‘It invades gardens, and will take peas from their pods as cleanly as a man. In spring it turns carnivorous and eats eggs and young birds. It damages trees by biting bark and preventing the flow of sap.’2

“The ‘mercilessly shot’ squirrels ‘destructive’ to the fresh larch and fir shoots in a Gloucestershire arboretum were reds”.3 

'Between 1900 and 1925, red squirrel numbers declined drastically under human persecution, which in Hampshire’s New Forest officially ended only in 1927.'4 

‘Long before 1876, most rural folk considered the ‘common’ squirrel’ - as Britain’s native squirrel, and referred to it as a ‘fast-breeding vermin species no different from rats, mice and rabbits. The ‘squirrels destroying young pheasants’ and the ‘squirrels eating young pheasants’ in 1890 and 1912, were red.1  

‘The great squirrel massacre in the Scottish Highlands should be added as a slow violence sort of massacre. In Scotland, now home to 80 per cent of the UK’s red, deforestation and pest control effectively eliminated them by 1800’, and then in the early 1900s, they were again slaughtered on mass.4

‘How an animal once widely regarded as a common pest [the red squirrel] was converted into a treasure is another example of a fairly recently invented tradition. There was no pre-grey harmony between Britons and the reds’.1  

‘Natural history writer Frank Finn conceded that ‘our own kind’ was more destructive. Reds were also far less sociable.’5

Grey Squirrel Protection UK is colour blind and does not discriminate. All squirrels are sentient beings; precious and magical creatures, irrespective of colour or accusation, which all deserve the right to live out their lives free from human persecution and cruelty.