NTS Strategic Review Steering Group welcomed as Trust admits deer cull failure
published this on 8:15 pm, Tuesday, 1st December, 2009Community News| Tourism activities | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
The respected former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, George Reid today announced the names of members of a Strategic Review Steering Group to advise him in his review of the governance and activities of the National Trust for Scotland. They may well do a good job but from where we stand they are depressingly familiar in genre as well as in person.
The appointment of the strategic advisory group was welcomed by In Trust for Scotland (ITFS), the lobby group set up by members to ‘safeguard’ the trust’s properties following NTS proposals for wide-scale property closures and staff redundancies.
ITFS spokesman, Bill Fraser, says: ‘The trust, however, is accountable to its 315,000 members and volunteers who are the backbone of the organisation. We look forward to considering this distinguished group’s advice on revised governance structures and successfully developing support for Scotland’s heritage’.
This is effectively a shot across the bows of the Steering Group. It reminds them, healthily, that members have the final say.
This comes as the Trust has at last admitted the failure of its persistent, simplistic and expensive (£750,000) culling of deer at its Mar Lodge estate adjacent to Balmoral – a matter on which we have recently reported. This matter has also been of concern to In Trust for Scotland.
The cull was intended – against the advice of professional and established gamekeepers who recommended fencing – to regenerate ancient woodlands on the estate. Something like 800 deer each year for almost 15 years have been pointlessly slaughtered.
The Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association says that virtually no new trees have resulted from the cull and point to additional negative consequences of the Trust’s action. These include areas now choked with blanket heather which the deer herd, progressively weakened in numbers, would have kept down.
The extent of the poor practice on the part of the Trust was underlined by a formed head stalker at Mar Lodge, Willie Forbes. Mr Forbes told The Herald: ‘What is disgusting is the killing of deer at night using spotlights, which means that they are pursued 24 hours a day’.
If anyone else did this they would rightly stand accused of wilful cruelty to animals.
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