The pro-hunting media site Scribehound recently launched a gardening ‘channel’. It lists some of the country’s most well-known gardeners among its contributors, including “the nation’s gardener,” Alan Titchmarsh, as Gardens Illustrated has described him.
Scribehound is listed in Protect the Wild’s bloodbusiness database due to its overtly pro-hunting and shooting output and its founder being one of the people behind the shooting marketplace GunsOnPegs.
‘The internet’s Village Hall’
Scribehound says that it is “on a mission to put great writing at the heart of gardening” with its new offering. To achieve this, it has signed up over 30 contributors, many of which will be familiar to horticultural enthusiasts. Alongside Titchmarsh, the new platform lists BBC Gardeners’ World‘s Arit Anderson and Adam Frost as among its “gardening creators”. Other contributors include Matthew Pottage, who is head of horticulture for London’s Royal Parks. Meanwhile, the channel has former director-general of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), Sue Biggs, and one of the society’s current vice-presidents, James Alexander-Sinclair, as its “figureheads”. Simply put, this new channel has signed up many of the horticultural elite.
Scribehound’s other well-established offering is a Countryside channel, which it describes as “the internet’s Village Hall.” Here too are around 30 writers who use it to have “the most important conversations about the countryside” – mainly shooting birds dead – according to the platform.
Although Scribehound Countryside covers topics like farming and conservation, many of the conversations that contributors have on the platform are unashamedly pro-shooting and pro-hunting. The platform’s content that doesn’t overtly promote these activities also often falls in line with typical industry talking points, such as questioning ideas like rewilding and predator reintroductions.
Some of Scribehound’s authors threw their weight behind the idea that hunters should be recognised as a protected minority too. This notion is being pushed by the organisation Hunting Kind, which counts Scribehound contributor Charlie Jacoby as one of its “pack”.
Jacoby, who is the co-founder of Fieldsports Channel, is among the Scribehound writers who have covered Hunting Kind’s idea. His article attracted condemnation on social media for making “offensive remarks” about academic and activist Chantelle Lunt, who had criticised the idea on Good Morning Britain as being insulting to genuine minorities.
Scribehound’s pro-hunting and pro-shooting output should come as no surprise considering that its founder is Chris Horne. He is also the co-founder of GunsOnPegs, which claims to be “the UK’s leading marketplace for game shooting.” Alongside “putting shoots in touch with guns and guns in touch with shoots,” GunsOnPegs is affiliated with lobbyists the Countryside Alliance and the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, according to its website. The shooting marketplace says its team is “doing all we can to make sure the freedoms of the countryside are here for generations to come.” In other words the ‘freedom’ to kill wildlife.
Not so strange bedfellows
Although hunting and shooting enthusiasts and members of the horticultural elite may seem like strange bedfellows, this isn’t the first example of such associations.
Earlier this year, Protect the Wild and other animal welfare defenders protested at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show over its ties to a company that has repeatedly allowed a notorious hunt to meet on its land. The RHS’ famous flower show has been sponsored by The Newt, a luxury hotel firm, for four years running. The firm is also due to sponsor the next show in 2025. But as Protect the Wild revealed, The Newt has regularly hosted the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt and its estate manager has a number of ties with the hunt.
For many, the name of this hunt will be familiar, as it was the focus of a Channel 4 expose in January, which broadcast drone footage of the hunts’ hounds chasing and killing a fox on private land. Hunt monitors and saboteurs have regularly documented the BSV chasing and killing foxes. Indeed, Protect the Wild’s latest annual hunting report shows that the BSV accounted for 12.83% of the total reported fox chases and kills across the 2023/24 hunting season.
Normalising hunting and shooting
The choice of many high-profile gardeners to write for Scribehound should be seen as either a serious lack of due diligence by the authors or simply part of a wider normalisation of hunting and shooting.
As Protect the Wild’s Charlie Moores wrote in early October when the pheasant shooting season got underway, an endless array of hotels, pubs, and other businesses, contribute to this normalisation by “advertising to shooters with a staggering indifference to the birds themselves.”
As Moores argued, the industry that these businesses are attempting to cash in on is anything but normal. Rather, it is engaged in the commercialised killing of millions of birds who themselves aren’t normally found in the British countryside, having been released into the environment solely for people to kill them. Likewise, there is nothing normal – or rational – about setting moorlands on fire in an age of climate breakdown to create an ideal landscape for people to find and kill grouse in.
By welcoming the shooting parties with open arms, these hotels, pubs, and other businesses, are helping to brush all of these realities and the industry’s other harms to wildlife under the carpet and make the practice appear acceptable. Similarly, Scribehounds’ new gardening cohort is lending legitimacy to that platform – and its ferociously pro-hunting and pro-shooting views.
Nonetheless, some gardeners are pushing back against such associations. Sarah Gerrard-Jones, author of The Plant Rescuer and writer for BBC Gardeners’ World, spoke out against The Newt’s sponsorship of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, in light of the luxury hotel business’ links to hunting. Gardener Cleve West, author of The Garden Of Vegan, also criticised The Newt for not severing ties with the BSV hunt.
Moreover, Scribehounds new gardening channel got onto Protect the Wild’s radar precisely because a professional gardener contacted us, sickened by the fact that members of the horticultural elite were working with the platform.
