Members of the Scottish Parliament unanimously agreed yesterday that the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill should pass its first stage.
Environment Minister Roseanna Cunningham MSP described it as “a nuts and bolts Bill” and one that would require stakeholders with widely diverging views to compromise. As part of that compromise, the Minister set the tone by pledging to introduce a new vicarious liability offence for employers complicit in the persecution of birds of prey by their staff.
This offence has been lobbied for effectively by raptor groups and others, and it was good to see it welcomed by all parties (except the Conservatives). So in terms of improved accountability, it was a good day.
Unsurprisingly, however, the Minister declared that snares were a vital part of land management. In her view, the regulations in the Bill and the requirement for operator training would be enough to improve standards of animal welfare.
While that sounds depressing to anyone who sees snaring as a simple matter of wrong and wrong, there was at least an interesting concession in the Minister’s speech. She accepted the Rural Affairs and Environment Committee’s suggestion for a review of the snaring measures five years after the Bill.
Now - without deviating for an instant from our position that snares must be banned as soon as possible - we can see that in a difficult and contentious debate the Committee were sufficiently concerned by the problems with snares to leave the door open for a ban. They wanted to give the regulations a try and if it could be shown that they were not working, and could not be made to work, a ban might be the only answer.
If the Parliament favours the review process, however, five years is far too long. Most of the snaring provisions are the same as existing regulations, introduced this March, which we have shown not to be working. We don’t need five more years of snare operators taking chances on animal suffering.
So our briefing suggested that no more than two years should elapse before a review, and we were pleased to hear Scottish Labour MSPs refer to that recommendation during the debate.It was positive also that comments on snaring were made by almost every speaker - there may not have been consensus on the solution, but it was clear that MSPs recognised the seriousness of the problem.
I’ll say it again, though – we are not changing our view that these cruel and indiscriminate traps must no longer disfigure Scotland’s landscape. Over the next couple of weeks we will continue to publish academic research exposing the facts about snaring - the impact of snares on animal welfare, the alternatives to snaring, its role in biodiversity, and much more.
It is regrettable that government has not invested in research of this kind, but instead continues to depend on briefings from the shooting industry. Even yesterday, the Minister preferred to quote the shooting industry’s own estimate of its economic value - £240 million - rather than information from government advisory body Scottish Natural Heritage which recently put the value of all field sports, including fishing, at £136 million.
The next stage involves detailed scrutiny of the Bill and consideration of amendments lodged by MSPs. This will be the first opportunity to amend the snaring provisions, to remove the partial and complex approach to the snaring problem, and replace this with an outright ban. As I said yesterday, and no doubt will say many times between now and next spring, we need your help. The Take Action page is only a click away. If you haven’t already been there, you know what you have to do.