The high-velocity slingshot weighs 540 g and has a bow height of 17 cm. The elastics are made from superior quality material for durability. This slingshot’s triple band elastic system sets it apart from other competitors and consistently surprises shooters with the power it leverages. The unit also has an additional laser light that is likely to make you wonder how you managed without this feature before.Įspecially if you use your slingshot for fishing, as customers are reporting that fish are attracted to the light and this has radically increased their success rate. The infra-red sight is a very helpful addition, as are the precise aiming points. The only successful local eradication happened in Anglesey in Wales, where 9,597 grey squirrels were killed at a cost of £1,019,000 – that’s £106.18 per squirrel, and it took 16 years.This slingshot is packed with innovative features, and happy customers have reported that these additions go a long way towards improving the overall hunting experience. But just about everybody accepts the impossibility of eradicating grey squirrels. Should the UK commit to the relentless killing of grey squirrels in perpetuity? Too often the default response to a “problem” animal is simply to kill it. The environmental impact of releasing a handful of grey squirrels – particularly in areas where red squirrels are absent – is likely negligible. Bird traps used under general licence capture and kill corvids and gulls.Ĭompared to the 11 million domestic cats and more than 40 million non-native game birds, there are only an estimated 2.5 million grey squirrels living in the UK, and 700 are taken into captivity each year. Stoats and weasels can be killed in snap traps. Snares can be legally used to kill foxes and dogs can be legally used to flush foxes out of cover to be shot. Many of the UK’s native predators are killed to maximise the density of game birds for hunters to shoot. Pheasants are a non-native species, but their UK population is boosted by the annual release of millions of birds for the sake of game bird shooting. When grey squirrels are singled out for strict release control on the EU hit list of Invasive Alien Species, why aren’t pheasants? Pheasants also cause around a million road accidents each year. They’re also significant predators of native adders, a species of major conservation concern, and the extremely rare sand lizard. There’s evidence that pheasants affect local plant communities by increasing the area of bare ground and changing the soil chemistry. The total mass of pheasants released annually exceeds that of the entire breeding population of native birds. On an even greater scale, the game bird industry releases millions of non-native birds – 35 million pheasants and six-and-a-half million red-legged partridges – into the British countryside each year, to be shot for sport. In defence of the grey squirrel, Britain's most unpopular invader Why is it acceptable for animal shelters to rescue an invasive alien species, the domestic cat, and for the public to allow them to roam free, but unacceptable for wildlife rescue centres to help and release a few grey squirrels? There are 11 million pet cats in the UK, which kill about 27 million wild birds each year and around 92 million wild prey in total. There are also glaring contradictions in what is considered invasive and what needs to be controlled. So killing grey squirrels is not necessarily money well spent. But that cost also includes money spent on controlling grey squirrels, and there is no link between how much is spent on controlling their numbers and reducing damage to trees. The cost to UK forestry is estimated to be £10 million per year, including damage to timber caused by the grey squirrel’s habit of stripping bark from trees. The campaign against grey squirrels is justified by the UK government, which insists that grey squirrels threaten native wildlife and harm the economy. This means that wildlife rescue centres in England which previously took in, rehabilitated and released wild grey squirrels, will instead have to kill them, on both practical and ethical grounds. It’s illegal in the UK for anyone to release grey squirrels into the wild from December 2019.
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