Wild Justice is pleased, but not remotely surprised, to see that the RSPB has followed our lead on the general licence consultation and recommended that lethal killing of Jay, Jackdaw, Rook and Magpie should only be authorised by specific individual licences and not by new general licences.
The science simply doesn’t exist which would justify widespread, open unmonitored lethal control of these four species.
It’s hardly surprising that the RSPB opposes general licences for the lethal control of these four corvids as RSPB does not cull these species on its 150,000ha of UK nature reserves (the area of a smallish English county).
Michael Gove is under considerable political pressure from shooting organisations, not as far as we have seen so far from farming organisations, to issue scientifically ill-founded general licences for lethal control of Jay, Jackdaw, Rook and Magpie but we trust he will stick with the science.