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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Adam W" data-source="post: 3326049" data-attributes="member: 81080">A very interesting thread, I must admit that even as a shooter who has shot the odd Woodcock my first thought on seeing the 100,000 figure was that it was shockingly high and I'd be the first to say that I find some of the extreme examples mentioned such as a syndicate shooting 200+ in a day or and individual shooting 200+ a season frankly obscene and I know it is a much debated issue within the shooting world too.However having said that since having a proper look into the facts and figures I strangely find myself perhaps more comfortable than ever with the idea of shooting Woodcock(in moderation of course) and the reasons I say that are for all 100,000 sounds a huge number it's actually only about 7% of the birds wintering in the UK and only works out at about 0.25 birds per shooter per year on average. As for the decline well it seems widely accepted that shooting is not the cause of the decline probably largely because of again the widely accepted fact that the vast majority of birds shot are migrants anyway.So all things considered all the facts and figures seem to strongly suggest that the shooting of Woodcock in the UK is in fact nothing more than a small sustainable harvest that has no real conservation affect.I'm sure there's plenty of people against it simply on principle and that's fine but if we are talking about changing laws to ban people from doing things then we need a lot more than personal opinions and the numbers simply don't seem to back up the idea that there's a any need to change anything.</blockquote>

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