Agricultural operations including silage cutting, ploughing and harvest kill and injure millions of wild animals annually. Simple operational modifications significantly reduce wildlife casualties.
Agricultural operations cause enormous individual animal welfare harm that is largely invisible because casualties are dispersed across landscapes and rarely recovered. Brown hare leverets that lie motionless as an evolutionary camouflage response are killed by mowers; nesting skylarks and lapwings lose eggs and chicks; small mammals are killed by ploughing. These deaths are not inevitable - operational modifications that are affordable, practical and often already required by Countryside Stewardship schemes significantly reduce casualties. The welfare case for agricultural wildlife casualty reduction is straightforward: these are preventable deaths and injuries that can be substantially reduced at modest operational cost.