Sporting stakes

Dr ADAM Smith and Tim Baynes (Letters, 23 May) sound like people pleading on behalf of sectional interests that may feel under threat from potential democratic land reform and are trying to extol their pedigree and usefulness in respect of that threat.

On a geological timescale, the so-called “traditional” sporting ­estate is a very recent development; for most of the past 18,000 years, the ecology of the uplands functioned without it.

When the sporting estate first arose about 200 years ago, the uplands were not an undisturbed natural ecology: man had been interacting with it, to varying degrees of intensity, for millennia.

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Before the introduction of the sporting estate, there had already been massive forest loss: the big native herbivores – moose, auroch, reindeer, wild horse, wild boar and beaver – had been exterminated. Of the big carnivores, wolf, bear and lynx, only the wolf had made it to “British” status.

Any concept of a natural unspoiled wilderness had long gone, and things were about to get worse.

From about 1800, we see the start of the process leading to the creation of the quasi-feudal 
Victorian-Edwardian anachronistic nightmare world of rural ­upland Scotland that still blights the nation today.

A mere inkling of the impact can be gleaned from looking at the number and diversity of animals killed by game preservationist interests in lower Glengarry in just a few years in the mid-19th century.

Extrapolating this process to the rest of the Highlands makes it easier to understand the loss of polecat, red kite, osprey and erne as well as the near loss of pine marten, otter and wildcat.

Critically, we should never forget that, at the same time as this “ecocide” was going on, the coming of “the great white sheep” ­accentuated the process of the disintegration of Gaelic society, as well as having its own impact on the soil vegetation complex that supports all other wildlife and human land uses.

So here we stand with this anachronism in land tenure and management still in place.

To the processes of the past we have added blanket forestry, using exotic trees, hydro-electric development and wind farms. We face a future without true 
national parks, a true national wildlife service and an SNP 
government that has lost any desire for true land reform.

The vested landed interests can sleep calmly, but the rest of us and Scotland’s biodiversity 
deserve better.

Ron Greer

Blair Atholl

Perthshire