The Observer view on licensing grouse estates | Observer editorial

If grouse shooting estates are run with benefits for all wildlife, including hen harriers, surely they have nothing to fear from limited inspection

Capitalism and wildlife make uncomfortable bedfellows. On one hand, our countryside needs to be exploited efficiently to generate money and to create rural jobs. At the same time, there is an equally pressing necessity to protect the rare or threatened species that enliven the nation's natural habitat.

This dichotomy is sharply illustrated by the increasingly bitter row that has erupted between landowners who are intensifying the use of moorland for grouse shooting and conservationists who argue that this process is driving one of our most beautiful birds of prey, the hen harrier, to extinction in England. According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, there are now only a handful of breeding pairs of hen harriers in England, although the country has enough habitat to sustain several hundred pairs. Illegal persecution, particularly on land managed for intensive grouse shooting, is blamed for this alarming trend. Landowners, for their part, reject the charge and maintain that hen harriers fare worse in open moorland or on RSPB-controlled land than they do on land near grouse shooting estates. In turn, this charge is vigorously denied by conservationists.

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