Countryside Alliance send formal complaint to the Guardian

The Countryside Alliance has sent a formal complaint to the Guardian following an article printed on Saturday 14 July titled 'Country diary: no sanctuary for hunted partridge at Melangell's church', explaining the many ways in which the article fails to uphold the paper's own Editorial Code on accuracy. Our complaint asks that the article be amended or removed from the Guardian website, and a correction published, and states that if the Guardian fails to do so we will refer the article to the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

The Countryside Alliance is committed to fighting for honest and accurate reporting on rural issues, and will continue to challenge bias and misinformation whenever and wherever it appears. In addition to our formal complaint, the Alliance also wrote the following letter to the editor:

Jim Perrin's Country diary argues that the shoot surrounding the shrine of Saint Melangell blasphemes a patron saint of wild creatures. He is wrong in this assertion, just as he is wrong in almost every detail of his diary entry. His photograph is of pheasants, not partridges. No shot birds are being sent to landfill, they are all joyfully eaten as the tasty wild game they are, and to suggest otherwise is actually libellous.

The only thing Mr Perrin got right is that the valley is a magical place, full of wildlife and romance. It is indeed a treasure, precisely because of the hard work put in to running the shoot. The shooting of the pheasants Mr Perrin mistook for partridges doesn't just provide delicious meat for the table, it provides the money for the conservation of the hazel hedges your diarist so enjoyed and so much else in the valley.

Every year shooting estates in Wales spend £7.4million on planting trees, managing hedgerows, cultivating cover crops and conservation headlands, coppicing woodlands and maintaining habitat, to the benefit of a huge diversity of wildlife including Saint Melangell's beloved hares. The valley Mr Perrin visited may be infused with magic and myth, but it is the very real investment and hard work of the local gamekeepers that keeps it that way.