The sad thing is its the minority that lets the industry down. I know of many well managed grouse moors where effective predator and pest control have done astoundingly well in breeding successes of short-eared owl, curlew, golden plover and hen harrier. An example being a large investor who bought a degraded moorland and pumped around £4 million of his own money into it and it's truly a site to behold with the sheer amount of threatened species thriving on the site.
One of the most aggravating things with raptor persecution is the conviction rates are appalling and the sentences are honestly pathetic. In the game industry, it's completely normal to loose grouse, pheasants etc due to predation, exposure etc but people should not be killing any and every predator that appears on their land. It's all about balance.
Admittedly there are rouge gamekeepers and there are rouge conservationists. I know of a story of a friend of mine was going to a pheasant shoot and had popped into the local pub for his lunch. He was not wearing his shooting attire and behind him sat a group of people against pheasant releases who had just killed 3 buzzards to place on the shoot to make out that the gamekeepers were actively persecuting them. This site was actively involved in pest and predator control yes, but they were not going out their way to shoot raptors of any kind let alone three buzzards.
