Upland keeper

Fieldsports organisations are frequently engaged in ‘fighting fires’ in various issues as they crop up, but we need to take a longer-term view

- Lindsay Waddell

To say 2020 was a difficult year is something of an understatement, though not all of the problems were COVID-19 related. I have spent more of my life than is healthy in and around the various organisations that, in their own way, do what they can to preserve the way of life of those who enjoy the countryside and its age-old pursuits. It’s easy to knock what they achieve — or don’t, as the case may be — but I’m aware that all too often they are firefighting. That is, trying to put out the flames of the fallout from matters that have arisen, rather than trying to stop them happening in the first instance.

If we had the time to look far enough down the road ahead, could we have foreseen Wild Justice and its attempts to stop so much of our management? I doubt it, but people who should know better and who purport to protect our wildlife have ended up damaging and reducing the numbers of our most vulnerable species — the waders — by stopping the control of some of their most serious predators. And the science was there to show it would happen.