Our Wildlife Crime Detection Dogs Appeal Gains Welcome Support from Protect the Wild
Our good friends Rob Pownall and Charlie Moores from campaigning wildlife charity Protect the Wild have lent their support to Hen Harrier Action’s latest fundraising appeal, publishing a guest blog on their excellent website.
Founded in 2015, Protect the Wild is a non-profit organisation that campaigns tirelessly in three key areas, to end hunting, shooting and badger persecution. They were much-valued co-sponsors for our Action for Wildlife Day event at Carsington Water last August, and once again we owe them our thanks for promoting the Wildlife Crime Detection Dogs Appeal on their social channels and with an email and guest post to their supporters.
Writing in the introduction to the blog post, Charlie noted:
“Since 2018 alone, almost 140 Hen Harriers have been confirmed as ‘missing’ or illegally killed in the UK, most of them on or close to grouse moors.
Proving what has happened to those ‘missing’ birds is incredibly difficult – persecution often takes place in very remote areas (especially upland shooting estates) with little cooperation from landowners and their employees. One intriguing answer is to train dogs – which have a sense of smell 100,000 times more sensitive than ours – to search for the bodies of the harriers and other persecuted raptors shot and dumped on the moors. The dogs can even detect the scent of birds on confiscated property like clothing and bags. A low-tech response, it might seem, to an intractable modern problem, but the landscapes involved make a working relationship like this sensible and very effective.
Resources for police work are always under pressure, and funding for detection dogs is no different. So HHA has just launched a Detection Dog Fundraising Appeal, seeking ring-fenced funds for a dog to work alongside investigators in the field as they search for the remains of persecuted birds of prey.”
The charity runs a high-profile campaign to End Bird Shooting, arguing that it is catastrophic for wildlife and the environment. Not just the millions of birds killed each year by ‘sportsmen’ but also for the birds of prey and mammals that are relentlessly persecuted in huge numbers on shooting estates.
You can find out more about Protect the Wild’s End Bird Shooting campaign here.