Animal Rebellion activists dyed the iconic Queen Victoria Memorial fountain red today, accusing the current queen of having ‘blood on her hands’. We take a look at the scandal that sparked this action plus the ways in which crown lands have either supported animal agriculture or turned a blind eye to hunting.

With waters flowing crimson and stone walls adorned with sanguine splashes - eerily reminiscent of scenes from inside a slaughterhouse kill floor, one might add - dying one of London’s most famous fountains blood red was always going to send a powerful and visceral message. The response from the UK’s national press is a testament to that, with the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mail and The Mirror all running stories amplifying Animal Rebellion’s message, albeit with different editorial biases.

Whether you support the action and the public outreach opportunities it created, or you agree with the Daily Mail in labelling Animal Rebellion as “scruffy members of the rag-tag protest” and an “eco-mob”, the story behind the sensational pictures and videos cannot be denied.

As Harley McDonald-Eckersall, a spokesperson for Animal Rebellion, said: “The crown estate is the biggest landowner in the UK and they choose to use this land for animal agriculture and hunting, which not only decimate our environment but cause the deaths of millions of lives every year. It’s time for a new system based on justice and compassion and the royal family should be leading the way.”

The action itself was sparked by a recent report by the Guardian which revealed that the Queen’s lawyers had “secretly lobbied Scottish ministers to change a draft law to exempt her private land from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions.” That initiative would have required the Crown Estate to facilitate the construction of new pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy, but at a considerable cost that they wanted to avoid.

According to the report, the crown’s lawyers were able to use an obscure and arcane 300-year-old parliamentary procedure known as ‘Queen’s consent’ to see the legislation early, giving them ample time to apply for an exemption before anyone else noticed. This has resulted in one of Scotland’s largest landowners, the Queen, being the only person in the country not required to pay out for the good of the environment.

The Guardian report is worth a read and details all the ways in which the scandal was suppressed, including the failure of Nicola Sturgeon’s government to disclose the Queen’s lobbying efforts. What is clear is that despite the royal family’s apparent support for green initiatives - including campaigning by the Duke of Cambridge and his father Prince Charles to cut greenhouse gas emissions - it is one rule for the crown and another for everyone else.

“Crown land should be used to grow healthy, nutritious food for all and to provide homes for the animals we share this country with,” Said McDonald-Eckersall. “We are demanding that the Queen end the use of crown land for industries which are contributing to the climate and ecological emergency and the death of animals.”

The Crown Estate is not only one of the largest landowners in Scotland, but the UK as a whole, accounting for around 360,000 acres of forest, farm and common land in 2015 and assets worth £13 billion in 2018. Its agricultural estates are mainly let to tenant farmers for both arable and animal farming making the Queen by extension one of the UK’s biggest farming landlords. While she may not have direct control over her tenants’ individual operations, the Crown Estate can pick and choose tenants, favour certain forms of agriculture and invest money into its lands to make them more suitable for sustainable, less harmful types of farming.

For example, in 2015, the Crown Estate announced a £400,000 investment into its holding of arable land at the 4,500-acre Ellington Estate in Northumberland for the purpose of improving drainage and upgrading fixed equipment. This investment was made entirely to support crop farming telling us that if the crown wanted to it could invest further by diverting some of the £269.3 million in net revenue profit it made in 2020/21 to support the fundamentals of a plant-based food system.

The Queen, however, as we have already noted, is not afraid to hide behind legal loopholes in regards to her responsibility as a landowner. As well as wrangling exemptions from climate laws behind closed doors at Westminster and Holyrood, the Crown Estate is on record as denying any knowledge of what its tenants get up to when it comes to hunting.

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According to several Freedom of Information (FOI) requests filed by Mr Henry Pitcairn in 2018 and 2019, asking the Crown Estate to disclose its knowledge of permissions granted to fox hunts, stag hunts and hare hunts on lands it owns, the crown responded by shirking responsibility to it tenants.

“We do not hold any lists of hunts with permission to hunt over Crown Estate land as we generally do not grant permission for hunting activities across our land, this being a matter for our tenants,” said Crown Estate Knowledge Manager Martin Brazier. “The exception is one consent under the Hunting Act 2004 given to the Eton Beagles in 2018 over an area of Windsor Great Park.”

‘Beagling’, a form of hunting with hounds historically targeting hares and rabbits, was banned in 2005 along with other blood sports following the 2004 Hunting Act, forcing the few remaining public school and university packs to switch to hunting artificial trails, or so they would have us believe.

In 2016, Eton College launched an investigation following claims that its beagles took part in an illegal hare hunt in North Yorkshire, as shown in footage captured by the League Against Cruel Sports. Eton College of course being the £36,000-per-year public school attended by current and former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and David Cameron, and Princes William and Harry.

In a special report for the Guardian, Denis Lawton, professor of education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and co-author of Royal Education: Past, Present and Future, questioned Prince William’s suitability as future king due to the nature of his education:

There are three reasons for suggesting that William's education has not been an adequate preparation for a future king. First, Eton, although a "good school" in some respects, is an unsuitable environment for a future king. At a time when the monarchy needs to become more "democratic", William has been brought up in a privileged institution, where he was socialised into thinking of himself as a superior person. 

At Eton he also became identified with such upper-class pursuits as beagling (hunting hares with dogs) and other blood sports, which many find offensive. He has mixed throughout his schooling with a limited section of the population. His education and training should have broadened his social experience, but have restricted it instead.

There are other stories of Prince William’s beagling days at Eton, including attending society debates only to argue vociferously against visiting animal rights activists’ notions of a ban on fox hunting. According to one report from an apparent fellow Etonian, and we must take this with a considerable grain of salt, William would go beagling twice a week sometimes on the estate of former foreign minister Lord Carrington. However, this would have been in the late 1990s before the advent of the Hunting Ban and it is possible that the now Duke of Cambridge’s attitudes towards blood sports have changed over the twenty years since.

Returning to what we know - or rather what we don’t know - about the Crown Estate’s current support for hunting, in all but one case in 2018 they deny all knowledge of what permissions are granted to hunts conducted on any of its lands. Responsibility for that, they say, lies with the tenants themselves. Legally this is sound - landlords are not responsible for anything illegal their tenants do without their knowledge - yet morally it is reprehensible. As vegans we know all too well that legality does not equal morality.

The crown is fully aware that hunting takes place on its land, yet does nothing to control or monitor it. The royal family has spoken about the dire need to limit greenhouse gas emissions and pursue net-zero strategies to limit global warming, yet they support and profit from animal agriculture to the tune of hundreds of millions in profits per year.

It is time the Queen and the royal family stopped shirking their responsibility to the public and truly led the way in working for a future where animals are no longer exploited in farms or hunted mercilessly, and to avert a climate crisis spiralling out of control. It shouldn’t take a bunch of ‘scruffy’ activists dumping red dye in a fountain to get this message across.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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