Birds of prey including hen harriers, buzzards, and peregrines are illegally killed across Europe and the UK, primarily in connection with driven grouse shooting. This persecution causes severe welfare harms and population impacts.
Raptor persecution involves welfare harms that range from instantaneous death by shooting to prolonged suffering from poisoning or trap injury. Anticoagulant poisoning — whether deliberate or from feeding on rodenticide-poisoned prey — causes internal bleeding that may take days to kill. Illegal pole traps break bones of birds landing on posts. Nest destruction kills eggs and dependent chicks. The scale of persecution is substantial: satellite tracking has demonstrated that tagged raptors disappear at far higher rates over managed moorland, with the pattern consistent with deliberate illegal killing. While individual welfare impacts are severe, the population-level welfare effect — preventing species from recovering to functional numbers — affects thousands of individuals. Enforcement is weak and prosecutions rare, reflecting the difficulty of gathering evidence in remote areas.