Chamber and committees

Petitioner submission of 7 June 2021

PE1859/B - Retain falconers rights to practice upland falconry in Scotland

Unfortunately, I do not feel that the Scottish Government response reflects any kind of reality of the art of falconry, the status of mountain hares in the regions where falconers hunt them, nor of the ecology of the uplands, or of the relationships between avian predators and their prey.

It also seems to at first, reference falconry as a heritage pastime, but then refer its response specifically to shooting, so to address these points, I would ask you to consider the following.

The mountain hare needs to be conserved at a level of high density to attract falconers to the mountain locations where they live. This very fact encourages their active support and creates a barrier against shooting them. Falconry ensures that the hares have a significant commercial value which further encourages land owners to support them. These facts coerce to ensure that hares are not just tolerated where they would otherwise be shot but that they are encouraged and maintained at a significant population density. The fiscal sustainability for landowners is very clear, not to mention the income generated to some isolated rural economies through visiting falconers.

Falconry accounts for a vanishingly small number of hares, and thus, the numbers supported to attract falconers go on to breed and the expanding population is the genesis for the species dispersal to wider ranging areas.

Removal of the hares value wipes out its support and subsequent expansion. Removing tolerance for the species through devaluing it is a massive blow to the conservation of the species.

Falconers travel to where hares are in good numbers. If falconers decline through unjustifiable species protection, the support for the species will decline, and thus, hare numbers will decline.

The Scottish Government submission suggests that falconers may hunt other species like ‘rabbits, grouse, and stoats’.

Rabbits do not occur in the high places that upland falconry takes place, in the vast mountainous areas where eagles are flown. This aside, rabbits are very very unsporting quarry for eagles. The term a sledgehammer to crack a nut comes to mind. Additionally, it may have escaped ministers attention, but rabbits are in a state of massive decline through viral hemorrhagic disease (VHD) and other man made diseases and are a largely absent quarry base for falconers.

Grouse occur, but aside from the fact the access to them is too expensive for most falconers, they are quarry only suitable for falcons. They are not a suitable, realistic or attractive quarry for hawks and eagles. Furthermore, if we were to hunt grouse, or indeed tried to find a rabbit on a mountain, with our eagle a thousand feet above our heads, how do we tell it that it must ignore its natural quarry of thousands of years, but should hunt something different? If the eagle does follow its instinct and hunts the hare that lives beside the grouse on the mountain, the falconer becomes a criminal!

Stoats are not an acceptable quarry for birds of prey. They are tiny, virtually invisible by day, and bite savagely risking injury to the falconer’s birds!

The Scottish Government submission refers to the Grouse Moor Management Group recommendation regarding the shooting of mountain hares.

My petition has no reference to, nor any bias about shooting. More importantly, the recommendation is that ‘a licensing system for shooting should be introduced’. We are falconers. We are not shooting. The recommendation does NOT reference the immeasurably small impact of falconry, nor the positive conservation effects of falconry.

Suggesting that the infinitesimally small numbers of hares that it is possible to take with birds of prey/falconry makes it a useful or attractive method of killing hares as pest control is little more than obfuscation and does nothing at all to address the damage that the legislation does to the 4000-year-old heritage art of falconry.

I also reference the globally recognised and UK adopted 5 Freedoms for any animal in captivity and in the care of humans.

Falconers across the world aspire to reach and go beyond them all.

The relevant inclusion on the list of five freedoms for animals in captivity is;

And finally Freedom To Express The Natural Behaviour For The Species.

Under SSPCA/RSPCA guidance, and UK Animal Welfare standards, it is our legal obligation to allow our trained, captive bred birds of prey all of these freedoms. The Freedom to express the natural behaviour for the species, is being taken away from us by this legislation. There is simply no possible way to allow a Golden Eagle to express natural behaviour for the species unless it is allowed to fly high and wide in the mountains which are its ancestral home. If you fly an eagle in these places, they will hunt hares. This legislation makes us criminals if we do, and criminals under welfare standards if we don’t.

As exists in other sections of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, I request an amendment to the legislation to allow hares to be hunted in the pursuit of Falconry.