2004, a law riddled with loopholes that continue to undermine accountability.

During that incident, it was reported that members of the hunt produced a black bin liner in an apparent attempt to dispose of the fox’s body, to conceal and hide the evidence.

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And with cub hunting season approaching, we expect hunts to be filling in even more setts, to stop foxes reaching the safety of their dens.

Every blocked sett exposes the reality hunts continue to deny, but can no longer hide: trail hunting is nothing more than a smokescreen for fox hunting. Because time and again, across the country, the evidence shows the same pattern: hunts interfering with wildlife, attempting to prevent animals from escaping, and acting in direct conflict with the law. This is not the behaviour of a few “bad apples.” This is systemic.

If you see hunts surrounding coverts, find filled-in or dug-out setts, or know where a hunt is planning to be, report it to your local anti-hunt group and the police.

And lastly, to keep groups like the Welsh Border Wildlife Protectors out in the field, documenting the truth and gathering vital evidence, please consider donating.

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We’re pushing harder than ever to end hunting with hounds for good and our campaigning is making an impact.

Since 2023, we’ve published four groundbreaking reports exposing the reality of modern hunting. Our three annual hunting reports documented widespread evidence of foxes, deer and hares continuing to be chased despite the Hunting Act.

Fox Keyring

These reports have exposed:

• Trail hunting being used as a smokescreen for illegal hunting

• Violence and intimidation linked to hunts

• Road havoc and repeated traffic offences

• Inconsistent and inadequate policing

• The significant public cost of policing hunting events

• The constant threat that packs of hounds pose to wildlife

We also produced a first-of-its-kind report examining the forgotten victims of the hunting industry: the hounds themselves. It exposed serious concerns surrounding the treatment, exploitation and disposal of foxhounds.

But we haven’t stopped at publishing reports. We’ve delivered a petition signed by hundreds of thousands of people to Downing Street, helped ensure tens of thousands responded to the recent government consultation and exposed millions of people to the reality of hunting.

Protect the Wild receives no government funding, has no major corporate backers and, because of the nature of our campaigning, is ineligible for most grants. Everything we achieve is funded by people like you.

By purchasing this beautiful, hard-hitting keyring, you’re doing more than carrying a powerful message. You’re helping fund the investigations, research and campaigning needed to finally end hunting with hounds.

Fox Keyring

Investigations

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, and how the adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated. We’ve also looked briefly at how enormous numbers of eggs are collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers, where - as we explained - wild birds including Magpies were visiting those dumped eggs.

We pointed out at the time that Magpies are routinely targeted by the shooting industry as a species that must be “controlled” because they are supposedly too numerous and too great a threat to ‘ground-nesting birds (ie pheasants and grouse) and other wildlife.

Here is one way this awful, cruel industry carries out that ‘control’, and how it gets around laws that were meant to protect wild birds…

Larsen Traps

Behind the language of “predator control” and “conservation,” the shooting industry relies on a largely unobserved - and at the moment, lawful - practice: using live wild birds as bait to lure and kill other wild birds.

That ‘control’ extends to all parts of the shooting industry. Undercover footage we were forwarded recently came from a so-called ‘game farm’ (not a shooting estate, the farm where birds are produced for the gun) and was filmed earlier this year. It gives a rare, unfiltered look at what ‘control’ can actually look like on the ground - and it is a long way from the tightly regulated, welfare-conscious system the industry likes to describe.

The footage passed to us shows a Larsen trap. This is a small cage with two compartments, one typically holding a live decoy bird and the other set to snap shut around any corvid (or raptor) coming to investigate the decoy. This trap was baited with pheasant eggs. (On a side note, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) originally championed the introduction of Larsen traps from Denmark in 1988, a claim repeated on their website which states these awful things were “pioneered in the UK by the GWCT and its regional advisory team”.)

Inside the trap sat a Magpie, a wild bird, kept alive as a lure. Food provided was a dried-out pheasant carcass (not a permitted food source under the rules that are meant to govern this practice). A water container held algae sludge.

Return visits told the rest of the story. Days later, the pheasant remains had been picked to the bone and not replenished. The water had not been changed. The Magpie’s tail feathers were gone - whether through deliberate clipping or through the bird battering itself against the mesh in distress we cannot say for certain, but neither explanation reflects well on whoever was meant to be checking that cage.

By the final visit, there was no food left at all and the same foul water. The Magpie had been abandoned to starve and dehydrate inside a trap from which there was no escape.

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A second Larsen trap, found separately, told a similar story. The only food was a scraped-clean set of old bones and the provided water was thick and green with algae. In this cage, the decoy Magpie was already dead.

Ironically, both traps had a perch fitted - a ‘welfare provision’ that cannot possibly stop a bird from dying of thirst.

The legal framework these traps are supposed to operate under

Larsen traps are not illegal. Lobbying by the shooting industry has made sure of that. In England (where this pheasant farm is located) they are operated under General Licences issued by Natural England, which exist as exemptions from the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981’s protection of wild birds.

Shooting lobbyists have whipped up a storm of hatred aimed at Magpies. Traps like these litter the countryside. If they had bothered to read what the General Licences say, a pheasant farm using one to trap Magpies would probably claim it is to protect pheasant eggs and poults. It would (if they had bothered etc etc) be relying on a purpose-specific licence, most likely GL42 (a licence to control birds ‘to prevent serious damage to livestock’ - which includes “gamebirds kept in an enclosure or which are free-roaming but remain significantly dependent on the provision of food, water, or shelter (by and within the release pen) by a keeper for their survival” - the same ‘gamebirds’ which will be sold to be ‘damaged’ by shooters of course) or perhaps GL40 which allows the killing or taking of Magpies to conserve “wild birds of conservation concern” - which clearly doesn’t include non-native pheasants (or Red-legged Partridges).

It’s also worth noting that if relying on GL40 there is a “reasonable endeavour to use alternative lawful methods” requirement which applies specifically when acting against Carrion Crows, Jays and Magpies…

Whichever purpose-licence applies, its use of traps and decoys is only lawful if it also complies with a second document that sits underneath all of them: GL33, “Trapping wild birds: standard licence conditions.”

GL33 sets out what “adequate” provision actually means in practice. GL33 is not optional extra guidance - it is a binding condition of the licence itself:

• Food must be sufficient, palatable, and of a type suited to the decoy species. There must be enough to sustain the bird between an operator’s visits, and if carrion is used for a corvid decoy it must be fresh, with enough meat left on it to meet the bird’s needs. Dried-out pheasant remains picked to the bone do not meet that standard.

• Water must be available at all times: drinkable, free of contamination, and changed regularly to stay clean - a description that algae-choked sludge plainly fails.

• GL33 also requires decoy birds to have appropriate shelter and a suitable perch, and requires traps to be checked at least once every 25 hours - a rule that these two examples clearly suggest was not being followed with anything like that regularity, if at all.

This matters legally as well as morally, because while General Licences don’t need to be applied for (which in our opinion is a clear loophole for their exploitation) they come with conditions. Where GL33’s welfare conditions are NOT being met, the exemption to the Wildlife & Countryside Act that the purpose-licence provides DOES NOT hold for that instance of trapping.

In other words, the conditions filmed here change what should have been abhorrent but lawful, licensed control into abhorrent unlawful taking and possession of a wild bird contrary to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 - a criminal offence sitting alongside, not instead of, any welfare offence.

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Where the Animal Welfare Act comes in

The conditions found here also bring in the Animal Welfare Act 2006 (AWA). The AWA sits entirely independently of the wildlife licensing framework we described above. It applies to any “protected animal” (in legal terms that means ‘under the control of a person’, which includes a captive decoy bird) regardless of which general licence, if any, was being relied on at the time.

Two sections of the AWA are directly relevant here.

• Section 4 makes it an offence to cause a protected animal unnecessary suffering, or to fail to take reasonable steps to prevent it, where a person knew or ought reasonably to have known that an act or omission would have that effect. A bird left to starve over a period of days, watching its food disappear without replacement, sits squarely within what this section was written to capture.

• Section 9 goes further, creating a positive duty of care: anyone responsible for an animal must take reasonable steps to ensure its welfare needs are met, including a suitable environment, a suitable diet, the ability to exhibit normal behaviour patterns, appropriate housing with or apart from other animals as needed, and protection from pain, suffering, injury and disease. A single perch in an otherwise barren cage, with fouled water and no fresh food, does not come close to satisfying that duty regardless of what the General Licence’s minimum conditions technically require.

Why this isn’t an isolated technicality

Supporters of the shooting industry - whom for good reason we routinely describe as ‘wilfully blind’ to the horrors surrounding their chosen hobby - will undoubtedly claim that most trap operators are not behaving like this. The usual ‘rotten apple’ script they like to wave around, in other words. Unlike us, though, they are not providing evidence to prove that assertion, and, given the litany of abuses that anyone who looks into this blood-soaked industry will be aware of, why should we believe them?

They might also claim that ‘operator errors’ like these are breaches of a set of rules rather than anything that can be challenged on legal grounds. They would be wrong. The Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Animal Welfare Act are laws, not guidelines. And anyway, that argument simply blasts wide open the weakest point of the whole system: General Licence trapping in England is a weak system that is essentially self-policed by the same industry that stands to benefit most from abusing it.

• There is no routine inspection regime,

• no independent verification that decoy birds are fed, watered and checked daily,

• and enforcement depends almost entirely on chance discoveries like this one - usually made by investigators, hunt saboteurs or members of the public, rather than by any statutory body checking traps in the field.

Magpies starving in cages while being used to bait other wild birds so they can be killed too is a disgrace. These poor birds are a strong argument for getting rid of General Licences and for asking why the hell the self-serving shooting industry should be allowed to regulate itself at all…

… though the answer is probably that no one in authority seems to care enough to do anything about it.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2026.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

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End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

Many of you have already responded and we are extremely grateful, but we are repeating our ask for you to become a Game Changer. We need to make people care. Please stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

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Hull Wildlife Protectors spend much of their time out in the field, monitoring their local hunt, the Holderness Hunt and the Brocklesby Hunt, for wildlife crime. But when they’re not treking through fields after men on horses, they turn that same energy to raising vital funds for the local rehabbers who keep wildlife alive.

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You may remember our earlier article, when we shared that Hull Wildlife Protectors were taking on the National Three Peaks Challenge; Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon in under 24 hour, in aid of two Yorkshire rehabbers who never rest and never stop: The Wildlife Alliance and Ren’s Wildlife Hospital.

Well, they did it. And now they’re doing it all over again.

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Donate to the HWP fundraiser here

This time, they’re taking on the Humber River (very fitting as this iconic river is so recognisable to locals). The whole length of it, 57 miles, on foot, across East Yorkshire. On the 22nd of this month, the team will set off on the gruelling walk, one mile at a time, all fifty-seven of them!

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Why put themselves through it again? Because wildlife needs us more than ever.

Hull Wildlife Protectors Charlotte Smith said:

“The number of animals needing rehabilitation has skyrocketed. Droughts have dried up water sources, food has grown scarce, and wildfires have torn through habitats, leaving more injured, orphaned and displaced animals than ever before. And without rehabbers, there is simply nowhere for them to go. No second chance. No way home.”

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This year, the team are walking for Ren’s Wildlife Hospital and Pudz Animal Sanctuary - two local lifelines that take in the animals no one else will, and ask for nothing in return. On top of every penny raised, HWP will donate 10% from their own pockets to The Wildlife Alliance, Hull and East Yorkshire, because they know that behind every rescue is a rehabber quietly working through the night.

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Charlotte went on to say that:

“Pamela, Shena and Jenny are the true heroes of wildlife rescue. Under-recognised for what they do, but absolutely indispensable. Without them, countless animals in Hull and the surrounding areas would have nowhere to turn.”

Donate to the HWP fundraiser

Because HWP have never been “just” a monitoring group. They rescue. They transport. They pick up the phone when someone finds an animal in trouble and hasn’t a clue what to do. And they believe, deeply, that wildlife is saved when people work together, at a time when it needs us most.

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Reflecting on the challenge ahead, Hull Wildlife Protectors said:

“The Three Peaks pushed us to our limits, but the rehabbers we walk for climb mountains every single day, without rest and without a day off, for the wild animals who share our countryside and urban areas. We walked for them then, and we’re walking for them again now. All we ask is that you stand with us, and help us give these wonderful women the support they deserve.”

The walk takes place on the 22nd, and the team are urging supporters to get behind them in the days that follow. This is a chance to give back to those who give everything for wildlife, often with little recognition, but always with love and dedication.

Donate to the HWP fundraiser and share it far and wide. Let’s help wildlife!

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Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, then how adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated, and the enormous numbers of eggs collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers. We’re now going to look at what happens to the chicks the industry breeds for the gun…

On a so-called ‘game farm’ a pheasant chick’s first hours in the world are spent in darkness, huddled for warmth beneath the red glow of a brooder lamp. At this stage, a pheasant chick is about as fragile as a living creature can be.

And yet within days, that same chick is pulled from the dark and carried into a different world entirely - a factory floor loud with people and machinery, bright with strip lighting, where this tiny animal is handled, sexed, and dropped onto a moving metal conveyor belt alongside thousands of other chicks.

It is a jarring transition for any young animal, let alone one this delicate: from stillness to noise, from shelter to exposure and the mechanical efficiency of an industrial sorting line. Ground-nesting and precocial birds like pheasants are born with an instinct to see large, fast-moving silhouettes as potential threats; however, on the factory line there is no mother to guide or comfort, and no experience to interpret the shock of this enormous change. Yet this is where the story of the “game” pheasant really begins - not in some scenic, unspoiled woodland, but on a production line built for volume, speed, and profit.

Looking at the images and video in this post we think it is clear that to the workers standing at that belt, hour after hour, thousands of birds a day, the chick is just one more item to be sorted, moved, processed. But a chick is not a package at a fulfilment centre. A chick is not a vegetable being checked for blemishes. This is a very young animal, small enough to fit in a cupped palm, their bones still soft.

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What the rules actually say

A chick is an animal that, by the industry’s own guidelines, is supposed to be handled with a level of care that this footage simply does not show.

The UK government’s Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes (in other words, how birds reared to be used as live targets ought to be treated) exists precisely because hatchery and rearing work happens at a pace and scale where birds can easily be forgotten as individuals.

The code is explicit that management practices must not be compromised by the speed of operation, and that birds must be handled by competent, experienced people in a way that avoids injury.

The RSPCA’s own welfare standards for hatcheries go further, stating plainly that birds must be handled carefully and compassionately at all times, that care must be taken to prevent injury during handling, and that manual handling should be kept to an absolute minimum.

These are not vague aspirations. They are specific, written acknowledgements that day-old chicks are fragile enough to be hurt by rough handling - bruised, crushed, or injured by falls that would mean nothing to an inert object like a carrot but everything to a body this small.

Watch the belt again with that in mind. Each bird weighs perhaps 30 to 40 grams. Bones have not hardened. Legs are not yet reliably load-bearing. A chick has no way to brace for a fall, no way to signal distress that a worker moving at speed has time to notice.

When a chick is carried along by a machine built to move inert material efficiently, ‘it’ is being treated exactly as the machine was designed for - as a unit, a product, not as a live animal that can suffer.

This isn’t really about ‘bad workers’ - it’s about a ‘bad industry’

It would be easy, and wrong, to make this article about cruel individuals though. What the footage shows looks far more like the consequence of industrial scale: workers processing thousands of eggs and chicks a day, on a line moving at a pace set by production targets they did not choose, doing a repetitive task until the animals in front of them stop registering as animals at all.

Even when one of those tiny and vulnerable chicks is trapped between two trays, in danger of being dragged under and crushed by the spinning rollers…

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Psychologists call this a kind of perceptual numbing - when a task is repeated often enough and fast enough, the brain stops processing each instance individually. A chick becomes a unit, not an individual. That is not malice. It is a coping mechanism. It is what industrial-scale processing of living creatures does to the people doing it, and it is exactly why welfare codes insist on limits regardless of how anyone happens to feel in the moment.

That is also why the responsibility for what this footage shows lies not with the person standing at the belt, but with the system that put them there - one that sets throughput targets which make the code’s language about care and minimal handling almost impossible to honour in practice.

One that, by treating chicks as an inert commodity teaches everyone who works within it to see them the same way.

Will anyone be prosecuted?

We’re often asked whether we could prosecute based on the evidence we have, and in this case the honest answer is: probably not. Causing an animal unnecessary suffering is a criminal offence in this country, but courts have historically reserved that finding for conduct that is unambiguous: visible injury, obvious distress, sustained mistreatment.

A chick tumbling a short distance onto a moving belt among other chicks, without a clear injury on camera, is unlikely to meet that threshold on its own, however hard it is to watch.

What footage like this does show, though, is something a criminal charge was never going to capture anyway: the physical set-up and pace of work of an industry-standard ‘sorting’ system sits uneasily beside the very code of practice the industry says it follows - a code that requires chicks to be handled with care and that manual handling be kept to a minimum.

We don’t know, and can’t claim to know, whether the staff on that belt had received sufficient training to meet those standards. Our footage covered a short window, and the undercover worker didn’t have an opportunity to speak to everyone. The farm would undoubtedly claim that they provide sufficient training anyway.

What the footage does show, though, is what actually happened in that window, regardless of what training was given: the gap between a published guide to careful handling and what a moving belt actually does to a tiny and vulnerable bird passing along it.

It is, if anything, a harder thing to explain than a criminal case would be, because there is no dispute to have about it: the code exists, and the footage (and we have plenty more of it) speaks for itself.

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A small moment, a larger question

Millions of pheasant chicks pass through hatcheries like this one every year, destined for release onto shooting estates as live targets, to be shot for so-called “sport.” The belt wasn’t designed to be cruel. It was built to be fast and efficient.

But a hatchery is not a factory sorting non-sentient fruit or vegetables, whatever the equipment suggests - and even the short clip in this post shows exactly how easily that distinction disappears when speed and volume matter more than the animal moving through the system.

We are routinely challenged about why we aim to shut down this vile industry. Look at the screenshots and the footage again. These are the first fragile hours of a bird’s life. The rest of that life will be as short and brutal.

How anyone can support any of this is absolutely beyond us…

Next in this series: Why are the chicks being sexed anyway? Because males don’t lay eggs…

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Become a Game Changer

If you have a story you think we should cover, email us at contact@protectthewild.org.uk

Google plans to concrete over a 52-hectare wildlife haven in Thurrock to build a hyperscale data centre. The land it wants to destroy hosts roughly 530 invertebrate species and has Local Wildlife Site status.

Arena Essex Raceway is wedged between Lakeside Retail Park and Mar Dyke, and is home to hundreds of species of invertebrates, including Brown-banded Carder Bee, Five-banded Weevil-wasp and the Dingy Skipper butterfly.

The data centre is expected to emit more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Conservation organisation Buglife is central to the campaign against the data centre. It says:

“If it gets the green light, the Google data campus plans would lead to over 80% of this precious Open Mosaic Habitat on Previously Developed Land being lost, including areas of irreplaceable Thames Terrace Grasslands – a unique habitat that Natural England say is now limited to just tens of hectares.”

Buglife points out that Google has received national criticism about its carbon calculations, which have been underestimated fivefold and will be comparable with the emissions of an international airport.

Buglife has been ignored by Google, so it is urging all people who care about wildlife to sign its petition. Tell Google to search for somewhere else for its development!

Sign the petition

The annual grouse shooting season has begun

The Red Grouse shooting season opened on 12th August. Approximately 600,000 birds are shot dead every year, blasted out of the sky by paying clients.

The shooting industry is eager to publicise how its ‘tradition’ boosts local communities and economies. It loves to trumpet its conservation credentials, conveniently ignoring the damage it continues to inflict on vast swathes of the UK’s countryside.

The shooting industry requires a brutal infrastructure throughout the year to keep grouse numbers artificially high on the moors. Raptors prey on grouse, so on many estates they are illegally trapped, poisoned or shot dead. Snares and Fenn traps are set across the uplands in their thousands to kill natural predators. Heather moorland is deliberately burned - drying out and degrading peat - to create the tender new shoots grouse feed on.

The UK’s moorland is in a dire state. In fact, the moors of the Peak District and South Pennines are some of the most degraded in Northern Europe. The moors need to be restored instead, generating healthy peat that stores carbon and holds back floodwater, providing space for wildlife to recover.

The killing of fox cubs has begun too

Cubbing is where fox hunting packs train new hounds to kill, giving them a taste for blood. It involves a group of riders surrounding a small woodland or crop field, blocking escape routes for a young cub. The fox is then hunted and ripped up by hounds.

This week, the first report of cubbing was published by hunt saboteurs. Northants Hunt Sabs used their drone to catch the Pytchley with Woodland Hunt, who were allegedly cubbing. Unsurprisingly, one hunt member insisted that the hunt was only engaged in “hound exercise”, the excuse used time and time again by those out cubbing.

Defra has the power to ensure that no more fox cubs needlessly die. It is currently considering changing Hunting Act legislation. The last ‘attempt’ by a Labour government failed miserably under Tony Blair’s leadership.

Sign our petition, telling Defra to ban hunting for good by closing all loopholes in the law and ensuring that no new loopholes are introduced. If you previously signed this and received an error, please try again - all glitches should be sorted now!

Sign here

If you like the work we do at Protect the Wild, please consider donating a couple of pounds per month.

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NatureScot is asking for feedback on its system for licensing hunting with dogs. The survey is for those “who have applied for licences” or who “have been involved in the introduction to the [Hunting with Dogs] licensing scheme”. Local sabs are concerned this is providing cover for relaxing a law that Scottish hunts are already exploiting.

On 13 July, NatureScot launched its Stakeholder Feedback for 2026, and it will run until 24 August. This brief questionnaire states it is “keen to find out about peoples’ experiences of applying for a HWD [Hunting with Dogs] licence” as part of its commitment to a Shared Commitment to Wildlife Management policy.

In practice, this means the survey is seeking feedback from hunts on how easy they’ve found getting a licence. In particular, the Scottish Countryside Alliance response guidance for the survey makes it clear that it is providing leverage for what it calls “traditional hunts” to push back on current legislation. In particular, it uses three of its six points to challenge NatureScot’s approach to ‘cover’, i.e. areas where a fox may hide.

For example, point 4 states:

NatureScot are currently only allowing the flushing to be from cover. Under licence, dogs can “search for, stalk or flush from cover”, which are three separate activities which can be undertaken individually or in combination. The activity licensed does not need to be within cover. Searching for and stalking can take place outside cover.

This appears to be an attempt to enable fox hunting to take place across open ground. When the HWD Act was introduced, NatureScot intended licensing conditions to confine ‘pest’ control activity to flushing from cover. However, by wrenching searching and stalking away from flushing, it would legalise the hunting of a fox across open ground by hounds up until the point the fox is shot (or, less commonly, taken by a bird of prey).

Legislation and loopholes

Whilst this point is very much within the nooks and crannies of the law, it’s exactly the type of technicality that creates exploitable loopholes. When the HWD Act was brought in, then-Environment Minister, Màiri McAllan, said:

This bill is about closing those loopholes, preventing others from opening and finally ending illegal hunting with dogs in Scotland.

Yet time has proven this wrong. Glasgow Hunt Sabs, who initially raised concerns over this survey with Protect the Wild, pointed out that some hunts in Scotland have already exploited loopholes in the legislation:

Although trail hunting is banned in Scotland the word ‘drag’ easily replaces it, which is legal if done correctly. The Jed Forest has exploited this loophole and given a show of ‘drag’ hunting while hunting in a traditional way

The Jed Forest is currently facing six charges of illegal hunting. Glasgow Hunt Sabs said the hunt exploits the law by:

hunting in a traditional way, e.g., surrounding a covert, where foxes take refuge, using a full pack of foxhounds. When they know they’re being watched, the pack is put away in a hound truck and they then continue to hunt for the remainder of the day with 2 hounds, flushing foxes to waiting guns.

The Jed Forest Hunt is not licensed by NatureScot. Instead, it exploits the lack of legislation on drag hunting. However, licensed hunts are no less devious.

Glasgow Hunt Sabs are instrumental in a case of illegal hunting by the Lauderdale Hunt. As the group’s post about the case highlights, at the time the chargeable offence was committed, the Lauderdale Hunt was licensed by NatureScot under the HWD Act. It’s this licensing that the current survey is reviewing.

A tale of two surveys

This isn’t the first survey conducted for the licensing process. In fact, as the government’s website states, it committed to annual reviews of the process for the first five years of the new law.

NatureScot has published its own analysis of previous years’ surveys that suggests something very different from claims made by the Countryside Alliance’s guidance.

In 2023/24, for example, 72 applications were received and 43 licences issued, a 60% approval rate. By 2024/25, that had risen to 77 issued out of 89 applications (87%), whilst refusals fell from 27 to just six. This is not a scheme “utilising frustrating tactics” to keep licences “difficult to attain and retain”, as the Countryside Alliance claimed. NatureScot's own figures show it approving almost nine in ten applications by year two.

The analysis also highlights that the issue of cover has been present since the start. NatureScot maintained the statutory definition "is clear", but its report also shows two licences were amended after compliance visits to include areas of cover that had originally been refused on application. In these cases, NatureScot revised its own calls in the applicant's favour once it saw the ground. The Countryside Alliance’s claims that the regulator is applying an unlawfully narrow reading are therefore highly questionable when NatureScot’s own record shows it is loosening, not tightening, definitions of cover when challenged.

The 2026 review is the third year that feedback is required and the Countryside Alliance’s guidance continues to push the same points that have appeared in response to previous consultations. What’s different this time, though, is that we have two years’ worth of information on how hunts are abusing legislation and, as outlined, how they are pushing to surreptitiously undermine legislation.

Opening up the cracks

One glaring omission from this and previous surveys, though, is whether applications are on behalf of people associated with traditional fox hunts.

Glasgow Hunt Sabs told Protect the Wild that:

No traditional fox hunting pack should ever be issued with a license to hunt foxes as, of course, they will exploit the legislation and carry on as always. [But] As part of the licensing process, the applicant doesn’t have to declare whether they’re connected to a traditional fox hunt or not.

This seems to be a huge oversight in the application process.

NatureScot’s analysis of previous years doesn’t mention such distinction at all. The scheme is scoped entirely around fox control, with no data collected on whether licence-holders have any connection to a traditional hunt.

Given the Countryside Alliance’s guidance on the survey making explicit a desire to separate searching and stalking from flushing, it seems obvious the pro-hunting organisation is trying to open up wiggle room for hunting with hounds in Scotland. And because the survey stipulates that only those involved with licensing can respond whilst also not requiring respondents to declare their affiliations, it creates a situation that could see an already flawed law weakened rather than strengthened in its attempts to protect wildlife.

Glasgow Hunt Sabs made this clear, saying:

The licensing scheme needs more than a review. The current legislation is not working and requires all loopholes, that are clearly being used to continue to hunt, tightened and removed where needed.

Images of Jed Forest huntsman and gun are courtesy of Glasgow Hunt Sabs.

Campaigners and hunt saboteurs have spent more than twenty years fighting the trail hunting loophole in Engand and Wales. But as the Scottish example shows, drag hunting may very well replace trail hunting as the next loophole. We cannot spend another twenty years fighting drag hunting.

With our handy tool, it takes just a few seconds to demand a ban on drag hunting. Click on the button below.

Ban drag hunting now!

Today marks the so-called “Glorious Twelfth” — the beginning of another grouse-shooting season.

But there is nothing glorious about turning Britain’s moors into killing grounds. Nothing glorious about birds being driven towards waiting guns. And nothing glorious about landscapes being manipulated so that wealthy shooters can kill animals for entertainment.

Grouse shooting does not exist in isolation. Its intensive management is associated with the persecution of protected birds of prey, the killing of other wildlife, the burning of precious peatland and the degradation of habitats that should belong to us all.

Until now, our End Bird Shooting campaign has focused predominantly on the pheasant and partridge shooting industry. But that is only the beginning.

Over time, we will expand our work to confront every form of bird shooting for so-called “sport” across the UK — including grouse shooting.

We will create hard-hitting animations and videos, produce powerful campaigning content, fund undercover investigations and push the truth in front of millions of people. We will expose what happens on Britain’s shooting estates, challenge the powerful interests protecting the industry and build a movement capable of bringing it to an end.

Our aim is clear: to make grouse shooting socially toxic, politically indefensible and an industry with no future.

You can help fund this work by purchasing one of our bird of prey pin badges. Every purchase helps us reach more people, reveal more of what the shooting industry wants hidden and strengthen the campaign to end bird shooting.

Wild birds are not targets. Our countryside is not a playground for people with guns. And killing animals for entertainment has no place in a compassionate society.

Stand with Britain’s birds of prey. Stand against persecution. Help us end bird shooting.

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One week ago, NatureScot rejected the 2026 Guga hunt licence. Now comes the bigger fight: making sure it never returns.

The timing could not be more important. Right now, the Scottish Government is setting its priorities for the year ahead, which will be announced when Parliament returns from summer recess in just a few weeks. This gives us a crucial window to put ending the Guga hunt firmly on the agenda. If we want to see the law changed and the hunt of baby Gannets ended for good, now is the moment to make our voices heard.

EMAIL THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT

The special legal provision allowing the Guga hunt originally dates back to the 1950s.

Back then, perhaps Guga still provided essential sustenance in times of food scarcity and hardship. But more than 70 years later, that is absolutely not the case and it’s time for the law to reflect this new reality.

The exemption allowing the Guga hunt was carried forward into the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 (WCA), which is the law that governs it today. Section 16 of the Act allows Gannets to be taken from Sula Sgeir under licence from NatureScot for the purpose of human consumption.

We’re asking the Government to commit to amending Section 16 and removing that exemption from the law as soon as possible.

NatureScot’s recent decision to reject the 2026 licence only reinforces the need to end the hunt for good. Its scientific assessment found that even a massively reduced kill limit would undermine conservation objectives and hinder the long-term recovery of Sula Sgeir’s Gannet population. Gannets already face significant pressures from avian flu, bycatch and offshore wind development - pressures that will persist and may intensify in the years ahead. They cannot afford another entirely avoidable threat. The deliberate killing of these birds must end.

This hunt is not only unnecessary - it is inherently inhumane. Young Gannets are taken from their parents and subjected to the barbaric practice of being killed by blunt force trauma.

With 77% of Scots with a view opposed to the hunt, the Scottish Government has a responsibility to listen and act.

SEND AN EMAIL

Please take 30 seconds to send off an email to the Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Rural Affairs, Gillian Martin, and call on the Scottish Government to act now, end the Guga hunt and give Sula Sgeir’s Gannets the lasting protection they need.

We need more Gannet Guardians!

I’ll be honest, we need more Gannet guardians. That’s people who give us a few pounds every month to help us fund the campaign against the Guga hunt.

We had great news last week, but we can’t pretend the job is done. The law hasn’t changed. Another application will be made next year.

And we need to know we have the funds needed to see this campaign through its next (and hopefully final) stage of changing the law to end Guga hunt for good. We don’t have a huge campaign machine behind us. What we have is a growing group of people who care deeply about these birds - and every donation helps us keep this fight going.

Become a Gannet Guardian

If you set up a monthly donation today, we will send you a limited-edition gannet plushie - yours to keep as a reminder of the difference you’re helping make :)

Most people will already be aware that the British government has been backing a huge expansion of AI datacentres. Labour has created ‘AI Growth Zones’ (AIGZ), where corporate developers are being promised laxer planning processes. AIGZ have been created in London, Oxfordshire, North Wales, South Wales, North East England, North West England and Lanarkshire in Scotland. This week, London mayor Sadiq Khan even threatened to allow datacentre construction on London’s greenbelt land.

Fewer people will know the devastating effects that these datacentres could have on British wildlife. Protect the Wild takes a look at what we know so far about the wildlife consequences of the AI explosion.

In Europe, the UK is second only to Germany in terms of the number of existing datacentres, and London is fast being seen by the industry as Europe’s datacentre hub. These projects are being classified as ‘Critical National Infrastructure’, allowing them to be fast-tracked through the planning system.

Fuelling the climate crisis

All this has dire consequences for the environment and our struggling global climate, affecting both human and non-human animals. An AI search currently needs ten times more energy than a comparable old-school Google search. Datacentres need a huge amount of energy, and the global AI boom is fuelling our dependency on fossil fuels. AI is being backed by global supporters of oil and gas as a way to stave off moves towards an economy based on renewable energy. They also require intensive mining for rare earth minerals and the construction of new roads and water infrastructure - all of which contribute to global CO2 emissions.

Destroying precious wildlife habitats

Datacentres are massive complexes taking up huge swathes of land. Servers, along with associated transport infrastructure, turbines, and cooling systems need a lot of space. In the UK, AI datacentre development projects are set to encroach on land that is home to birds, bats, foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, bees and more. They are being fast-tracked through the planning process. This rapid rubber-stamping process is being facilitated by the fact that Labour has been busy bulldozing many of the remaining checks and balances on corporate developments with its controversial Planning and Infrastructure Act (PIA), which gained Royal Assent at the end of last year. The government has specifically named datacentres as one of the key categories of infrastructure it wants to fast-track now that the Act has passed.

The PIA means that environmentally destructive projects are able to destroy habitats by paying a levy into a new Nature Restoration Fund, financing Natural England to undertake ‘pro-nature’ projects elsewhere. As Protect the Wild has pointed out before, that’s not the way ecosystems work. Once destroyed, a wild landscape is gone forever. No amount of tree planting at another location can compensate for that. This new ‘pay to trash’ framework also ignores the individual sentient animals whose lives and livelihoods are destroyed.

Secondary legislation is still going through parliament to iron out how the Nature Restoration Levy will work, and a group of high-profile conservationists, environmentalists and campaigners recently wrote an open letter to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, calling on him to scrap the scheme.

Habitat fragmentation

As well as destroying habitats, the massive footprints of datacentre developments cause habitat fragmentation - preventing animals from moving from one part of an ecosystem to another and making it more difficult for them to find food or mates.

AI boom enthusiasts will argue that many of these datacentres are being built in post-industrial areas. But several of these projects - like Google’s proposed datacentre on the Arena Essex Raceway site - have been rewilded and are now homes to new, precious ecosystems. The Arena Essex site is a piece of rewilded land which is now home to a trove of insects including the rare carder bee. Plans to develop a datacentre for Google on the land are being opposed by local people together with Buglife and the Wildlife Trusts.

Disrupting migratory birds, bees and nocturnal animals

Research has shown that the intense humming, vibration and other noise from datacentres can reach a level where it prevents wildlife from living normal lives, even affecting hormone levels and breeding. Light pollution from huge datacentres can disorientate many species and disrupt migration for birds. Many local communities in the UK have raised concerns over the effects of datacentre construction on bats, barn owls and waterbirds.

Electromagnetic fields, caused by the high transmission power lines required by datacentres, adversely affect pollinators including honeybees. This could affect the biodiversity and health of entire wild areas.

A new threat to our already fragile water system

Datacentres already use 6.6 million litres of water in the UK daily. Labour is seeking to triple the number of datacentres by 2030, which would lead to an increase to 19.8 million litres a day.

The water needs of these facilities could reduce the amount of waterflow available for rivers, wetlands and wildlife that could affect fish, amphibians, birds and mammals that rely on healthy freshwater habitats. Warmed and inadequately cleaned wastewater released from datacenters is likely to affect water systems too, as well as the lives that rely on them.

Technofixes could cause new problems

Submerging servers in undersea pods - which has already been trialled in Scotland - is being posited as a technofix to some of the environmental concerns over AI. However, the potential warming of the sea water used in cooling these pods could be fatal for some undersea animals and plants, and disrupt marine life - on top of the potential undersea habitat loss.

Case studies - Concerns for new datacentres effect on wildlife:

1. The Bromley datacentre planned by consultancy firm Dare DC borders Norsted Valley Woods Site of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC) and located around 500 metres from Downe Bank and High Elms Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Natural England has raised concerns over the plans. The woods are home to Daubenton’s bats, who are under particular threat from the noise and vibrations caused by datacentres.

2. Campaigners have raised the alarm over concerns that the proposed AI datacentre planned by energy infrastructure company Xlinks in Torrington, Devon will affect habitats for skylarks and other wildlife.

3. In Elsham in North Lincolnshire - the biggest planned UK datacentre site - council ecologists advised that the proposals were likely to affect badgers and nesting birds including barn owls, and could affect bat roosts. Other animals that stand to be affected include badgers and hedgehogs. Objections have focused on the nearby protected Humber estuary - home to lapwings, golden-footed plovers and geese. The project received 364 public objections. Elsham Tech Park is being spearheaded under the Aegis of a development company called Greystoke

4. Local people are raising concerns over the planned £10bn Cambois AI campus, near Blyth, Northumberland, being developed by QTS/Blackstone as part of the North East AI Growth Zone site. Community members are raising concerns over biodiversity loss from this reclaimed and rewilded industrial site.

Ministers seeking to overrule local objections

At least 200 new data centres are under consideration in the UK. Many of the planning processes are in the early stages. Labour ministers have intervened on several occasions to push the processes through. In Buckinghamshire, Steve Reed used a “development consent order” to rule that the planning process for a new datacentre would bypass the local council and instead be decided by government ministers. In the case of another application related to the Buckinghamshire data centre, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s decision to overrule the local council’s rejection of a planning application was reversed after campaigners forced the government to admit that it had not considered the climate impact. This shows that targeted pressure can still be effective - despite the state’s increased powers to steamroller the planning process.

Many councils have ‘screened out’ the need for Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). However, in the case of the Bromley datacentre, Bromley Council has stated that the effects on the environment will be significant and that a full EIA will be required.

The Scottish government is currently weighing up a moratorium on new AI datacentre projects over concerns about the nation’s climate targets. The debate has been spurred by a vote by the Scottish National Party (SNP) National Council in favour of a pause on new datacentres. However, all the signs show that the government in Westminster is unlikely to back down from its support for this destructive industry. Those of us who care about the land, climate and wildlife need to consider what we can do to oppose developments at a local level.

Local campaigners need your support

We need to slow down the expansion of AI datacentres in the UK. The government has shown that it is not willing to listen to people’s concerns, and wants to push these developments through at all costs. Its up to local communities to make that job as difficult as possible. Here are some of the local campaigns and petitions that you can support:

- Sign the petition to stop the Stop the Bridgwater Datacentre on the Somerset Levels.

- Find out about ACORN Community Union and Ditch the Datacentre’s campaign to stop the new Cardiff development.

- Check out the campaign to stop the Torrington datacentre in Devon.

- Sign Buglife’s petition to stop Google’s datacentre on the old Arena Essex Raceway site.

Photo Credits: Image of Google’s Dallas datacentre via Wikimedia/Visitor7; Image of owl in Neston, UK courtesy of Heather Wilde/Unsplash; Barnowl featured image taken by Joshua J Cotten; Carder bee image thanks to Ivar Leidus/Wikimedia; Photo of Daubenton bat taken by David Savory; Plover image by Michael75/Unsplash.