IN 1566 Elizabeth I's government passed an act which listed all the wildlife that was to be classed as vermin, with payments offered for specimens killed.

The catalogue includes not only crows, magpies, stoats and weasels but buzzards, ospreys, kites, sea eagles, kingfishers, polecats and otters.

Fast forward to 2005. The Shooting Times published an article naming 30 "voracious predators", which included golden eagle, buzzard, hen harrier, red kite, heron, badger, polecat and otter.

Roger Lovegrove observes: "That list resonates very strongly with the one enacted in 1566. How far have our real sentiments changed in 500 years?"

The question becomes particularly acute over the hen harrier, pictured below.

On the brink of extinction in Britain through illegal persecution, it recovered so strongly when given special protection in a research project on a Scottish moor that grouse shooting, a key local industry, became unviable through the high loss of chicks to the harriers. The implications are still being fiercely debated.

Lovegrove, a former director of the RSPB in Wales, deals extensively and very fairly with this seemingly intractable conflict. He gives a well-balanced run, too, to the foxhunting issue, though one senses his sympathies are with the hunt, chiefly because of its social role.

For the present, the fox at least remains common and ubiquitous. The broader fact is that Britain's wildlife is threadbare compared with centuries ago. Providing detailed accounts of how more than 30 individual species, ranging from eagle to house sparrow, and badger to mole, have fared, Lovegrove paints a shocking, even shameful, picture of a ruthless and systematic assault on the nation's wildlife.

He says: "Over the centuries our relationship with wildlife has swung to extremes but we have always managed it for our own benefits, however damaging or ill-advised this might have been at times. What will define wildlife-management/ vermin control as we advance in the 21st Century?"

Though he doesn't say so, perhaps the sad decline in our wildlife will be halted only if and when we come to believe that we do not have a God-given right always to put ourselves first.