Who is really behind Friends of the Dales' war on grouse shooting?
- C4PMC
- 13 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Friends of the Dales is a small Yorkshire charity with a modest footprint and a pleasant-sounding mission: protecting and enhancing the Yorkshire Dales for the communities that live there. Its "Eyes on the Skies" campaign, launched last autumn, is presented as a community response to raptor persecution - local people standing up for local wildlife.
A closer look at the campaign's architecture, its speakers, its evidence base, and its political demands reveals it is nothing of the sort. Instead it is something rather different: a coordinated national lobbying operation directed at the licensed destruction of a lawful rural industry, using a small community charity as its public-facing vehicle.
The question is who is really driving this campaign, whose agenda it serves, and whether a registered charity is being used as a launchpad for political objectives that go well beyond its stated purposes - and well beyond what charity law permits, as Chair Jonathan Riley should know.
The "Eyes on the Skies" campaign launched in October with a webinar featuring Kate Jennings, UK Head of Site Conservation and Species Policy at the RSPB. The charity openly states that the campaign "collaborates closely with organisations such as the National Wildlife Crime Unit, RSPB, and Hen Harrier Action."
The January webinar featured a serving National Wildlife Crime Unit detective. The February webinar featured the co-chairs of Hen Harrier Action. And on 20 May, Dr Ruth Tingay - former President of the International Raptor Research Foundation, and prominent anti-grouse-shooting campaigners in Britain - is scheduled to speak about the ongoing persecution of birds of prey in the UK.
Dr Tingay’s work focuses on campaigning against the illegal killing of birds of prey in the UK, and she is a co-director of the wildlife conservation organisation Wild Justice, alongside Chris Packham. She also writes the Raptor Persecution UK blog, which has been one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the Eyes on the Skies campaign since its inception, cheerleading its launch and promoting material that continues to present gamekeepers and grouse moor managers as presumptive criminals.
Wild Justice, it should be noted, has its own active petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting altogether - a position considerably more radical than the licensing demand being promoted by Friends of the Dales. The campaign ecosystem here is not difficult to map.
The RSPB's fingerprints are everywhere
The Friends of the Dales petition to Parliamentary Under-Secretary Mary Creagh explicitly cites RSPB analysis as the evidential foundation for its central demand - the licensing of the gamebird shooting industry. That is not incidental. The RSPB has made grouse shoot licensing its primary legislative objective, and its senior investigators and policy staff have been closely involved with the "Eyes on the Skies" campaign from the outset.
When the petition declares that most confirmed incidents of raptor persecution are linked to land managed for gamebird shooting, it is not presenting independent charitable research. It is reproducing the RSPB's own lobbying position, verbatim, under a local charity's letterhead and directed at a government minister.
That distinction matters enormously from a governance perspective. Charity Commission guidance on campaigning requires that activity be evidence-based, proportionate, and independently formed. It is not clear how any of those conditions are met when a small Dales charity is effectively functioning as a distribution channel for a national organisation's political programme.
The January webinar, hosted under the "education" banner, featured a serving police detective who deployed language associated with serious organised crime – covert surveillance, undercover operatives, financial investigators, proceeds of crime enforcement – to describe the management of moorland estates. No balancing perspective was offered. No scientific uncertainty was acknowledged.
On satellite tag disappearances, the evidentiary linchpin of the entire campaign, the audience was told that the UK stands uniquely apart from the rest of the world, and that technical failure was not a credible explanation. Yet the reality is tags have regularly failed, but the default accusation of persecution is regrettable. None of this reached the webinar audience.
The latest webinar was more aggressive still. Speakers named estates, read aloud from covert recordings, and deployed the disappearance of a hen harrier called Sita as the emotional centre of a licensing demand. Geographical proximity to a grouse moor was treated as all but conclusive evidence of illegal killing. One speaker, anticipating any challenge, told the audience: before you ask, yes, she disappeared close to a grouse moor. Anonymous hearsay from a podcast was presented as illustrative of widespread criminal instruction. No charges. No convictions. Just inference, implication, and the confident framing of an entire profession as presumptively guilty.
Good charitable education separates allegation from proven fact. It discloses uncertainty. It challenges its speakers. These webinars did none of those things – because education was not, in any meaningful sense, what was being delivered.
The community being targeted
It is worth pausing on what this campaign is actually doing to real people. Gamekeepers and moorland workers are not an abstraction. They are members of the Yorkshire Dales communities that Friends of the Dales, under its own governing document, exists to serve.
A survey conducted by BASC, the Countryside Alliance, the Game Farmers Association, and the National Gamekeepers Organisation found that nearly two thirds of gamekeepers had received abuse and threats because of their occupation, including threats of criminal damage and arson, with social media abuse rising year on year.
The February webinar's advice to raptor monitors – keep your activities casual, don't reveal your purpose if challenged on private land – is the most troubling element of all. This is a charity using its platform to encourage covert surveillance of private landowners and their employees, in a landscape its own speakers described as potentially threatening. Whether that constitutes an incitement to trespass or harassment is a question lawyers may eventually be asked to answer. What it plainly is not is community cohesion.
There is nothing wrong with a charity campaigning. There is nothing wrong with wanting stronger penalties for wildlife crime. But there are serious questions about whether Friends of the Dales is acting as an independent charitable entity pursuing its own objects - or whether it has become, wittingly or otherwise, a front operation for a coordinated national campaign whose real architects include one of Britain's most prominent anti-shooting lobby groups and whose evidence base is supplied almost entirely by an organisation with its own substantial stake in the legislative outcome.
The petition is addressed to Mary Creagh, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at Defra, and signed on behalf of Friends of the Dales, its staff, trustees, members and supporters. But the voices behind it stretch considerably further than this. The Charity Commission's guidance quotes former Chair Baroness Stowell: charities must not become captured by unnamed people who wish to push a partial view of the world and use a charity platform to wage war on political enemies.
Whether that is what has happened here is a question the trustees of Friends of the Dales should be required to answer: clearly, publicly, and soon. The petition is live. Ruth Tingay is speaking on 20 May. The campaign is escalating. The board's silence on how all of this was approved, and whose agenda it actually serves, is no longer tenable.
