Chamber and committees

Petitioner submission of 11 November 2021

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

Submission PE1859/O from the Scottish Government reinforces the fact that it is legislating on a subject that I don’t believe it understands. It also confirms that they are not acknowledging the facts being put before them in submissions made to the committee, including those by NatureScot. It is a failure of office and government to legislate on a subject they do not understand.

Point 1, the first section talks about section 7 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the need to register schedule 4 species of birds of prey with Scottish Ministers. In fact the registration is with DEFRA, and has no relevance to this legislation and makes no reference to the hundreds upon hundreds of species of birds of prey used within falconry that are not on Schedule 4 and require no registration. This point from government amounts to little more than obfuscation.

The next section discusses responsibilities under the Animal Health & Welfare Act 2006, and includes reference to the 5 freedoms for captive animals and the specifics of the freedom to Exhibit Behaviour Natural To The Species.

The Government Submission then moves to suggest that falconers can continue to hunt hares where a landowner has secured a licence to kill them to protect for example, forestry.

In making this suggestion, the government demonstrate that it has:

1. failed to acknowledge the comments within the submission from Nature Scot that flying eagles in forestry is dangerous to the birds due to the risk of impacting trees or forestry fences at speed. Doing so would kill an eagle. They are NOT forest species. They are birds of open hill and mountain; and

2. it is suggesting that falconers wishing to allow their birds to fly naturally have to seek out a landowner who has secured a licence to kill hares to protect forestry, then persuade them to let them fly their eagles in unsuitable locations where the eagle is in danger, and its hunting ability is reduced by 90% from an original place where its use as a pest control method is already inadequate?

Leaving aside the fact the government is now suggesting we fly our eagles in an unnatural (not the behaviour natural to the species) way where their lives are threatened, this system also reduces the likely amount of venues that would host us to virtually nil. It is a naive and utterly unworkable suggestion.

To reiterate what has already been said, upland falconry works like this. We take an eagle or other bird of prey (not a falcon that would hunt grouse or other birds) that naturally hunts lagomorphs, to very remote, high altitude locations, usually starting at around 2- 3,500 feet above sea level in the Grampians and Cairngorms). We choose a ridge or mountainside that is facing the incoming strong, often gale force winds. We do NOT then carry the eagle around on the gloved hand. We simply release it to fly naturally, exactly in the way its wild counterparts do, and the way it has evolved to. Using the wind that is screaming up the hill and being forced skywards, the eagle opens its wings (7 feet in span, and far too wide to fly in forestry)  and soars at massive altitude on this rising air (orographic lift). The eagle will rise above us to a height dictated by the wind, but usually between 600 and 3000 feet above the ridges. The eagle can remain in the air flying at these altitudes for as long as 4 hours without ever alighting. This and ONLY THIS is behaviour natural to the species. 

The mountain hare is a natural quarry to the eagle. The hare has evolved to evade the predator so successfully, that the eagle will take a hare on perhaps 15% of its attempts. 

At this huge altitude, behaving in the most natural way, would government please tell us how we explain to the eagle that it is allowed to catch a rabbit (not present at altitudes suitable and safe to fly eagles in this way) if it sees one, a grouse if it wishes (although getting permission to hunt grouse would be highly unlikely, and a trained eagle is not a grouse hunter), but if it sees the most numerous creature living in these places, the white mountain hare, that it must ignore every instinct in its body, and it must ignore it. Hunting that hare is the absolute personification of ‘behaviour natural to the species’.

I repeat our simple request for an amendment to the legislation that simply says, and as is listed elsewhere within the act ‘Except within the pursuit of Falconry’.

Failure to provide this exemption relegates hundreds of birds of prey to a life of total inactivity because we cannot explain to them that they must selectively ignore their most natural of instincts.

Not flying them properly makes us criminals under the 5 freedoms, flying them risks making us criminals if the bird follows its instinct and catches a hare.

To remain legal, our only remaining option is to euthanise our healthy birds, often endangered species.

Is this acceptable to government and the committee?