The following account will give you an insight into the consequences of setting a legal fox wire snare trap in the countryside. Unfortunately this incident is not uncommon and is something that I have come across on several occasions and regularly occurs throughout the whole of the UK.
I was out to record and photograph legal snares on a Scottish shooting estate for general library purposes as well as photograph any wildlife in the area that I saw for our photographic library.
Unfortunately I was later to find both opportunities present themselves at the same time, but not in the way that I had wanted.
A snared badger
Weeks before I had found a live snared badger in this area so I knew that this estate was probably heavily snared. The snare had caught the animal around the waist and there was devastation to the undergrowth and earth around this animal.
There was a complete perfect circle of muddy ground and chewed branches surrounding the anchor to the snare which was fixed to a tree. Sadly the badger had to be put to sleep as the injuries to its body were too great. Also it was estimated that the badger had been alive in this legal snare for almost a week and would have been too weak to save.
Finding signs of snares
Within a few meters inside a forest that was set on a hillside I could see that branches from the trees around me had been recently cut down.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I could see what had become of the cut branches. They had been placed onto the ground and were roughly woven together to make a wall of sticks which were about two foot high.
This wall stretched along the side of the hill through the forest. At Intervals along the line of branches, deliberate gaps had been left and snares were set within them.
From one end of this snare line to the other it took me ten minutes to walk at a steady pace and I counted approximately fifty wire snares. Any animal travelling up or down the hill through the forest would be bound to come across this vast line of wire traps.
Indiscriminate traps
If they were a deer then they may jump over it, but any smaller animal would almost certainly walk along the wall until they found a gap and then walk through it into the wire trap and depending on the size of the animal and how it entered the wire loop then it may be caught by the neck or waist. (This is the point that those who set snares will tell you that the trapped animal will have a little struggle and then settle down to sleep).
The snare is supposed to be set in such a way that, if set properly, should only catch a fox, but so much evidence shows that many other animals, such as cats, dogs, badgers and pine martins, can also be caught.
As well as deer also being trapped by the snares, even humans can get trapped by the foot if they’re not looking where they’re going!
Discovery of snared rabbit
As I walked along this line of misery I first came across a dead rabbit that had been caught in one of the wire traps. The rabbit had been caught by its middle and by studying the disturbance of the soil underneath the animal it had put up quite a struggle to free itself.
As it had been struggling, the wire, which was fixed to a tree, had caught itself over a high branch which meant the rabbit had died hanging by the waist with its front paws just touching the ground. I was unsure of the cause of death, but it was very possible that it had died from starvation.
Snared fox
I carried along the line and towards the end of it was when I first noticed that around a tree, the earth had been heavily dug and branches from the snare line were scattered around, chewed and broken. The light in the forest had become very dim, but as I carefully looked around the area I could see what had caused this devastation.
A fox lay stretched out dead on her side with a wire noose tight around her neck. The wire, which had been pulled to its full length, was firmly anchored to the tree and on examination of the scene I would say that the fox had put up an enormous struggle in an attempt to escape the snare. Worse than that though I could conclude by the state of the area around the fox and her injuries that she had been in the snare for days before she had finally died.
Bark from the branches was missing and it is not uncommon for snared foxes, which have been trapped for extremely long periods, to eat this bark in a vain attempt to stay alive.
As I mentioned earlier, the law states that snares are supposed to be checked within a 24-hour period, which clearly was not the case in this incident.
I always wonder however just how this can be achieved when some shooting estates can have several hundred snares spread throughout an area that can be thousands of acres in size.
It would take a day or more to check every snare and this would have to be done on top of the gamekeeper’s other jobs.
The new law not only now states that the snare has to be checked for trapped animals within a 24-hour period, but also has to be checked to make sure that it is free running.
Investigations into these incidents continue.