SOME facts are difficult to understand, such as the startling one that three quarters of all the heather moorland in the world occurs in the UK, covering a quarter of all our uplands. That’s not natural and can’t have happened by chance, or natural selection, so it’s due to human intervention.

5,000 years ago the uplands were wooded, with birch and juniper, as the climate warmed up after the ice age, followed later by alder and pine. Some woodland and scrub would still exist but for one activity – grouse shooting, with over four million acres of moorland managed for this so called sport.

There’s little to say in its favour, and recent flooding in the UK, and locally in the Calder Valley at Hebden Bridge, has highlighted one of the many problems.

Heather now dominates following the draining of the water retaining sphagnum moss peat bogs that can hold 25 times their dry weight in water. The heather’s kept low by regular burning, which leads to soil and competing plants deteriorating, and releases CO2, all encouraged by a government subsidy rising from £12 to £23 an acre in 2014.

There’s evidence that moorland trees help reduce the flow of water by some 40 percent, and upland tree planting does more to reduce flooding downstream than young heather shoots.

It’s not just the grouse in trouble. There’s unregulated culling of mountain hares, while crows, foxes and stoats are destroyed, as are some protected birds of prey, often illegally.

The real nonsense is the medication of the grouse, spread widely on grit that can get in water courses. It keeps them alive, so they can be shot later, using lead pellets that collect in the meat that’s eaten by those with more money than sense.

It’s a classic human abuse of the environment and the animals that share it.