Why You Shouldn't Sign a Shooting Petition

At the Countryside Alliance we are often asked to support petitions in favour of shooting, but we almost never agree to do so.

This can be the cause of some agitation among those who create these petitions. When all your friends support shooting it can be easy to assume that a pro-shooting petition would be a good way of capturing that positivity. In reality, supporting petitions would harm the credibility of those of us working for shooting in parliament and the media.

Today the petition is the favourite tool of the animal rights movement, whose arguments are long on emotion and short on facts. They like to use petitions because they can fill the statistical holes in their arguments with numbers of signatures, and their heartstring-tugging pictures and slogans are an effective method of harvesting clicks on social media.

The arguments for shooting are the reverse. They are complex and grounded in science and real-world experience. At the Alliance’s Campaign for Shooting, we work to put these arguments in the hands of policymakers and politicians. There is a sound and growing evidence base that both demonstrates the value of shooting and is helping shape and form our shoot management practices, and that evidence should be the bedrock of our arguments, not the number of clicks we can achieve on a petition.

If we start to argue from a position of how many people support our petitions, we immediately validate everyone else trying to do the same. Our position has always been, and must continue to be, that policy should be based on evidence and principle.

There is another reason we do not support petitions. The Alliance’s role in the defence of shooting is politics and PR, and supporting petitions is bad politics.

Consider the recent row over animal sentience. It was a classic of modern animal rights campaigning, a strategy we have been highlighting for the past two years. A “fact” of dubious provenance is selected, it is distorted to maximise outrage and broadcast on social media, it is shared by celebrities with enormous followings. The underpinning campaign is invariably a petition. Using this precise strategy over 360,000 signatures were gathered in 24 days on one petition, over 230,000 on another, calling on the government to recognise animals are sentient when literally no one had argued that they weren’t.

We need to be combatting this anti-scientific, post-factual method of campaigning, not engaging in it. At the Alliance we are working with politicians to spread the message that these petitions are so often based in mistruths and distortions that they mustn’t be allowed to drive the policy-making process. We are also helping them understand that even the most vigorously-signed petition carries no electoral threat. Those 360,000 signatures represent 0.7% of the electorate.

We cannot make these arguments if we are supporting petitions from our own supporters. We appreciate the passion that drives those who start them, and we understand our refusal to back them can be frustrating, but we must do what is right to mount the most effective defence of shooting. That means arguing that petitions play no role in the legislative process.

Liam Stokes was Head of Shooting Campaigns at The Countryside Alliance and famously defended driven grouse shooting infront of the parliament select committee when a petition to ban the sport reached 100,000 signatures.