Letters: Hare cull needed to manage moors

YOUR article relating to hare culls in Scotland is inaccurate (News, 9 January). Scottish moors can continue to harvest hares without fear of compromising their European conservation status.

Over the years mountain hares have become an important asset for many estates in Highland Scotland. This is because management for red grouse, notably improving habitat and controlling predators, has allowed mountain hare populations in Scotland to build densities up to ten times greater than seen anywhere else in Europe. Indeed, some moors need to do so to enhance and protect the very moorland management hares have come to depend on. This issue has been discussed by Scotland's Moorland Forum without major concerns being raised.

When sheep treated with tick killing chemicals are present and there are few deer to support the tick population, hare densities have sometimes had to be reduced to suppress viral disease of sheep and red grouse. This ultimately protects the investment in heather moorland which both hares, grouse and tourism depends upon. Similarly, some suppression of hare population densities may be necessary to allow woodland regeneration.

Of the reported 25,000 hares culled per year it has to be considered in the context of a national population of around 350,000. In real terms, any cull representing less than 10 per cent of a population is entirely sustainable. Allegations of local over-culling have never been quantified and given the range over which eagles hunt are unlikely to have consequential impacts on raptors. Recent research by Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, SNH and the Macaulay Institute it was found that the range of mountain hare had not changed - a sign of a healthy population.

We welcome, with some adjustments, the hare closed season in Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill. But moors must also take account of the need to secure the future of the key driver of the hare population, investment in red grouse shooting.

• Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust; Scottish Rural and Property Business Association; Scottish Gamekeepers Association; British Association of Shooting and Conservation (Scotland); Scottish Countryside Alliance; Scottish Estates Business Group; The Heather Trust

IT IS not often I agree with Scottish Natural Heritage but I was pleasantly surprised to see SNH has come out against the culling of mountain hares. As well as introducing a close season to protect leverets from dying of starvation and exposure when their mothers are killed, the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill should be amended to totally outlaw the cruel practice of snaring.

All too often MSPs are taken in by myths created and circulated by shooting estate owners, many of whom seem to know little about how nature works. For generations mountain hares have been killed in the belief that this protects grouse from ticks. If you kill the hares the ticks need an alternative host which is quite likely to be young grouse.

When you artificially reduce hare numbers, foxes and birds of prey must look for alternative food sources. A fox or eagle has to kill two or three grouse to replace each hare in its diet. Of course many estate managers have an answer to that one - they snare the foxes and poison the eagles which they have forced to eat grouse by reducing the availability of hares.

If action is not taken to protect them, how long will it be before mountain hares suffer the same fate as the Scottish wildcat and pine martin which have been made rare and locally extinct at the hands of estate owners and their employees?

John F Robins, Animal Concern

Advice Line, Dumbarton