While on holiday last week, the view from my hotel room was of a British tourist enjoying a spot of fishing. He caught a small fish which he impaled on a barbed hook to be used to catch a larger fish. In Scotland, this would be illegal as there, live vertebrates cannot be used as fishing bait. South of the border however we lack such decisiveness.
As Boris Johnson quipped when speaking about the EU last year, he is pro cake and pro eating cake, and such nonsense is all too often applied to issues of animal welfare and conservation. In England, rather than deliver an unambiguous yes or no to questions about the rights and wrongs of live-bait and barbed hooks it is left to individual coarse fishery managements and local by-laws to determine what the rules are. We have cake, we eat cake.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking a pop at angling. In terms of what goes on in sports that involve the exploitation of wildlife, angling is at the enlightened end of the spectrum. Angling does great conversation work in maintaining waterways and native fish stocks. And nor am I moaning about killing wildlife. Good luck to the fly-fishers who put trout on the dinner table or the wildfowlers who stock their larders with duck. Hunting for food seems a fairly natural thing for humans to do.
No, what gets my goat is the ‘cake and eat it’ compromises that go into fashioning ill-conceived legislation that fails in its attempts to satisfy both the freedom to practice traditional country sports and society’s concerns about animal welfare and conservation. Being pro wildlife and pro exploiting wildlife is a challenging balancing act, and the Hunting Act illustrates just how poorly that challenge can be met. It is illegal to hunt foxes with dogs, and yet Boxing Day, the biggest day in the hunt calendar, looks much the same today as it probably did a hundred years ago. We protect fox, we kill fox.
And then there’s game shooting. Not the hunting for food variety, but the industrial scale destruction kind where live birds such as pheasant and grouse are treated as objects as disposable as shotgun cartridges. It is illegal to kill protected bird species, and yet pheasant shoots chip away at the common buzzard’s protected status and the hen harrier hovers on the edge of extinction in England, condemned by its efficiency in clearing grouse moors of the birds required for recreational target practice. All game shoot operators claim to respect the law on protected species, but legally protected birds continue to disappear in suspicious circumstances. Another conservation law made to look an ass.
The public is rightly concerned about issues of animal welfare and conservation, so why not focus first on what’s best for the well-being of British wildlife before considering people’s recreational preferences? After all, people and businesses can adapt, wildlife often can’t. By setting the right priorities, how hard can it be to draft conservation policy that actually works, something with teeth sharper than a foxhound’s and with a bit more firepower than a rogue gamekeeper’s gun?
* Phil Aisthorpe has been a Lib Dem member since September 2015 having previously been a life-long Labour supporter. In a previous life, Phil worked as an IT planning manager and business strategy manager with a leading UK financial services organisation.
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5 Comments
“By setting the right priorities, how hard can it be to draft conservation policy that actually works, something with teeth sharper than a foxhound’s and with a bit more firepower than a rogue gamekeeper’s gun?”
Obviously, rather hard. You need either (a) enforcement on the ground, at the time, which is hard to resource, or (b) reliable witnesses prepared to drive prosecutions, and these seem to be in short supply. Otherwise we’re relying on voluntary compliance, and that seems not to be available, as the law lacks the consent of those most affected by it.
Is it sensible to pass laws that stand little or no chance of having any effect? It risks bringing the law in general into disrepute. Simply saying “it’s the law” is the weakest of responses, especially if there is no power of persuasion behind it. While the country folk are unpersuaded of the merits of the argument, and see no realistic chance of being prosecuted, they will carry on as before.
“Is it sensible to pass laws that stand little or no chance of having any effect? ”
Exhibit A – the speed limit
Chris, there is quite a lot that can be done without the need for continuous on-the-ground policing and witnesses. Let’s begin by requiring all hunting and shooting organisations to be licensed. Then add vicarious liability so that named officers of these organisations are held personally accountable for upholding the law – as with Health & Safety legislation. Violations of wildlife protection law could then result in criminal prosecutions of officers and suspension or removal of licences. Licence fees would ensure that resources would be made available for policing.
As to your comments about country folk being beyond the law, this is the UK, not the wild west.
He caught a small fish which he impaled on a barbed hook to be used to catch a larger fish. In Scotland, this would be illegal as there, live vertebrates cannot be used as fishing bait. South of the border however we lack such decisiveness.
Be careful about what you wish for…
The current laws and conventions do present some seemingly daft situations. Recently, I visited a zoo (in England) that had spent significant amounts of money on their penguins, lots of attention to detail, only problem, can’t feed them live fish, so they are unable to develop the key skill they will need if they are to be released back into the wild…
Gamekeepers who shoot or poison protected raptors are caught from time to time. Since this could mean loss of their livelihood, this ought to be a serious deterrent. However, the punishments given are often right at the slight end of the spectrum and provided the man does not go to prison, he’s invariably still employed by the landowner who probably told him to do it.
One radical solution is to punish the landowners. There are obvious problems of justice about this, but I think it would be reasonable where the crime is not the first of its kind and where it can be shown to have been committed by an employee and not an outsider. We punish factory-owners and builders whose employees get seriously hurt thanks to a lack of care by management, even though the owners or managers never intended them to get hurt. A landowner who fails to take due care to protect wildlife might justifiably be liable. Strong guidance to courts to hand down tougher penalties would help, but perhaps the most practical measure would be to make it a crime to employ someone on an estate who had killed protected wildlife until say three years had passed. This would not stop a gamekeeper getting employment of a different kind off a shooting estate, but it would seriously damage his gamekeeping career.
I should say I’ve also met gamekeepers who were dedicated to protecting vulnerable birds of prey!