BY ADAM GALPIN

I feel an overwhelming obligation from a personal point of view to defend first and foremost my job but also to speak out in defence of Farmers, Gamekeepers, Landowners and the voiceless prey animals which suffer or simply do not get the chance to exist where the management of predators is non-existent.

On the 9th of January 2019 the Scottish Government announced its intention to bring into place legislation that could ultimately cost me my job and undoubtedly will have an effect on rural pest control. The Government promised it was going to look into hunting with dogs and it appointed Lord Bonomy to carry out that review.

Lord Bonomy made an in depth and thorough investigation, in his recommendations he was clear that using a pack of hounds is not only more effective but is also more humane than if you were to only use two hounds. The Rural Affairs Minister Mairi Gougen has decided to ignore the science, evidence and reason within Lord Bonomy’s peer reviewed research and has announced that she intends to limit the number of hounds to just two.

I know some people for whatever reason feel strongly against wildlife management and I appreciate not everybody understands the ways of the countryside but I ask anybody with an ounce of critical thinking about themselves to please not believe the trite that is spewed out on the anti’s pages.

Sometimes on a hunting day I am shadowed by a tiny group of extremists that call themselves “hunt saboteurs” they claim to have the interest of foxes at heart and it seems they don’t care about a lot else other than pushing that single-issue agenda. I have been assaulted once by one of their members and I spend more time in court than I wish to giving evidence against them for the crimes that they carry out on a day’s hunting and even once when they disrupted my neighbour’s pheasant shoot.

I feel I have nothing to hide I am simply employed to be part of a team carrying out legitimate rural pest control. These charlatans that call themselves sabs edit footage and blatantly lie on their hit reports and we do not answer back, I don’t feel the need to speak out and justify my actions enough as they are totally lawful. I probably put too much faith in the general public but this whole “hunting issue” within the media seems to be very one sided.

Today I am going to reply in kind and show things from my point of view so that you can see what we do is lawful, efficient and I hope that you agree with me when I claim the right to call this method of rural pest control humane.

For the purpose of this exercise I have simply taken the last video the sabs have put online from 05/01/19 they claim we killed the fox with the hounds and even go as far as to imply I released it in order to let the hounds catch it! I could have chosen pretty much any of their propaganda over the last few seasons but I have selected this particular video because it was the last one they put up. I am going to say a few words about the video, some people may find it distressing so I will warn you now this footage shows a fox being shot and then a few minutes after that hounds arrive and rag the dead lifeless body of the fox. Hounds do this as it is their reward and if sabs don’t jump in and steal it from their jaws they pretty much eat the whole carcass. This may look brutal but this is how hounds feed, it is no different than looking at minced beef or watching a butcher cut up a dead pig. The fox knows nothing about it, one minute he is running away from the noise and disturbance as he would have many times before from ramblers, farm workers, dog walkers and even sabs when they pre-beat an area the next moment he is stone dead, shot by myself at a lethal range with a very capable BB load in a 12g shotgun.

The importance of this is to show that week in week out folk are duped by hunt saboteurs pushing their agenda and basically making out that myself and my colleagues are breaking a law that antis think needs to be tightened up and quite frankly this is not what is happening out in the field. The Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act came in to place in 2002 and to the best of my knowledge not a single fox has ever been illegally savaged by a hound over the last 17 years.

There are always two sides to every story so for once here is mine…………..

Adam Galpin’s original post can be found here on Facebook.