YESTERDAY was the first day of the game shooting season, known as the 'Glorious Twelfth' – as if blasting birds out of the skies for fun can ever be described as glorious.

It’s a sport popular with very rich businessmen, who escape London and head north for a few days of killing birds.

As a very rich person’s pursuit, I have an instinctive dislike for it.

But it sounds as if there may be fewer opportunities to glory in slaughter this time.

Many pheasant and partridge shoots have had to be called off this year because of an outbreak of bird flu in France.

The partridges and pheasants are reared in Britain – and then released to be shot here. But around half of the eggs are laid in France, mostly in the Loire Valley, where an outbreak of avian flu was detected earlier this year.

When avian flu is spotted on a farm the birds have to be culled, and after 30 days the French bird breeders are allowed to begin trading again within the EU.

But under World Trade Organisation rules – which Britain is now subject to – the delay is 90 days.

Animal rights activists have long tried to stop game shooting, without success. Now bird flu and Brexit have done it for them.

Grouse are not affected by this, because they are not reared and released. So the game shooters can still satisfy their bloodlust.

However shooters and bird flu are not the only threat to game birds. Birds of prey are their natural predators, and for years there have been reports of the illegal killing of birds of prey in order to protect the grouse.

Hen harriers were almost driven to extinction by the shooting industry. They breed in open, upland moors and nest on the ground, with the male hunting for food while the female incubates the eggs.

Around 95 per cent of the hen harrier’s diet is made up of small mammals, but they do eat a proportion of other birds, including grouse. That is what brings them into conflict with the grouse shooting industry.

Grouse shooting began to take off in 1850, hen harriers were routinely shot to preserve the grouse, and by 1900 they were persecuted practically to extinction.

They began to recover after World War One and in 1981 it became a criminal offence to kill, injure or take wild birds, including hen harriers.

But it still goes on. They are shot, trapped and poisoned, particularly in areas where the land is intensively managed for grouse shooting.

A total of 852,000 acres of land inside Britain’s national parks is devoted to driven grouse shooting.

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Male hen harriers disappeared from the RSPB reserve in Geltsdale in 2015, 2017 and 2018 – all in what the RSPB described as 'suspicious circumstances'.

They said it was highly unlikely that they would all have died of natural causes, just at the time when they were providing for nests.

And though hen harriers numbers have bounced back more recently, they are still nowhere near the levels they should be. The English uplands could be supporting 330 breeding pairs of hen harriers.

It does seem rather daft to kill one bird in order to protect another, so that it can be killed instead. And it seems to go against the national instinct.

England is supposed to be a nation of animal lovers, although I could never square that with the immense fury, in Cumbria and elsewhere, when the Government outlawed fox-hunting.

At least the Conservatives broke their election promise to bring it back.

Over the years we have become gradually less cruel. Bear baiting, cock fighting and hare coursing have all been banned and nobody in their right mind wants to reintroduce them.

In recent years other horrifically cruel practices such as keeping hens in batteries and docking dogs’ tails for no medical reason have also been done away with.

We have also stopped testing cosmetics on animals. I am prepared to accept animal testing if it helps find a cure for cancer, but not simply so that we can have another lipstick.

Will shooting birds be stopped one day?

Of course there will be protests that the jobs of gamekeepers depend on shooting.

Then the jobs of doctors and nurses rely on ill health and the jobs of most police officers, prison officers and lawyers rely on crime.

With grouse unaffected by avian flu, rich people can still have their fun this season – if killing creatures that are no threat to us really is their idea of fun.

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