The Countryside Alliance Moorlands Campaign has run into trouble less than a week after it was launched after anti-bloodsports groups denounced it as a cynical attempt to "dress up" sport shooting as conservation. The League Against Cruel Sports today (August 15) accused the CA of using the veneer of conservation to hide their real agenda - the shooting of hundreds of birds for sport - the CA's Moorlands Campaign does not use the word "kill" once.

The controversy comes only days before the start of the "Glorious Twelfth" on August 12, which will see hundreds of grouse, snipe and ptarmigan blasted out of the sky for sport across Scotland and the North of England. Paying participants will be bussed in from across the country to take shotgun pot-shots at birds bred in specially managed conditions.

The blood-sports lobby's claims that its latest campaign initiative is concerned with promoting sustainable heather moorland management have been attacked as misleading and having more to do with protecting the interests of those concerned with decimating wildlife in order to provide the ideal conditions to breed birds for game shooting.

Douglas Batchelor, Chief Executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, said: "The Glorious Twelfth itself is nothing more than a cruel, barbaric and dated pastime. Hundreds of birds will die for no other reason than idiots with nothing better to do fancying taking to the countryside with shotguns."

He continued: "In preparation for this shooting spectacular, wildlife and birds of prey have been subjected to all manner of 'predator control' - which in reality means the use of cruel snares, traps and poisons. Killing birds and animals purely for pleasure is wrong and should be banned. The Countryside Alliance is not concerned with conservation. It is concerned with promoting bloodsports."