Ban grouse shooting – it's cruel, harms the environment and we're all paying for it
The chilly air chaps your cheeks as your boots rustle through the heather – and when you reach the top of the hill, you can see for miles.
Stretched out all around you is moorland.
Open, treeless, with not a house or farm in sight.
It looks and feels wild, so you should expect to be able to see plenty of wildlife . But there is nothing, it’s silent and still, it’s eerie.
Then you pass a log lying over a little stream. On it, inside a metal cage, is a trap and in its jaws are the smashed and tangled remains of a stoat, its eyes squeezed from their sockets, its mouth locked open in a grimace of terminal pain.
Before that, you had stood holding your nose at the side of a gamekeeper’s “stink pit”, gazing in disbelief at the rotting bodies of foxes , crows, magpies, all mouldering in a vile
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