The Hypocrisy of Wild Justice as £550,000 of Public Money spent on Non-Native Birds

Wild Justice spends much of its time attacking the shooting community. They've launched futile legal challenge after legal challenge against the supposedly devastating impact of non-native birds released by private estates.

Yet when Sadiq Khan spent £550,000 of taxpayers' money introducing non-native white storks to one of London's poorest boroughs, Wild Justice fell conspicuously silent.

For years, Wild Justice has attacked shooting estates about releasing pheasants—birds that have been part of the British countryside for centuries, supporting rural economies, habitat management, and conservation funding. They've demanded environmental assessments, challenged licenses, and portrayed game management as ecological vandalism.

But when a Labour mayor decides to spend over half a million pounds of public money on white storks in Dagenham—a borough where children live in poverty and public services are stretched—Wild Justice couldn't find a single word of criticism.

The silence is deafening, and it reveals Wild Justice for what it increasingly appears to be: not an environmental organisation at all, but a politically motivated campaign group that targets its ideological enemies.

Let's be clear about what Wild Justice attacks when it goes after pheasant releases: a legitimate, well-regulated rural industry that has delivered enormous conservation benefits.

Shooting estates manage hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat. They plant cover crops, maintain hedgerows, control predators, and create the woodland edge habitat that supports dozens of native species.

The money generated by shooting funds this conservation work—work that simply wouldn't happen otherwise in our intensive agricultural landscape.

Studies have repeatedly shown that land managed for shooting supports higher biodiversity than equivalent farmland. Grey partridge, tree sparrow, yellowhammer, and numerous other declining species do better on keepered estates than on land without game management.

Pheasants themselves, while technically non-native, have been part of British ecology since Roman times.

They're fully integrated into our ecosystems. Yes, large numbers are released, but the overwinter survival rate is low, and there's no evidence of the catastrophic ecological impacts Wild Justice claims.

Compare this to white storks: genuinely non-native in any meaningful modern sense, extinct in Britain for centuries, introduced into a completely different urban ecosystem with no baseline data about what their impact might be.

If Wild Justice genuinely cared about non-native species introductions, they'd have been all over the Dagenham project. But they weren't, because this was never really about ecology.

Follow the Politics, Not the Science

Wild Justice's selectivity reveals what this has always been about: culture war, not conservation.

Shooting is associated with rural communities, tradition, and land management practices that don't fit the urban progressive worldview. It's an easy target for a certain type of activist who views the countryside through a lens of class resentment rather than ecological understanding.

Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, ticks all the right boxes. Progressive mayor, rewilding rhetoric, urban context. The white stork project—however questionable its value—carries the approved cultural markers. Criticising it would mean criticising the right sort of people doing the right sort of conservation.

This is environmental activism as tribal signaling, where the identity of who's doing something matters more than what's actually being done.