Billionaire duke's vast estate no haven for wildlife

Duke of Westminster urged to treat "nature as a friend, not as a pest."

The Green Britain Foundation recently obtained undercover footage of a fox trapped in a snare on the Duke of Westminster's estate in Cheshire. As the Mirror reported, activists who discovered and filmed the snared fox, released it. But they said many other snares were set in one wood alone on the 11,000 acre Eaton Estate.

Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, who is a trustee of the Green Britain Foundation, has called on the estate's owner, Hugh Grosvenor, the 33-year-old duke, to "help set a new standard for our relationship with wildlife" by opting to treat "nature as a friend, not as a pest."

Considering the controversies around shooting and hunting on the young billionaire's vast landholdings, however, Grosvenor will have to do more than eliminate the use of snares to be considered a true friend to nature.

Snare controversy

Snares are illegal in Wales and a Scottish ban on their use will come into force on 25 November. Protect the Wild has repeatedly pointed out they are primarily used on shooting estates to kill native wildlife like foxes and have been described as a "barbaric, medieval way of trapping and killing animals." However, the Labour government has so far failed to follow suit and ban them in England, although it promised to do so in its election manifesto.

It currently remains legal to use snares in England, then, which means that just a few miles from the Welsh border, the Duke of Westminster's Eaton Estate is legally permitted to use them. Unsurprisingly, the undercover footage demonstrates that being caught in a snare is a traumatic experience for wild animals. The video shows the distressed fox thrashing about in an attempt to free themselves from the effective noose around their neck.

Approached for comment, an Eaton Estate spokesperson told the Mirror:

“We use legal cable restraints in a limited capacity, as part of necessary conservation efforts to protect red-listed species, as is common practice across farmland and the countryside in England.

These devices are carefully designed to be non-lethal, to avoid unnecessary harm and to allow other animals to escape. Employees, who are highly trained in their use, regularly monitor the areas with cameras and conduct daily checks.”

However, the Mirror reported that the snare was set "in apparent breach of best practice guidelines," as it "was placed at the entrance to a footbridge and close enough to a wooden post for the fox to become entangled." Moreover, conservationist Chris Packham stressed that snares are "non-selective" devices. They can trap endangered species like pine martins and red squirrels, as well as badgers, he warned.

Similarly, the National Anti-Snaring Campaign's Simon Wild told the Mirror that cable restraints "are simply snares that have been renamed." Wild continued:

"They are supposed to have a weak link so larger animals like badgers and deer can break free. But we have proved by lab testing that they weak link is unbreakable. It requires 11 stone of force. We know from a Defra study in 2012 that all snares cause traumatic injury and are completely indiscriminate. They kill as many if not more non-target species than target species."

On 17 November, the Mirror reported on a further video of a fox caught in a snare, this time on King Charles' Sandringham Estate. This is not the first time snare use and other forms of wildlife persecution have been documented on the estate, the Mirror highlighted. Conservationist and researcher Dr Charlie Gardner, who posted the clip online, said:

"This fox was lucky someone found it, but much of our countryside is covered in huge private estates where the public never go, and I hate to imagine how much stuff like this goes on there away from any scrutiny."

Photo by Jeremy Hynes on Unsplash

Fox hunting controversy

Snares are not the only nightmare that foxes are confronted with on the Duke of Westminster's land. For years now, hunt monitors have been calling on the Eaton Estate to ban hunts. On 13 November Cheshire Monitors responded to the snare footage on Facebook, explaining that:

We have lobbied the estate over a period of time about still allowing fox hunting and up until now the Duke/they have banned it on Saturday's but it still goes on weekdays.

The monitor group launched a petition on the issue back in 2021, which attracted over 120,000 signatories. Specifically, it called on the estate to prevent both the Wynnstay Hunt and the Cheshire Hounds from utilising the estate's land.

As Protect the Wild has previously highlighted, the Wynnstay Hunt has regularly been caught hunting foxes, harassing hunt monitors, and blocking badger setts. One of the hunt's terriermen was convicted in November 2024 for interfering with a badger sett earlier the same year. Hunts block badger setts to prevent chased foxes being able to take shelter underground.

In 2023, meanwhile, the then-huntsman for the Cheshire Hounds, John Finnegan, was found guilty of two counts of illegal hunting. The convictions, which were related to two offences in November 2022, were overturned on appeal. However, Finnegan was again found guilty for one of the offences in August of this year. As Protect the Wild has reported, Finnegan was also convicted in December 2022 for illegal hunting when working with a different hunt earlier that year. Cheshire Hounds kept him on in the wake of the 2022 conviction, although he is no longer huntsman for the hunt.

Protect the Wild's Glen Black spoke to an Eaton resident in 2021 who described the havoc caused by hunts in the area. This included intimidation by hunt terriermen, the resident's horses being distressed by the presence of hunts, and foxes being chased. They said:

"Most of the new young tenants are horrified by the hunt, however, the tenants that have lived here for ages will not speak up. Unfortunately their jobs and homes depend on the estate and wouldn't rock the boat."

At the time, the Eaton Estate told Black:

"The Eaton Estate does not permit illegal hunting. If there is any suggestion of illegal activity it should be reported to the authorities and, as always, we will support them with any enquiries.

The estate allows non-lethal, trail and drag hunting with dogs, subject to a licence, and the consent of the farm tenants on any land that is let, during the season (autumn and through winter), within the prescribed parameters of the Hunting Act 2004 (c37)."

No place to be a grouse

Eaton Estate is one of many landholdings that are part of the Duke of Westminster's wider Grosvenor Estate. His other land holdings include Abbeystead Estate in Lancashire. Like Eaton, this estate has argued that its land management practices are beneficial to some threatened species. It credits the practices as being integral to populations of waders like Lapwing and Curlew being found on the estate.

While strong populations of wading birds anywhere are welcome, the notion that Abbeystead's practices benefit wild species must be viewed in context. First and foremost, management of Abbeystead is aimed at boosting populations of grouse because it is a private shooting estate. The Grosvenor Estate also owns La Garganta in Spain, which is the largest private hunting estate in Europe.

The Abbeystead Estate has the woeful distinction of holding the record for the highest number of red grouse being shot in a single day in the country, as Wild Justice's Mark Avery has highlighted. This was back in 1915, when eight people gunned down 2929 birds in a day's shoot. But the shooting 'tradition' on the land continues, with the current duke's late father, who died in 2016, being "never more content than when he was on the grouse moor with a shotgun in hand," according to the Grosvenor Estate. Meanwhile, The Field described the current duke as one of "the cream of the crop of younger shots" in 2013.

Considering what the Abbeystead Estate subjects grouse to, it's fair to say that many of them would rather be born or raised far away from there. While the terrain on the estate might be to their liking, being terrorised into flight, then shot at and killed, most certainly is not. The same will be true for the pheasants released onto the estate for the same purpose.

Ecological assault

Moreover, the shooting industry itself poses a threat to wading birds and all manner of other wild species, according to Wild Justice. In 2020, the organisation launched a legal challenge over the industry's releasing of millions of introduced birds, namely pheasants and partridges, into the countryside each year. Grosvenor was one of three estates named in the legal action. As the Guardian reported, Avery described the release of these birds as an "ecological assault." Explaining why, he said:

"These non-native game birds go around gobbling up insects, other invertebrates and even snakes and lizards, they peck at vegetation, their droppings fertilise sensitive habitats which no farmer would be allowed to fertilise, and they provide prey and carrion that swell the populations of predators that then go on to prey on other threatened species."

What is more, the National Anti Snaring Campaign tasked Professor Stephen Harris with reviewing of the use of snares in 2022. In the review, Harris asserted that though the shooting industry portrays snares as essential for protecting vulnerable species like ground-nesting birds, this is not backed up by evidence. He highlighted that in the 23 years up to 2018, fox, curlew, and lapwing numbers in the UK declined by 44%, 48%, and 43% respectively. Therefore, he argued:

"at the population level there is no evidence that reducing overall fox numbers is of conservation benefit to ground-nesting birds."

Lesser Black-backed Gull. Image Unsplash

Gull persecution

Additionally, although some wading birds may have fared well on the Abbeystead Estate, other wild birds have not. As the Guardian reported in 2013, tens of thousands of threatened Lesser Black-backed Gulls were killed in licensed annual culls on the estate over decades. Officially, the culls were permitted to tackle water pollution allegedly caused by the birds' droppings. But an ex-surveyor of gulls at Abbeystead conceded that protecting the "economy of the shooting estates" was partly behind the cull of the gulls, who are known to predate grouse eggs, according to the Guardian.

The gull killings began in the 1970s and were ongoing in 2013, despite the bird's increasingly precarious conservation status (they are now Amber listed as a species of  conservation concern). This was due to the fact that although a 2001 review had confirmed that the species' population in the area qualified for legal protection, necessary alterations to the relevant conservation documents had not been done.

The Duke of Westminster acquired the estate – via a trust – in 1980 and the Grosvenor Estate has managed it since.

Fast forward to 2017 and RSPB staff discovered that workers "on a grouse moor managed by the Abbeystead Estate" were again killing lesser black-backed gulls. Subsequently, Natural England (NE) opened an investigation into the matter. As the RSPB's then Global Conservation Director, Martin Harper, explained in 2018, that probe ultimately found that the killings were unlawful. NE issued the Grosvenor/Abbeystead Estate with a Compliance Notice, which Harper described as "a slapped wrist in the form of a legal document."

Harper pointed out that the gulls' population in the area had endured a dramatic decline in the first few years of the Grosvenor Estate's management of Abbeystead. In 1981, there were 25,000 pairs, he said, with their numbers dropping to less than 8000 pairs by 1985.

Raptors shun Abbeystead

More broadly, persecution of raptors is a well-known issue associated with grouse moors. Although the bird shooting industry's involvement in this persecution is hard to precisely quantify, a recent RSPB report pointed to the extent of the problem. It showed that the industry was connected to 75% of the 57 convictions for raptor persecution between 2009 and 2023. This low number of convictions reflects how difficult it is to identify and prosecute perpetrators, as over the same period, at least 1,344 birds of prey were illegally killed, according to the report.

The industry's relationship with raptors is also reflected in whether the birds can be found nesting on shooting estates. In 2019, Avery noted that no Hen Harriers nested on Abbeystead Estate. This estate occupies over 23,000 acres of the Forest of Bowland, which "has been at times the stronghold of this bird in England," according to Avery. Indeed, the Wild Justice co-founder pointed out that Hen Harriers have repeatedly shunned the Duke of Westminster's land for years now, opting instead to nest on land owned by the water company United Utilities, where they are better monitored.

The Forest of Bowland contains several grouse moors, not just the Abbeystead Estate. As Who Owns England's Guy Shrubsole reported in 2018, other owners of grouse moors there include the Duchy of Lancaster, i.e. King Charles, and United Utilities. However, the water company announced in 2023 that it will not be renewing the leases it has with shooting interests for use of its moorlands, meaning grouse shooting on the parts of Bowland that it owns is being phased out.

In 2019, Terry Pickford, a founding member of the North West Raptor Protection Group, soberingly said that he did not believe raptors had a future in the Forest of Bowland unless things change. His group was set up in 1967 to try and stem raptor persecution in the area. He warned that compared to the group's early days in the 1970s, "we're worse now than we were then" in terms of persecution of birds of prey.

The Duke of Westminster has vast financial resources. He has a net worth of over £10 billion, according to the 2024 Sunday Times' Rich List. His family estate also includes around 165000 acres of British countryside - on which, along with 19 other land-owning Dukes they have never paid inheritance tax. The young billionaire is certainly in a position to "help set a new standard for our relationship with nature," as Ecotricity's Vince has called on him to do.

But the controversies surrounding snare use and fox hunting on his land, as well as bird persecution and the distinct absence of raptors like Hen Harriers on his shooting estate, show that the duke has much work to do to demonstrate any kinship he may feel towards nature.

• If like Dale Vince and Protect the Wild, you also feel like more can and should be done by the Duke of Westminster to work with wildlife not against it, you can reach out to his estate here.

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