I refer members to my entry in the register of interests, which states that I am a member of the League Against Cruel Sports. I thank the many MSPs from across Parliament who have supported my motion, thereby allowing today’s timely debate on snaring to take place. I also thank the League Against Cruel Sports, OneKind, Cats Protection, Scottish Badgers and the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for providing the information that I requested to assist with the debate.
As members will be aware, snares are thin wire nooses that are set in order to trap animals around the neck—usually, foxes and rabbits. Legal snares are meant to tighten as the captured animal struggles, and to relax when the animal stops pulling. They are intended to hold the animal alive until the snare operator returns to kill it—usually by shooting—or to release it, if the snare has not caught the target creature.
Although their purpose is to immobilise target animals, the reality is often different. Most snares cause extreme suffering to animals, often leading to a painful and lingering death. They are also indiscriminate. They might aim to catch a fox, but are just as capable of catching cats, dogs, badgers, otters, deer, hares and livestock, which often suffer terrible injuries or are killed. Today’s debate allows us all to ask whether there is a place for such indiscriminate cruelty in Scotland in 2017.
It is six years since Parliament last debated the use of snares, during the passage of the bill that became the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Act 2011. At that time, Parliament regrettably chose not to ban snares, but instead to introduce a new regulatory regime. It was agreed that that regime would be reviewed before the end of 2016 and every five years thereafter.
The first review of snaring, which was carried out by Scottish Natural Heritage on behalf of the Scottish Government, was published in March. It has rightly been described by the League Against Cruel Sports as a “missed opportunity” and by OneKind as “destined to fail”.
The review group set itself three aims: to assess the
“efficacy of the legislation ...Review snare training and assess the effectiveness and compliance with the administrative procedure for obtaining snaring ID”,
and
“Consider any evidence of outstanding animal welfare implications in relation to snaring and whether these are sufficiently addressed through the provisions under section 11 of the”
Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981
“as amended.”
It is clear that the review failed to meet the first and third objectives. If we look first at the brief section in the review on animal welfare, it states:
“It is not within the scope of this review to assess whether”
the
“degree of suffering is acceptable.”
The legislation that was passed in 2011 was supposed to be about improving animal welfare, so surely any meaningful review of the legislation would need to ask the fundamental question whether, in modern Scotland, that practice, under the new regulatory regime, is cruel. The lack of any proper focus on animal welfare issues is probably not surprising, given that in the review there was no meaningful consultation of the non-governmental organisations that have experience of animal welfare issues and carry out extensive fieldwork on the matter.
The review’s focus on numbers of offences as the measure of efficacy ignored the documented evidence that is available on animal suffering, and completely missed the point that even though snaring causes suffering to the target animals that are caught in those barbaric traps, that does not merit the term “offence”.
The focus on offences was also ineffective because the review group did not have access to the numbers of snaring crimes that were recorded by the previous local police forces or even by Police Scotland, because they could not be provided in a suitable format. It is little wonder that the report acknowledged that
“It is important to note that the sample size is too small to perform statistically significant analysis of the incident,”
standard prosecution reports
“prosecution and conviction data”.
The consequence was a report that failed to look at all the available evidence and that proposed only a small number of recommendations, including tweaking snare designs. I have no objection to any of those recommendations, but they simply do not go far enough.
As part of the review process, a technical assessment group was set up in parallel with the review group. The technical assessment group made 26 suggestions, but the overwhelming majority were completely ignored in the review group’s final recommendations, with no explanation or even reference to them in the body of the report.
Not surprisingly, prior to the publication deadline of SNH’s review, OneKind and the League Against Cruel Sports in Scotland worked together to commission their own report into snaring in Scotland, called “Cruel and Indiscriminate: Why Scotland must become snare-free.” The report concluded:
“Snares inflict unacceptable suffering on thousands of wild and domestic animals in Scotland every year. Continuing to permit the use of these cruel and indiscriminate traps flies in the face of modern concerns about animal welfare, conservation and the wider environment.”
I repeat: the report talks about “unacceptable suffering” and says that the practice is “cruel and indiscriminate”. It is astonishing that, in Scotland today, we still allow devices that cause such suffering in an indiscriminate way to be used in the name of control.
I could give members countless examples from South Scotland alone that demonstrate the appalling harm that snaring causes to animals. In June last year, a pet cat returned home to her family in Ayrshire with a snare caught around her neck and front leg. The cat suffered atrocious injuries, which the vet believed were caused by her chewing herself free from the snare. The vet also informed the family that, had the cat been caught around the neck alone, she would most certainly have died.
In Borgue, near Kirkcudbright, there was a recent case of a family Jack Russell that became trapped in a snare that was set close to a path that is used by walkers. Despite its being a free-running snare with a stop on it, it did not have an ID tag, which rendered it illegal—a common issue.
In Cumnock in 2015, a brown hare leveret was born while her mother was trapped in an illegal untagged snare. In that case, the mother had already died and, despite expert care, the baby hare also later died.
Late last year on the Leadhills estate in my South Scotland region, OneKind responded to a complaint from a member of the public about a fox being caught in a snare. Unfortunately, the responding unit was unable to find the fox and, on returning to the site the next day, found it with horrific injuries, piled on top of a stink pit. I know that Christine Grahame will speak about that later, but I will read a brief description from the member of staff who found the fox, who said:
“It looks like the snare killed the fox by causing that massive wound. There were gobbets of flesh on the grass and blood and fur. The fox’s eye was bulging out so much ... which must have been due to being strangled by the snare.”
Just last week at a farm in Dumfries and Galloway, a badly decomposed snared badger was discovered. Although the police responded quickly to the discovery, no charges are being pressed.
Protected species including badgers and otters as well as domestic animals are regularly caught in snares. In fact, the “Snarewatch” website suggests that the non-target capture rate is consistently between 60 and 70 per cent. Despite tightened legislation on snaring, non-target catch continues to be an issue, which stands in direct conflict with our conservation objectives in Scotland.
What is the alternative? We do not have to look far from the report to see that alternatives to snaring exist and are working effectively. SNH does not employ snaring on any of the land that it owns or manages directly, including its 36 reserves. In 2010, its head of policy stated:
“We think that other methods are effective enough for our purposes and we are concerned about the possibility of bycatch.”—[Official Report, Rural Affairs and Environment Committee, 29 September 2010; c 3131.]
Other methods such as cage traps, exclusion fences and habitat management, and even novel deterrents such as llamas being used to guard livestock from predators, have all been shown to be effective alternatives to cruel and indiscriminate snares.
I believe that the time has come for Parliament to be bold and courageous and to do what is right for animals in Scotland. We see the Conservatives in England singing the praises of fox hunting yet again. When it comes to animal welfare, we in the Scottish Parliament all have to ask ourselves whose side we are on. I believe passionately in a ban on snaring; I know that many members share that view. More important, so do the vast majority of the public, as is shown in poll after poll. They know that we simply cannot regulate cruelty.
I therefore ask the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform to acknowledge that the review that was carried out by Scottish Natural Heritage did not go far enough, and to ask SNH to revisit its report to ensure that it fully meets the objectives and to go further and commit to consulting the public on the outcome of that review, including gaining views on an outright ban on this outdated, cruel and indiscriminate practice.
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