BY BERT BURNETT
The Moral High Ground Is Easy When Your Hare Count Is Zero
There is one certainty that will emerge from the new falconry licensing regime for mountain hares in Scotland, and it has nothing to do with principle. No licence will be granted to fly a hawk at a hare on land owned by a conservation NGO or a rewilding estate. Not because these organisations have a moral objection to falconry, but because they have no mountain hares worth counting.
The uncomfortable truth for the rewilding movement is that their own management decisions have made hare populations on their land unsustainable. Long heather has been lost, trees have been planted and generalist predators, particularly foxes, have been allowed to prosper. The result is a landscape where mountain hares are either absent or clinging on in numbers so low that any licence application would be laughed out of Great Glen House. NatureScot’s own licensing guidance confirms that the conservation status of mountain hares nationally is “unfavourable-inadequate,” with regional variation and local declines . On rewilded ground, that decline is not a statistical abstraction. It is a biological reality.
Contrast that with privately managed moorland, where keepering, predator control and rotational burning have combined to produce hare densities that are, in some regions, extraordinary. A study cited in the Scottish Natural Heritage evidence review found that hare indices on driven grouse moors in Highland were 35 times higher than on moors that were not shot . A separate survey reported that driven grouse moors accounted for 68 per cent of the total area where mountain hares were recorded as present . These are not the figures of an industry that has driven the species to the brink. They are the figures of an industry that has, whatever its critics say, created the conditions in which hares thrive.
The numbers from the licensing returns tell their own story. In the years before full protection was introduced in 2021, licensed takes of mountain hares on managed ground ran at between 567 and 765 per year . After Schedule 5 protection came into force, the figures rose rather than fell: 1,408 hares were killed under licence in 2023, and 1,344 in 2024 . These are not rogue operations. They are licensed, monitored and reported. The system works.
Now consider what falconry will take. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) has estimated that around 1,000 mountain hares were caught by trained raptors annually in the years before the ban . That is a fraction of the licensed kill, and an even smaller fraction of the natural annual productivity of a species that fluctuates between roughly 100,000 and 400,000 animals . The idea that falconry represents a conservation threat is not supported by the arithmetic.
Meanwhile, the largest single source of hare mortality on rewilded and forestry land goes entirely unremarked. Hares are killed, under licence, to protect growing timber. NatureScot’s own application form lists “preventing serious damage to growing timber” as a standard licensing purpose, alongside “conserving young native trees” and “conserving an area of natural habitat” . The numbers involved dwarf anything falconry could take. Thousands of hares are removed from fenced woodland schemes and forestry grant areas, often with no public scrutiny and no moral posturing from the organisations that own the trees. A hundred times more hares are lost to tree protection and forestry interests than will ever be taken by a hawk.
The rewilding estate at Creag Meagaidh, the RSPB’s Abernethy reserve, the various private rewilding projects scattered across the Highlands: none of these places will be issuing falconry licences. Not because they disapprove of the practice, but because they cannot. Their hare populations are too sparse to sustain any take at all. That is the consequence of management choices, not moral superiority.
Yet we will hear from these quarters, in the months and years ahead, a great deal about the ethics of hare management. We will be told that falconry is cruel, that it is unnecessary, that it is a relic of a less enlightened age. The people telling us this will be the same people whose own land supports barely a hare, whose forests are fenced against herbivores, and whose predator control consists of allowing foxes to do as they please while congratulating themselves on a hands-off approach to nature.
The Scottish Government’s new licensing purpose for falconry, commencing in October 2026, permits the taking of mountain hares between 1 October and the last day of February, subject to site-by-site assessment . It is a modest, tightly regulated concession. It will apply almost exclusively to privately managed moorland, where hares are abundant enough to sustain it. The rewilders and the NGOs will not be applying for licences, because they have nothing to licence.
They will, of course, take the moral high ground regardless. It is easy to do so when your own failures are hidden behind a fence and a forestry grant.
Bert Burnett is a retired gamekeeper of more than fifty years’ experience.