Extinction Rebellion protestors gather at Dundee Airport
They're calling for grouse shooting to be outlawed
Extinction Rebellion protestors have today gathered outside of Dundee Airport as they aim to send a message to would-be grouse shooters flying into the airport to go grouse shooting.
The UK's grouse shooting season begins today, 12th August, and the group have gathered aiming to encourage politicians to outlaw grouse shooting.
Protestors hung banners across a wall and fences opposite the airport and received support from multiple motorists who honked their horns as they drove passed.
A spokesperson from Extinction Rebellion Dundee said: "Shooting creatures for fun may seem distasteful to most of us, but it is the wider land management that lies behind it that has caused serious ecosystem damage. Red grouse are a native bird, part of the natural ecosystem and therefore subject to the usual population-limiting pressures: predation, food scarcity and competition with other creatures.
"Grouse-shooters want to be able to shoot lots of grouse without the annoyance of having to search for them, so shooting estates are artificially managed to raise the density of grouse by increasing food availability (burning vegetation to increase heather shoots), eliminating competition (killing mountain hares) and eradicating predators (foxes, weasels, stoats and birds of prey). Creating such an artificial density of birds makes them especially vulnerable to outbreaks of avian flu, potentially spreading this lethal disease that is currently ripping through fragile seabird populations."
Angus features many estates that are managed for grouse, such as Invermark, Glen Clova, Glen Ogil, Kinnettles and Glen Prosen. The group say satellite imagery of these areas show that the land is sacred and brutalised.
Maggie Chapman, Green Party MSP for North East Scotland said “The Scottish Green Party has always opposed the gross misuse of our landscapes for grouse shooting and other bloodsports. At a time when we need to use our land to meet the needs of our people, and to avert climate breakdown, it is particularly egregious that we continue to see land used in this way. It needs to stop. And stop now."
Kate Treharne from the group said: "The whole eco system is just skewed towards grouse and this is completely unnatural. This is seriously problematic and people think it doesn't really matter but this has global impact."
She added: "What we're looking at is the ongoing and long term discussion of habitat and that in turn exacerbates flooding and also means that we're losing our biodiversity at a rapid rate and we're at the point that it may not even recover."
On the airport itself, she said: "You see a lot of private planes coming in here. So I think the fact that there is an airport here is a bit of an anachronism, because, the local pollution that it generates is horrible anyway. Also, the quantity of carbon emissions that aircraft produce is utterly disproportionate to what their usage is.
"We're talking about leisure flying in this case, and, this is leisure flying for a very destructive purpose. It promotes leisure flying, just having a little run about in the sky, which is obviously burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels, so we really think that Dundee Airport should be closed."
Clare Cooper, co-initiator of Bioregioning Tayside, said: “We all need to do everything we can, urgently, at every scale to restore biodiversity and enable nature restoration.”
