One proponent of the Victorian pastime of shooting red grouse on heather-clad uplands questions the “noisy” outrage over the shooting of a “few thousand” wild birds in a country that kills 700 million chickens at 34 days old. Another argues that anti-hunt sentiment is thriving online because social media creates fertile ground for simplistic arguments. Both are reasonable debating points, but they also reveal a hobby that is doomed to extinction.

Ironically, the defence of grouse shooting on the grounds that it is not as bad as industrial livestock production came on the very day that the environment secretary, Michael Gove, announced plans for compulsory CCTV in English slaughterhouses. There’s no economic reason for such a policy, only a growing number of people wanting to be less cruel towards animals.

We can treat this supposedly suburban sentimentality with scorn, and find all sorts of hypocrisies in it, but this is British society’s direction of travel. Just as we’ve become more socially liberal in recent decades, so we’re becoming more protective of domestic and wild animals, and more exercised by cruelty towards them.

Grouse shooting has survived so far because big landowners can ignore sea changes in public opinion. But politicians cannot. Theresa May’s pre-election advocacy of a free vote on foxhunting displayed a tin ear to the clamour for animal rights, and she’s quietly buried that pledge after her electoral humbling. As grouse shooting becomes socially toxic, businesses will also shy away. And the lavish subsidies pocketed by grouse moor owners will vanish with Brexit.

The coming demise of driven grouse shooting will be painted as the tragic loss of a cherished rural tradition

The coming demise of driven grouse shooting will be painted as the tragic loss of a cherished rural tradition, but only a vivid imagination can depict it as the antithesis of industrial agriculture. In Bowland Beth, a new book about the life and death of one hen harrier, David Cobham likens the past two decades of grouse moor management to the Klondike gold rush. Grouse moor husbandry has intensified – resulting in the illegal persecution of rare birds of prey and increased flood risk due to moorland management – because red grouse are effectively a cash crop: wealthy individuals pay thousands of pounds a day to shoot these fast-flying birds.

The grouse-shooting season may endure, but the gold will disappear: I predict its current industrial incarnation will be legislated, licensed or squeezed by subsidy-withdrawal into extinction within a generation.

Cats put out to stud

The image of Britain as a nation of animal lovers is tarnished by gruesome road signs that declare “Cats eyes removed”. So Suffolk county council has taken steps to ensure no foreign tourists mistakenly conclude that great cruelty is being inflicted on our precious moggies – by deploying instead the equally ambiguous “Road studs removed”. I hope we can be both the birthplace of animal rights and the home of idiomatic signs that bewilder and delight visitors.

Baby broomers

Clean sweep for Swedish parents. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

I was delighted by a new piece of idiomatic Swedish I learned this holiday. We British see Swedes as perfect parents, with their progressive leave and forest nurseries. But Swedish parents have the same anxieties about their shortcomings as we do about ours. Curlingföräldrar is their term for mums and dads who seek to obsessively smooth the way for their offspring, just as curlers sweep the ice in front of a gliding stone. Forget “helicopter parents” – “curling parents” sums up our follies much more precisely.

• Patrick Barkham is a natural history writer for the Guardian