.........
Cofnodir
y trafodion yn yr iaith y llefarwyd hwy ynddi yn y pwyllgor. Yn
ogystal, cynhwysir trawsgrifiad o’r cyfieithu ar y pryd. Lle
y mae cyfranwyr wedi darparu cywiriadau i’w tystiolaeth,
nodir y rheini yn y trawsgrifiad.
The
proceedings are reported in the language in which they were spoken
in the committee. In addition, a transcription of the simultaneous
interpretation is included. Where contributors have supplied
corrections to their evidence, these are noted in the
transcript.
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Dechreuodd y cyfarfod am 09:41.
The meeting began at 09:41.
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Cyflwyniad, Ymddiheuriadau, Dirprwyon a Datgan
Buddiannau
Introductions, Apologies, Substitutions and Declarations of
Interest
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[1]
Mark Reckless: Bore da, good morning. May I welcome you to
this meeting of the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs
Committee? Can I ask people just to check that they have their
phones off or on silent, and alert you that translation is
available as needed on channel 1?
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09:42
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Lles Anifeiliaid: y Defnydd o Faglau yng
Nghymru
Animal Welfare: Use of Snares in Wales
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[2]
Mark Reckless: League Against Cruel Sports, you, I think,
have led this petition, which came into the Assembly a couple of
months ago—1,405 signatures, if I remember correctly.
That’s being considered by the Petitions Committee. Our
committee has decided to have this short session this morning to
hear from the league and opponents of the use of snares, and
we’ll have a second panel, following you, with some groups
more supportive, at least, of the code of practice
arrangements.
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[3]
Could I ask, first of all: do you see any use for snares? Are there
circumstances in which regulation could reduce the animal cruelty
to such a level there may be some justification for their use?
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[4]
Mr Casamitjana: We don’t believe so. We believe that
the snares themselves are devices that, no matter how much
regulation, no matter how much modification you use, you
won’t be able to eliminate the two major problems that they
have inherent in them. One is that they’re indiscriminate, so
you can reduce that indiscriminate element they contain by
modifying the sizes and adding devices, but no research has shown
any type of snare that is 100 per cent accurate in catching the
target species. There are always other animals going to be caught,
and these animals might be endangered animals, they might be pets.
That’s the nature of the device.
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[5]
The other part is the animal welfare component of it—animal
welfare meaning not just injury, not just death, but also fear and
distress. It is impossible to develop a code in which the animal
caught is not going to be in fear or in distress. As you know, in
many of the advances in animal welfare, which led to modifications
in the way in which we kill animals when we need to kill them, in
abattoirs, in other places, the whole emphasis is on trying to
minimise fear and distress, reducing the time, reducing the pain.
None of these elements can be done with the snares. By nature, the
animal is caught, often without anybody around and it might take
some time before somebody can despatch it or deal with it.
That’s inherent to snares, so therefore we don’t
believe that you could create a code that eliminates the animal
welfare problems or eliminate the catching of a non-target
species.
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9:45
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[6]
Mark Reckless: Some proponents of the use of snares, for
instance, shooting organisations, say that, without snares, they
can’t protect nesting game birds, and the model they have in
terms of rearing and shooting those birds would not function
without the use of snares. Is that for you a further reason for
pushing for a ban on snares, since you don’t support the
rearing or shooting of birds in that circumstance?
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[7]
Mr Casamitjana: Not really, although it’s a factor
that we consider, and, in our campaigns against shooting, we use
the snaring fact as well. I’m talking about the need for
snares for wildlife management: we would argue that there are other
methods, there are alternatives. If we accepted that there is a
need for wildlife management—which we don’t in many
cases, but, if we did, we would still argue that snares are the
wrong method. We still would argue that there are more humane
methods, more effective methods, and a huge amount of methods of
which some are very humane; others might be less humane but, with
regulation, could be better. So, from all the array of options that
you have for wildlife management, snares are at the bottom of the
worst. I think it would be perfectly legitimate for a Government of
any kind to ban the worst types, regulate the ones that are in the
middle, and promote the ones that are very good. And we believe
that snaring is at the bottom of the worst types, so that’s
why we believe that it needs to be banned. But, definitely, we also
have an issue about whether there is a need for wildlife
management, and whether the killing of a fox, for instance, will
solve the problem that the gamekeeper is trying to solve. Because
we often have said, based on much research we have seen, that foxes
self-regulate—you kill some foxes and foxes come and replace
them, and there’s a kind of a continuous killing that
doesn’t really solve the economic problem that the shooting
industry faces, if they just try to blame the fox for the reduction
of income.
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[8]
Mark Reckless: Thank you. And a quick point from Huw
Irranca-Davies, and then Vikki, Vikki Howells, has some
questions.
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[9]
Huw Irranca-Davies: That’s quite helpful in that
you’ve set out that you don’t believe that the argument
for snares, whatever the type of snares, for control of the fox as
a predator is a genuine argument; there is a different way, an
ecosystem way, of balancing the fox population and so on. If you
did accept, as others do, that there is a need to control some
element of the fox population, then what would be your alternative
ways of controlling that?
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[10]
Mr Casamitjana: I would suggest that it is up to whoever has
to make that decision to choose the ways they want. We are not in
the business of giving alternatives to the shooting industry, but I
can give you—
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[11]
Huw Irranca-Davies: No, but you’re saying that we
should take away the snares—
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[12]
Mr Casamitjana: Yes, I can give you an array—
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[13]
Huw Irranca-Davies: So, for those who believe—an
upland hill farmer who believes—. He doesn’t want to
randomly kill all the fox population, but he’s going to need
to individually take out where’s there’s been an issue.
If that is their argument, can you—? You say that
you’re not in the business of offering alternatives.
I’m saying to you, if it’s a valid argument, somebody
needs to offer an alternative.
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[14]
Mr Casamitjana: I understand. My point is that there are
many alternatives that they can choose, but I’ll give you a
few. For instance, you could shoot the foxes rather than snare
them; this is one potential alternative. You can use fences; there
are fences that have been very well designed that have been proven
to prevent foxes going through. You could do shepherding, if you
are talking about lambs, for instance, because, obviously,
it’s not just shooting, it’s all sorts of cases. You
could do wildlife management: reduce the food, modify predators and
prey, the relationship of the environment. You can use trapping,
and you can use trapping and relocation—there are a variety
of options that have been used.
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[15]
Huw Irranca-Davies: That’s really helpful. Perhaps my
final observation would be, then, that shooting, or lamping as it
was previously known, by a qualified marksman would be preferable
to snaring.
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[16]
Mr Casamitjana: I would say that, if it is properly
regulated, with a proper marksman, yes.
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[17]
Mr Wild: Could I come in here? I started up the campaign
against snaring about 20 years ago on the back of a badger that we
had snared, and, when we postmortemed it, we found that it had
suffered from a snare injury a year before that. And we pressed
Lord March of the Goodwood Estate in Sussex to ban snares and he
agreed to write to all his shooting and farming tenants then, and
they hadn’t set snares since that time. About 10 years after
that, Viscount Cowdray of the Cowdray estate—another huge
estate in Sussex—agreed to write to all his shooting and
farming tenants to ban snaring, and none of them have set snares
since, over a huge area. On another issue, I did speak to a
gamekeeper on the Isle of Wight, and he said, ‘Oh, I
don’t use wires’. He said, ‘With modern night
sights, you don’t need to; you can’t miss’. I
think that’s the example. But what really is the thing
that’s pushing people on game-rearing estates is the fact
they’re moving more to wild bird shoots, and there you have
to have complete predator control. In Sussex, on the Norfolk
estate, there were wild partridge shoots. There are no badgers, or
very few, on 30,000 acres, and he won’t let us come in and
get a professional ecologist to find out why. On other shoots
they’re trying to purport to have 10 per cent or 20 per cent
wild birds. There they need very high levels of predation. Badgers
will predate on wild nesting birds, and so they’re quite
hostile to badgers. That’s why they like snares, because they
get two for one. And I’m afraid that’s what’s
happening.
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[18]
Mark Reckless: Vikki.
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[19]
Vikki Howells: Thank you. Given the fact that 81 per cent of
fox snares catch a range of other species, I’m keen to
explore with you the impact of snares on a wide range of wildlife
in our countryside, and also on domestic animals as well. I wonder
whether the panel would be able to provide us with more information
about the range of species that are caught indiscriminately in
snares and the kinds of injuries and suffering that they cause.
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[20]
Mr Wild: Well, I can do that. Again, on the Norfolk estate,
where I’ve been looking, we had a hare caught in a snare
there. I know it was caught at midnight, and it let out a terrific
scream. It was still there the next morning. We rescued it. We had
a deer in a snare when we went up there. Of course, through our
website, we receive a lot of snare-related issues that the public
raise with us. In the last week, I had a veterinary surgeon from a
local practice in Sussex contacting us to say that her cat had come
home with a snare. We had another tip-off from an estate in
Snilesworth in Yorkshire, and it was very vague. It just said,
‘You may want to know a shooter’s dog was killed in a
snare last week, and insurers are dealing with this’.
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[21]
When I was up here I thought, ‘Well, on the way back,
I’ll start to look in a few areas’. There was a place
in Bromyard. We’d received a tip-off from a lady. Her three
cats had gone missing. One had come back with a snare-related
injury. She couldn’t give us the details, because, had she
raised it with the gamekeeper, she feared that then she might lose
her tenancy. Apparently, the gamekeeper wouldn’t allow her
any access to the land. So, this is an example. She couldn’t
contact the police for fear of losing her tenancy, and the
gamekeeper wouldn’t give her access. That shows to me not
only is the code of practice not ever enforceable but the law
isn’t really enforceable in these situations unless you ban
snares completely. So, virtually every range of animal, including,
actually, pheasants—we’ve had pheasants in snares.
Every range of animal, including dogs. On the one estate—on
the Norfolk estate—we had two dogs in the last year. Then we
went up there ourselves and we had another dog in a snare. I looked
around: I found a badger had been caught in a snare with a terrific
doughnut-shaped hole and the snare cut. That’s just on the
one estate. So, this is happening and replicated around the
country.
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[22]
Mr Casamitjana: I could add some more information. There was
research done in 2012 by Short, Weldon, Richardson and Reynolds in
which they tried to see how many non-targeted species were caught
in an array of different types of snares. There was a huge amount
of cases: over 90,000 snare days, and more than 1,200 animals
caught. They made the statistics, and they showed that most of the
animals were not targeted animals, for a long range. The target was
the foxes, and they only got 28 per cent. There were 54 per cent
brown hares, 9 per cent badgers, 4 per cent deer, and 5 per cent
others. Of course, these others may include pets, may include pine
martens, may include otters, may include badgers. The most
important thing to recognise is that, when an endangered or
protected animal is caught in a snare, the number doesn’t
matter. If one protected animal is caught, that should be
sufficient to say, ‘There is a problem with this
method’, in the same way that, if somebody attacks a badger
and is prosecuted, the defence cannot be, ‘It was only
one’. One is sufficient to convict that person. If that
badger was protected, and the same badger was caught in a snare, or
the same otter is caught in a net, it should be protected, and if a
Government like Wales is protecting these animals, it is a
contradiction to protect the animals and allow a practice that
might affect them.
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[23]
Mark Reckless: Vikki, did you have any follow up on
that?
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[24]
Vikki Howells: No, thank you.
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[25]
Mark Reckless: Huw.
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[26]
Huw Irranca-Davies: To follow up on Vikki’s question,
what you’re saying in effect is that the code of conduct
that’s out there, that is supported by many organisations,
including those involving game conservancy, is unenforceable, or
actually irrelevant.
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[27]
Mr Wild: I’d say it’s completely unenforceable.
Not just unenforceable—the law is unenforceable.
Nobody’s checking. There’s no-one going on land in this
country and checking. I went to an estate at Llangybi in Wales and
on that estate there were 200 to 300 snares. I checked back through
all the badger records. All the main setts were now derelict. I
raised it with the police, because some of the snares weren’t
anchored. When I came out again to have a second look, the
gamekeeper called the police, and the policeman’s first
reaction to me, because he’d met me a few days before, was
‘I told you about trespassing, Mr Wild’. So, people are
hostile to trespass. Very few people will do it. You can’t do
it.
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[28]
I’ll give you an example of why the law doesn’t work,
either, until you ban snares completely: in Stockbridge in
Hampshire we found five badgers in various states of decomposition,
all snared. Five badgers. All in decomposition, all snared. One had
been buried and been shot in the head. We found that, just by the
little tail sticking up. The police took two for postmortem and
they both died in the snare. Now, when we met up with the police
there at the scene, they got the gamekeeper there, and the
landowner, and they came up. They didn’t deny setting the
snares. Three weeks later they’re called in for formal
interview and how they get away with it is they just say they know
nothing about those snares—‘They’re nothing to do
with us’—and they weren’t charged.
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[29]
Huw Irranca-Davies: So, could I then put to you what is the
clear supplementary? There’s another school of thought on
this, which is not to do with banning snares, but, as you know, is
to put a direct liability on the landowner, whether that’s an
individual small landowner or a large estate. It falls with them,
and then you should impose penalties that are commensurate with the
suffering and the inhumanity of the species being caught in this
trap and not complying with the code of conduct. What do you feel
about that as an alternative to a ban on snares—that you
actually put those punishments there directly on the landowner?
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[30]
Mr Wild: Well, this was a landowner standing right next to
the snares, and three weeks later he denies any knowledge.
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[31]
Huw Irranca-Davies: But the liability isn’t firmly on
the landowner at the moment, is it?
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[32]
Mr Casamitjana: The problem with this is the fact of how you
detect the infraction. The classic example is that I was in a
meeting that was revising the Welsh code of practice a few weeks
ago. The police forces were there, giving their testimony, and I
was quite struck by the fact that they were—well, it actually
made some sense to me, but they were reporting that any report they
had of a breach with a snare was always in a public place, and
normally a domestic animal, because, of course, a person might walk
home, see these, and report it to the police. But most of the
snares are on private land, so the only person who’s going to
see them is the landowner or the person that set them up. If there
has been an infraction, obviously they will not report it to the
police, and, if they won’t report it to the police, it will
be an infraction that is no breach. So, how do you ensure that the
code works when it is self-policed by those that set the
snares?
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[33]
Mark Reckless: What about each snare having to carry a
police contact number—I think there was a national wildlife
crime unit, but particularly a relevant person with specialist
expertise in this—would that assist, potentially?
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[34]
Mr Casamitjana: That is similar to the Scottish system. In
the Scottish system, the code they have allows registration; you
have a number. That was discussed as well in the previous meeting I
mentioned. But we face exactly the same problem: if there is a
snare without a number, who is going to find this snare if
there’s nobody able to go into private land and look around
and check whether it is the right number? So, there’s not
going to be a case where you have a non-numbered snare set up by a
gamekeeper in a public place where a person might find it. They are
all set in remote places with no access to whoever might find it.
Therefore, the probability of it being found by somebody that is
not involved or liable in the setting of the snare is remote.
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[35]
Mark Reckless: But, if it is found in that circumstance, at
least that’s a piece of evidence that the snaring is outside
the code of practice. Would that not be helpful at the margin?
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10:00
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[36]
Mr Casamitjana: Absolutely. Any step or any
regulation that makes crime more difficult obviously reduces crime,
but the point is not about reducing crime, it’s reducing it
to an acceptable level. And if that level as a minimum is not
acceptable, then that measure will be insufficient.
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[37]
Mark Reckless: Vikki, did you have anything more?
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[38]
Vikki Howells: No.
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[39]
Mark Reckless: Jayne, did you want to come in?
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[40]
Jayne Bryant: Thank you, Chair. I think you’ve given
quite a comprehensive response to the questions so far in your
presentation, but I was particularly concerned to hear that, I
think, it’s every 20 seconds an animal is caught in a snare
in the UK, which is a pretty shocking statistic for anybody. I
wonder if you could outline the differences between these
free-running snares and the self-locking snares, which the Law
Commission had gone through a few—I think 2015,
actually—and perhaps give an outline of the differences
there.
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[41]
Mr Casamitjana: The essential difference is that a
free-running snare doesn’t strangle completely—it
doesn’t close completely. So, there’s a stopper that
prevents the snare from being completely closed, so therefore would
allow the animal, if it is the right size, to be caught and not
strangled. With the other snares, they would just carry on
strangling. The more the animal moves and tries to escape, the more
it gets strangled and probably will die by strangulation. The
problem, when you have a free-running snare, is that each animal is
different—different sizes, different strengths. And you might
experiment by moving the stopper, which is what prevents the
complete strangulation, in one direction or another, or by creating
other new devices that break out, depending on the strength of the
animal, but—and this is the important thing—you design
snares for targets, and the non-target animals are huge in variety
and of sizes, from deer to cats. You can’t have a system that
releases all the non-targets perfectly well, very quickly, without
creating any fear or distress and only catches the target animals,
no matter where you’re going to put the stopper, no matter
how you’re going to design the breaking point. So, this is
it. So you might experiment with it, you might reduce, perhaps, one
particular species caught, but you might increase the other one,
because suddenly the size of the stopper or the ring through which
the animal is caught has varied 1cm or 2cm. And we can see that in
any variation, in any research on animal snaring, where all these
variables have been moved, you have different results, but you
never eliminate catching non-targets. You never find a perfect way
not to catch non-targets.
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[42]
Jayne Bryant: So, in your opinion, just to clarify,
you’d say that even the free-running snares would not prevent
any suffering for animals.
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[43]
Mr Casamitjana: Absolutely.
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[44]
Mr Wild: Can I just add a couple of points there? Ninety per
cent of commercial snares are bought in agricultural suppliers or
on the internet, and it was never defined what makes a self-locking
snare, but we’ve taken it that they ratchet up and get ever
tighter. After about a year of use, these snares rust on the edge
and they start to ratchet up anyway. Or, if they catch an animal,
the slider bends slightly and they catch anyway. Gamekeepers quite
often, in my experience, tighten the eye up a bit to make them
tighter so they’ll catch—. If a rabbit goes into a fox
snare, it twists it in a way that you couldn’t replicate with
a pair of pliers. You couldn’t do it. And they die quickly.
Cats die quickly, because they thrash around a lot. So the only
time we’ve ever had cats reported to us, the owners go out
and look for them—I had one in Northamptonshire recently,
about three weeks ago; she’d gone out looking for him and
found him dead with rigor mortis set in—or the cats get out
of the snare and pull the snare back with them, so they break it
off in some way. You never actually find anyone going out and
finding the cat alive in the snare, and these are free-running
snares, because they twist around and lock it up, and they twist
around and they go past the stop until it strangles it. And so
free-running snares really are a bit of a joke. They’re not
humane.
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[45]
Jayne Bryant: Thank you very much.
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[46]
Mark Reckless: David, I think you had a question.
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[47]
David Melding: Can you outline practice, perhaps, in the
rest of the European Union, particularly if snaring is completely
banned?
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[48]
Mr Casamitjana: It’s been banned in most
places; I think there are only five countries in the European Union
that still allow snaring. Of course, you could claim that the
practices that require snaring might be slightly different from
country to country, but it would be ludicrous to imagine that the
UK, or the five countries we’re talking about—which is
Ireland, the UK, France, Latvia—that these are the only
countries where there’s shooting, or that these are the only
countries where there is farming, or where foxes are predators. In
all the countries that don’t use snares, they use all these
other alternatives that I mentioned before, and it seems to be
sufficient. Even in the UK and in Wales, not everyone uses snares.
The research that DEFRA did in 2012 showed that many stakeholders
and landowners didn’t use snares; it’s not universally
used. Often, they’re used on shooting estates, and there are
a lot of shooting estates in this country, but many farmers
don’t use them, and many national parks and conservation
organisations that like to protect their biodiversity don’t
use them either. So, there is not a strong innate reason for
wildlife management to use snares, considering that there are
alternatives. And, as I said before, one of the alternatives that
is perhaps the best of all is to let nature find its own balance,
because in cases like foxes, if you do that—and research has
proven this—you will actually have less problematic foxes and
fewer foxes will attack your wildlife. It will even let the fox to
become mature, have his territory and prevent other foxes coming
in. That actually might lead to better results if you’re
running a shooting business.
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[49]
David Melding:
I want to concentrate more on
practice elsewhere, rather than the wider arguments against
snaring, which I think, from your standpoint, you have expressed
very articulately. So, with the exception of the five countries you
mentioned, snaring is completely banned in all other European
countries—i.e. it’s not allowed under certain
circumstances for certain periods in certain areas if there’s
a huge fox problem, for instance.
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[50]
Mr Casmaitjana:
It will vary from country to
country, but it’s either banned or it’s not used at
all. So, there was no need for a ban because it wasn’t
practised at all. It’s a combination of all this.
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[51]
David Melding:
And has there been any recent
movement, in those countries that did have a culture of using
snaring, to ban it?
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[52]
Mr Casmaitjana:
I do believe that in Ireland there
is also movement to ban snares.
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[53]
David Melding:
No, I mean in the countries that now
do not have snaring. You know, has there, in the last 20 years, for
instance, been a shift away from that and law saying it’s now
to be made illegal? Because that’s basically what
you’re trying to ask us.
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[54]
Mr Casmaitjana:
No, I’m not aware; perhaps
there might be. I’m not aware of cases where there was no
practice and they then wanted to ban it—
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[55]
David Melding:
No, no, I’m not talking about
where there was no practice. I’m talking about those European
countries that previously used or permitted snaring. How has it
changed? Has it been just a cultural change, or has there been use
of legal instruments in the last 20 years in any of these
countries?
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[56]
Mr Casmaitjana:
There have been legal instruments
used that ban snaring, because the Bern convention, which all
European countries have signed, is the first legal step that
started to regulate how you’re going to kill animals if you
need to kill animals in the wild. And from that Bern convention,
many practices in different countries started to be banned. What I
don’t have, I’m afraid, are details about who ran these
campaigns and whether there was any research done afterwards that
showed that there was a decrease or increase in foxes or not. That,
I’m afraid, I don’t have the details of.
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[57]
David Melding:
It would be useful from our point of
view to have—if there is a good practice example in a
European country that allowed snaring then banned it, and then the
experience they had with it. Was there cultural resistance, was
there not? You know, these things—the practicalities of
law-making—are important, and their consequences.
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[58]
And the second point—I
don’t know if Mr Wild is best to answer this, yet you did
touch upon it, really—is that there’s obviously a great
problem with snares capturing the non-target species. And you
indicated, I think, that there’s a very high mortality rate.
Is that also true of the target species as well? Because those that
support snaring often say that it’s a restraint, not a device
to kill. I notice all the stats we’ve had talk about animals
caught. They don’t refer to the mortality rate—and I
think we ought to know—. Presumably, there should be some
statistics somewhere that establish that.
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[59]
Mr Wild: I can touch on that. In ‘Determining the
Extent of Use and Humaneness of Snares in England and
Wales’—it dealt in that report quite extensively with
what has happening. We had hares caught in snares that had been
predated and badgers that were caused life-threatening injuries.
Badgers are probably one of the examples that cause significant
injury. As I said, a cat and a rabbit are two animals that thrash
around. This is why we had such a high mortality in rabbits in the
‘Extent of Use and Humaneness of Snares’ report. Cats
and rabbits thrash around. Badgers pull on a snare probably for an
hour; it depends on when they’re caught during the night. If
they’re caught at the very end of their time period when
they’d be out foraging of an evening. Then they’ll pull
on it for a bit and then you’ll find them asleep in the
snare. If they’re caught early in the evening, then
it’s probably going to cause them far more harm. A badger
being a powerful animal will cause a significant injury to itself
getting out. And although the Countryside Alliance and the British
Associating for Shooting and Conservation, who will come later,
will talk about how they have a snare that has a weaker part in the
eye, I’ve tried to physically pull that snare apart myself,
because I’ve seen that snare, and I can’t replicate it
without—I couldn’t even do it, even if I hurt myself.
So, the animals are going to cause themselves real injury even on
these snares that have a weaker part in the eye anyway.
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[60]
David Melding: Just to summarise, animals that are
restrained don’t just calmly wait to be released, even if the
snare were designed for that species specifically.
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[61]
Mr Wild: They don’t calmly wait, no. They’re
trying to escape, to get out. And if you approach a fox
that’s in a snare, as I do—I sometimes have released
them—they thrash around in the most crazy, quite distressing
fashion. So, they’re caused real pain and fear and distress,
yes.
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[62]
Mr Casamitjana: I would add that one of the elements of the
Welsh code of practice is to increase the frequency of visiting the
snare once you’ve set it, which, by law, was 24 hours, and it
could now be visited twice in that period. In that is the implicit
assumption that the longer you wait, the more of a problem it is.
The problem is: why only twice, not three times, and not four
times? What is the amount of time that you might think, from that
point onwards, suffering begins? I would argue that after a few
seconds of being caught in your neck with something, suffering
begins then. How can you then have a system where you wait until
minutes or an hour has passed, in conditions that might be cold,
where it might be raining? You’re bound to put the snares
only when the weather is okay, but how can you really predict the
weather? All these elements are, on paper, easy to say, but in
practice, they’re very difficult to plan.
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|
[63]
Mark Reckless: The cost of GPS and communications technology
has come down massively. If you were to have a snare that, as soon
as there was movement in it, it sent an alert to the gamekeeper who
could then come and check it in real time, is that something that
would be acceptable?
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[64]
Mr Casamitjana: Definitely, that would help. The problem is
how you check that that gamekeeper did visit it in the appropriate
time. You could develop systems that try to reduce all the damage.
If you do that, at one point, you will remove the snare and you put
a trap. That would be the most effective way to have minimal
suffering and it’s still a trapping situation. It’s the
snare type—the fact that it is a strangling, holding
thing—that generates the problem and generates the stress.
It’s different. An animal in a trap will behave differently
than an animal with something around his neck or around his body.
That is common sense.
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|
[65]
Mr Wild: A lot of gamekeepers do use cage traps to catch
foxes. For reared game birds, the real danger for them is this
short period when they’re in the release pen and then
released out of it. So, it’s only a very small part of the
year for released birds. Probably, I would say about 70 per cent of
the problem is on these wild bird shoots, where they try to wipe
out everything. But, certainly, a lot of them are using the cage
traps already.
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[66]
Ms Rh. Evans: Just to go specifically to the point about GPS
as well, thinking of the size of some estates across which snares
are set, even if you were sent an instant notification that an
animal’s just been caught, it could still take you hours to
get there. So, the element of time and suffering still comes into
play. It’s unlikely that you’d get the alert and
instantly be able to go and deal with the animal that was
caught.
|
|
[67]
Mark Reckless: Simon.
|
|
[68]
Simon Thomas:
Byddaf yn siarad yn Gymraeg, felly
byddwch chi eisiau’r offer cyfieithu. Rwyf jest eisiau gofyn
ychydig o gwestiynau yn benodol ynglŷn â’r
sefyllfa yng Nghymru, achos mae’r dystiolaeth hyd yma wedi
sôn am wledydd eraill, ac yn fwy penodol, hanesion o ystadau
yn bennaf yn Lloegr. Felly, rwyf eisiau deall beth yw eich asesiad
chi o’r defnydd o faglau yng Nghymru ar hyn o bryd. A ydych
chi’n gallu dweud wrthym ni, yn gyntaf oll, a ydy Llywodraeth
Cymru yn caniatáu maglau ar dir sy’n eiddo i
Lywodraeth Cymru?
|
Simon
Thomas: I will be speaking Welsh, so you’ll need to use
your headsets. Thank you. I just want to ask a few questions
specifically around the situation in Wales, because the evidence so
far has mentioned other countries, and more specifically, estates
in England mainly. So, I just want to understand your assessment of
the use of snares in Wales at present. Could you tell us, firstly,
does the Welsh Government allow snares on Welsh Government-owned
land?
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|
10:15
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[69]
Mr Casamitjana: I’m not sure. That’s a very good
question. I think you will have to ask them. I haven’t really
thought about it. I would expect that, if they legalise
snares—they allow it to be legalised—and they have a
code of conduct, they would not have an objection. But it would be
quite interesting to see whether they do. Do you know, perhaps?
|
|
[70]
Simon
Thomas: Wel, mae’n amlwg fod Llywodraeth Cymru, er enghraifft,
yn gosod tir i bobl godi adar ar gyfer saethu ac ati. Felly, byddwn
i’n tybio bod maglau yn cael eu defnyddio ar hyn o bryd gan
Lywodraeth Cymru. Felly, rwy’n awgrymu ein bod ni hefyd yn
chwilio am dystiolaeth gan Lywodraeth Cymru am y ffordd y maen
nhw’n defnyddio maglau ac a ydy hynny’n arwain at
broblem lles anifeiliaid ar dir Llywodraeth Cymru.
|
Simon Thomas: Well, evidently the Welsh
Government, for example, does lets land for people to have shooting
birds. So, I would imagine that snares are used by the Welsh
Government. So, I suggest that we do look for evidence from the
Welsh Government about how they use snares and whether that leads
to animal welfare problems on Welsh Government land.
|
|
[71]
Ond i droi at y
dulliau sydd i reoli pla ar ystadau neu ar ffermydd, eiliad yn
ôl, pan ofynnwyd i chi yn gyntaf am y dulliau amgen i faglau,
wnaethoch chi ddim sôn am drapio y pryd hynny, ond rŷch
chi newydd sôn am drapio nawr. A fedrwch chi ddweud wrth y
pwyllgor beth yw eich barn chi ar drapio a saethu os yw’r
anifail sydd wedi’i ddal yn anifail sydd yn bla? A oes gyda
chi farn ar hynny?
|
But turning to the methods of pest control on estates
or farms, a few seconds ago, when you were asked first about the
alternative methods to snares, you didn’t talk about
trapping, but you have just talked about trapping now. Could you
tell the committee what your view is on trapping and shooting, if
the animal caught is a pest? Do you have a view on that?
|
|
[72]
Mr Casamitjana: Yes, I do. As I said before, it is not up to
us to say which is the best method, but we have an opinion,
obviously—a comparative opinion—comparing one method
with another. So, we do believe that cage trapping is better than
snaring and we do believe that shooting is better than snaring, but
in both cases with the caveat, ‘If it’s done properly
with the proper regulations and with properly trained
people.’ Assuming that you will always do that—that you
will always apply the method with the best regulations possible and
the best trained people—then you only have to look at the
devices themselves and how well they are designed to minimise the
collateral damage and maximise efficiency. In this case, I do
believe that shooting and cage trapping do that better than
snaring.
|
|
[73]
Simon
Thomas: Yn y cyd-destun hynny, a oes gyda chi unrhyw farn o gwbl
ynglŷn â rheoli cadnoid yn benodol—ambell i
anifail arall, ond cadnoid yn benodol—yn y cyd-destun
Cymreig, lle mae gyda ni lawer o ffermydd mynydd lle byddai’n
gwbl anymarferol i godi ffensys? A dweud y gwir, nid ydym eisiau
codi ffensys achos rŷm ni eisiau cadw’r waliau cerrig am
resymau eraill, gan gynnwys rhesymau bioamrywiaeth da. A ydych
chi’n derbyn bod angen rheoli cadnoid yn benodol yn y
cyd-destun Cymreig?
|
Simon
Thomas: In that context, do
you have any opinion at all on controlling foxes
specifically—some other animals, but foxes
specifically—in the Welsh context, where we have many upland
farms where it would be entirely impractical to have fences?
Indeed, we don’t want to have fences because we want to keep
the stone walls for other reasons, including good biodiversity
reasons. Do you accept that we need to control foxes specifically
in the Welsh context?
|
|
[74]
Mr Casamitjana: I do have an opinion on this. In the case
of, for instance, farmers who might have sheep that are lambing and
claim the foxes are killing their lambs, research has been done
before on how much of that is real and how much the farmer is
guessing that it is the fox. It has shown—and this was DEFRA
research a few years back—that the percentage is very small
where you could conceivably claim that the fox was the culprit.
Often, what you will find is the lamb might have died and then the
fox might have eaten the dead lamb, as opposed to being the
predator itself. So, we already question blaming the fox in many of
the cases. But if it does happen and the farmer is concerned and
wants to do something about it, other than shooting the fox or
snaring the fox, I think there are two better alternatives than
that.
|
|
[75]
One is shepherding, this is one of the alternatives, where you have
much more control of the lambs and where they are, how they are
left alone and how many times they are left alone. That increases
the probability of not just preventing the predators attacking
them, but also detecting illnesses beforehand, which might have
been cause of the animal dying and then the fox eating the dead
body and then you would blame the fox. So, that is one part.
|
|
[76]
The other part is, as I mentioned before, leaving the fox
population stable. Research has shown that if you have a problem of
blaming the fox and you kill the fox, the fox will be replaced
again soon. The new fox coming in is likely to be a younger,
less-experienced fox. Depending what time of year you do it, these
foxes are looking for a new territory. Foxes are territorial, they
mark their territory and don’t allow others in. So, young
foxes are trying to find a territory. They only go in when there is
a vacancy—you kill the fox—or there is a competition
between them. These young foxes are still inexperienced; they
don’t know how to find food often and those are the ones that
are more likely to be problematic with humans. While the
experienced foxes, they know that people don’t like them and
then they know how to find food. So, if you keep a population of
only experienced foxes, they will limit the numbers and will
prevent more problematic foxes to come in. So, that would be
another management that could be done—just leave the foxes
alone. I would also say to be sure that you have a stable
population of experienced foxes on your land to prevent knew ones
from coming in.
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|
[77]
Simon Thomas: Pryd bynnag rych
chi’n edrych ar hynny, yn y bôn, mae yna rywbeth
cyffredin rhyngoch chi a’r ffermwyr, sef eich bod yn derbyn
bod angen rheoli—rŷch chi’n
wahanol yn y ffordd rŷch chi’n rheoli—ac y
mae’r ddwy ochr, mae’n ymddangos i fi, yn derbyn bod
angen rheoli, oherwydd nad oes gennym dir gwyllt yng
Nghymru—mae holl dir Cymru yn cael ei reoli, mewn rhyw ffordd
neu’i gilydd, gan dirfeddianwyr am bwrpas amaeth, coedwigaeth
neu am bwrpas bioamrywiaeth, neu beth bynnag yw e. Mae holl dirwedd
Cymru’n cael ei rheoli mewn rhyw ffordd neu’i gilydd.
Felly, mae dyn, a beth y mae dyn yn ei wneud yn y cynefin hwnnw, yn
hollbwysig ac yn cael effaith. A ydych yn derbyn fod hynny’n
wir am y cyd-destun Cymraeg—bod ymyrraeth dyn yn y cynefin yn
gyrru’r problemau neu sy’n ateb i’r
problemau?
|
Simon Thomas:
Whenever you look at
that, basically, you have something in common with the farmers,
namely that you accept that there is a need to control—you
are different in the way you control it—and both sides, it
seems to me, accept that there is a need for control, because we
don’t have any wild land in Wales—all of the Welsh land
is managed, in some way, by landowners, either for the purpose of
farming, forestry or biodiversity or whatever it is. All of the
landscape in Wales is controlled in some way or other. So, man and
what he does in that habitat is very important and has an impact.
Would you accept that that is true in the Welsh context—that
the intervention of man in that habitat is what drives the problems
or is the solution to the problems?
|
|
[78]
Mr Wild: You can obviously control fox population with
shooting. What we’re saying is that snares are completely
indiscriminate. If you are going to do the controlling—you
don’t have a completely indiscriminate method, where you can
potentially kill cats, dogs and badgers. That’s really it. As
Jordi said, I can only speak about the two examples when I’ve
stopped snares on particular farms over 10 and 20 years, and they
both had sheep and they survived, and I don’t personally
believe there is any significant problem. When I go around the
country looking at snares, sometimes in the north-east I find
dozens of bodies of sheep, and I would say that bad husbandry is
far more telling regarding sheep than any foxes will ever
be.
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|
[79]
Mr Casamitjana:
I would add that the DEFRA research
of 2012, which looked at how often snares were used, found that
they were mostly used in shooting estates, and in the case of
farmers, it was about, I think, 5 per cent, or something like that,
who used snares. That means that all the others don’t and
it’s not that they are at a disadvantage. So, to answer your
question again, what we’re saying is that we don’t
necessarily accept that there is a need to control; we say that if
you don’t control it, you actually may find that the solution
will be as effective as if you do, or will be better. But if, for
whatever reason, you feel you have to, or your landowner or the
Government ask you to, from all the range of methods to choose
from, don’t choose a snare—that’s not humane and
it’s too indiscriminate. But one of the alternatives is: do
nothing. We do believe that doing nothing is a good option, too,
for foxes; in other cases, perhaps not, but for foxes,
yes.
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|
[80]
Simon Thomas: Ocê. Rŷch
chi wedi dweud hynny’n glir. Dyna beth roeddwn yn chwilio
amdano mewn ffordd. Y cwestiwn olaf yw hyn: sawl gwaith yn eich
tystiolaeth y bore yma rŷch chi wedi dweud, i bob pwrpas, nid
yw’r cod ymarfer presennol yn gweithio achos nid oes plismona
ohono fe, i bob pwrpas. Mae rhai ohonom, sydd wedi trafod hyn gyda
heddluoedd yng Nghymru, yn gwybod nad yw trosedd yn erbyn bywyd
gwyllt yn uchel iawn, mae’n rhaid dweud, ar y rhestr o ran y
ffordd y mae’r heddlu yn rhoi ei adnoddau a’i
gefnogaeth. Ond rŷch chi’n gofyn i’r Cynulliad
ystyried newid y gyfraith i wneud rhywbeth sydd, heddiw, yn
gyfreithlon, o fewn cyd-destun, yn anghyfreithlon. Oni fydd yr un
broblem yn codi os ŷm ni’n gwahardd maglau? Oni fydd yr
un broblem yn codi, sef y broblem rŷch chi wedi ei hamlinellu
yn y fan hyn: maglau yn cael eu gosod yn y ffordd anghywir?
Rŷch chi’n honni bod ciperiaid yn newid y maglau
i’w gwneud nhw’n llai llesol i’r anifail. Os
ŷn nhw’n fodlon gwneud hyn o dan god ymarfer statudol,
oni fydden nhw hefyd yn fodlon torri’r gyfraith pe
byddai’n cael ei wahardd? Nid yw hwnnw’n ddadl, o
reidrwydd, yn erbyn newid y gyfraith, ond mae’n ddadl o blaid
addysgu a chael dulliau amgen o ddelio gyda’r broblem yma.
Sut y byddech yn ymateb i hynny?
|
Simon Thomas:
Okay. You’ve
stated that clearly and that’s what I was looking for, in a
way. The final question is this: several times in your evidence
this morning you’ve said that, to all intents and purposes,
the current code of practice isn’t working because
there’s no policing of it. Some of us, who have discussed
with the police forces in Wales, know that crimes against wildlife
is not high on the list of their priorities in terms of how they
allocate resources and support. But you’re asking the
Assembly to consider changing the law to make illegal what is today
legal, within a context. Won’t the same problem arise if we
ban snares? Won’t the same problem arise, namely the problems
that you’ve outlined: snares being set in the wrong way? You
claim that gamekeepers change the snares to make them less
beneficial to the animals, so if they’re willing to do that
under a statutory code of practice, won’t they break the law
if they’re banned? This is not necessarily an argument
against changing the law, but an argument for teaching and having
alternative methods for dealing with this problem. How do you
respond to that?
|
|
[81]
Mr Wild:
I think if it’s
black and white, there won’t be any snares—you
won’t find any snares. You may find the odd one, but
it’ll be less than 1 per cent of what we’ve got now.
So, it would be effectively job done, if there were a physical ban
on them. Police like things that are black and white. They
don’t like codes. If I call the police out
to non-anchored snares,
there’s nothing in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 that
says you can’t anchor a snare; it’s all a bit of a grey
area. So, quite often, what happens is either nothing happens, or
the gamekeeper, a few weeks later, hammers in a stake and anchors
it, and that’s worse than the snare on a pole, actually,
because it acts like a kill pole and they just strangle themselves
around it. If it’s black and white, it’ll be
finished—I’m certain of that.
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|
[82]
Mr Casamitjana: I would add, we’re talking about the
issue of enforcement here. What’s easier to enforce, a ban or
a regulation? I would say a ban is easier to enforce. For instance,
the straight thing you can do in a ban is you could ban their
manufacture and the keeping of snares. So, you already could
prevent snares being available on the internet in other places to
be bought or distributed in the first place, so the source of the
snare can be tackled in the ban, which already will reduce the
production. That means the only ones who will break the law will be
the ones who build their own snares. Also, the success of
prosecution will be higher, because having a snare will be a
black-and-white case so will probably be successful, and when you
have higher rates of prosecution, you have a higher deterrent
effect, and if you have a higher deterrent effect, you have that
enforcement. So, the current situation is not only that there is no
ban—there is a code of practice, which is in itself voluntary
in practical terms. They might be statutory in the terms that the
Animal Welfare Act says you can have a code of practice, but for
the person who uses it, it’s voluntary. If they don’t
want to use it and they don’t break the law, you cannot
prosecute a person for not using the Welsh code of practice. You
can use it in court, if they have broken the law, to increase the
sentences or perhaps as a defence, but as the Animal Welfare Act
says specifically, the code of practice cannot be used for
prosecution.
|
|
[83]
Simon Thomas: It’s exactly like The Highway
Code.
|
|
[84]
Mr Casamitjana: Yes. Therefore, that means the current
situation makes it very difficult to enforce, because there
aren’t even breaches that lead to prosecutions, while a ban
would be far more simple.
|
|
[85]
Mark Reckless: So, there may be a rebuttable presumption of
a breach if the code hasn’t been applied, but no more. Are
you aware of any prosecutions, let alone successful ones, which
have referenced a breach of the Welsh code?
|
|
[86]
Mr Casamitjana: No, I’m not, and I think that would
have been mentioned in the revise of code meeting a couple of weeks
ago—nobody did mention.
|
|
[87]
Mark Reckless: That was my assumption. Huw, did you have
anything further to comment on?
|
|
[88]
Huw Irranca-Davies: Yes. I just wanted to explore two other
options. You’ve been ruling out various options, and I share
some of the concerns Simon’s just articulated about the ban,
and whether this would drive things underground. I hear your
unequivocal reassurance that a ban would solve this, and you could
do it through prohibiting the sale of these and the distribution of
these. I wish I could entirely share your confidence that this
didn’t simply drive it to the extremities of larger states
and into the peripheral areas of the countryside, but I’ll
accept that for the moment.
|
|
[89]
David Melding: There is presumably evidence somewhere,
though, isn’t there, in
countries—[Inaudible.]
|
|
[90]
Huw Irranca-Davies: Indeed. David makes a helpful point.
Perhaps if you could evidence that that has happened, that this has
not led to driving it underground—. But could I ask you about
two alternative approaches—and I declare my associate
membership of the British Veterinary Association here—my
understanding is that their position is that they want to see the
existing code enforced, but they would also like to see a move
towards elements of the Scottish model, where snares are traced to
the individual, where there is training, where there is a much
tighter set of regulations. What about that?
|
|
[91]
Mr Casamitjana: The representative of our Scottish
organisations were present at the code of conduct review a couple
of weeks ago—it’s a pity they are not here to give you
straight testimony—but they basically explained that their
system still doesn’t work. So, it’s better, it allows
that enforcement, it allows to find somebody and chase them, but,
still, the snares there catch indiscriminate animals, catch
non-target animals and there is animal suffering involved. Again,
these are steps that would—
|
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[92]
Huw Irranca-Davies: But it is better.
|
|
[93]
Mr Casamitjana: It’s definitely better. You would
always find ways to make it better, you can meet and discuss, and
you can find ways to make it better, but you’re never going
to reach that point that is good enough.
|
|
[94]
Huw Irranca-Davies: Okay. We keep coming back to this point
that you’ve repeatedly said, which I fully understand, that
it’s that indiscriminate nature of these snares. But let me
put another alternative to you to a ban—because I’m
just testing this out with you—which is that you license
people to do it. You actually license individuals. So, you cannot
have widespread use of them, and if you break the conditions of
that licence, then you and that estate that you work on, or that
game bird shoot that you work for, then they’re not allowed
to use them whatsoever. You license individuals and you put
significant penalties alongside it, not only to the individual, but
under vicarious liability to the estate owner. I’m just
exploring this.
|
|
10:30
|
|
[95]
Mr Wild: Well, there are two factors: who’s going to
pay for the policing of that? And the other thing is, when you do
set the snares, as we’ve made quite clear, the non-target
species—particularly cats, hares, badgers—will all
suffer, so you can’t prohibit that. We know on wild bird
shoots that gamekeepers, when they catch badgers, in my experience,
can often shoot or stab them. So, I think that’s flawed
completely and I think that unless you ban them outright—
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|
[96]
Mr Casamitjana: I would give you a metaphor almost to
explain this, which is that the essence of this is that the snares
are placed on private land in a place that most people won’t
have access to. This is only really a problem for enforcement.
It’s the same as saying, ‘Let’s ban smoking and
let’s ban it in people’s houses.’ How are you
going to enforce a ban on smoking in people’s houses? You can
do it in a public place, in a bar, but not in people’s
houses. Snares are not placed in a public place; they are placed in
the equivalent of people’s houses. That is why they are
untouchable.
|
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[97]
Mr Wild: If I could just mention one thing—
|
|
[98]
Simon Thomas: But we banned smoking in cars. That’s
all I was going to say.
|
|
[99]
Mr Wild: I’ll tell you what, if you outlaw snares
completely, why gamekeepers won’t do it is because, with
modern technology, you could actually catch them setting the
snares. I think it would be quite rare, but if you did find a snare
on a shooting estate, I could potentially set up a camera trap,
which you can buy for next to nothing, and I’d probably catch
him doing it. So, they would know you could do that and they just
wouldn’t do it.
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|
[100] Mark
Reckless: Jenny, did you have anything you wanted to come in
on? There’s the point about Scotland that was
answered—are you okay? Good. Can I just finally ask, just in
terms of the cultural practice of snaring in this
country—I’d be interested in Rhiannon’s view on
this—why has that remained so prevalent? There’s a
strong focus on animal welfare in the UK and RSPCA sorts of
organisations. Why does this remain a practice that continues to
the wide extent that it does?
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[101] Ms Rh.
Evans: I’m not sure we’re able to answer that, in
that we’re the sort of organisation fighting against it. I
think kind of relevant to that is—. That’s a really
good question and it’s a question a lot of people ask. So,
we’ve had polling conducted by independent organisations that
shows that around 80 per cent of people would like to see snaring
banned, and that when they find out that it’s still legal in
Wales, they’re shocked by that. So, I would say I don’t
really know why it’s still so prevalent and why there’s
such an organised lobby that obviously are keen to see the practice
still allowed and also to work with the Government to create things
like the code of practice, which obviously allows snaring to
continue albeit in an attempt at a regulated way.
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[102] Mr
Casamitjana: I can only speculate about what I think might be
the reason, and it’s the link with the shooting industry.
It’s the fact that a snare is cheap, easy to produce, easy to
devise and if you try to run a business to minimise the cost,
maximise the profit, and you can do it in a way where there
aren’t many people around because of the nature of the
business you run, you might just try to find a cheaper and easier
way. Perhaps, because of the prevalence of the shooting industry in
this country, that was the reason it became the fashion, and then
people start to do it beyond the shooting industry, but
that’s just obviously speculation.
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[103] Mark
Reckless: Thank you. Can I thank all three of our witnesses for
joining us for this panel? We’ll have, I think, a six-minute
break before reconvening at 10:40 for our next panel. Thank
you.
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Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 10:34 a
10:41.
The
meeting adjourned between 10:34 and 10:41.
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Lles
Anifeiliaid: Y Defnydd o Faglau yng Nghymru
Animal
Welfare: Use of Snares in Wales
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[104] Mark
Reckless: Good morning. Welcome to our second panel on a quick
look at the snares issue. As you are aware, there was a petition
signed, I believe by 1,405 people, that came into the Petitions
Committee, organised by the League Against Cruel Sports. There was
also, I think on 16 November, a meeting with the Cabinet Secretary.
I’m not sure whether any of you attended that on the
operation of the code of practice. I’m also not sure whether
that feeds into the sort of formal review, or whether the Cabinet
Secretary has committed to that, and if so, what the timescale will
be. You’ve heard the evidence that was put to us at the
earlier session. I wonder if I could start by asking you about this
issue of free-running snares. Does that really deal with the animal
welfare concerns? Who would like to start? Mr Evans.
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[105] Mr Evans:
I’ll start if that’s ok. I think it’s important
to understand that self-locking snares have been illegal since
1981. So, for 35 years, the self-locking snares that were referred
to earlier have been illegal.
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[106] Mark
Reckless: But great emphasis is put on free-running snares, if
that deals with the animal welfare concerns. Does it?
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[107] Mr Evans:
Since then, snares have had to be free running, which basically
means that they go both ways. The code of practice itself builds on
that and uses the latest research that the Game and Wildlife
Conservation Trust and others have done, and develops a
code-compliant snare. So, it has additional design features built
in to enhance any welfare issues for the fox that’s caught,
and also to address any welfare issues with non-target species.
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[108] Mark
Reckless: We heard that the snare was set in a certain way with
a target species in mind. But then you would have species of
greater and lesser size that wouldn’t be appropriate for how
it was set, and you would have, as you describe it, animal welfare
considerations in light of that.
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[109] Mr Swan:
Can I pick up on that one? You’re absolutely right: how you
set the snare is related to the target animal, but there are lots
of features in both how you set it and in the design of the snare
that make a lot of difference to the non-target catch rate. So, for
example, the code-compliant snare has a break-out device in it,
which means that if a bigger, stronger animal gets in, it should be
able to break free, and we know that that liberates badgers. We
know that it actually gets broken quite often. If a deer puts its
foot in, then the snare pops open, and the deer goes away without
any sign of injury. There’s also a stop on the snare to stop
the noose from closing too tightly, and there was some confusion
about the importance of the stop as opposed to free running.
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10:45
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[110] You could have a
self-locking snare that would carry on ratcheting tighter and
tighter and still have a stop on it that would be the point at
which it wouldn’t close any further, just like you could
devise a stop on a cable tie, for example. Not that I’m
suggesting that’s a good thing. The free-running snare means
that the snare noose relaxes as an animal relaxes, so if it were
tight around its neck, that would make sure that it got another
chance to breathe and so on and so forth. The stop is designed to
not allow the noose to close tightly enough for there to be any
risk of strangulation of an animal that is of a size that could be
held by the breakout, and the stop then allows smaller animals to
break free.
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[111] The Game and
Wildlife Conservation Trust did a lot of work getting to the
distance, which is 26 cm, on the basis that the large majority of
the hares that we might catch would then actually just get out
straight away. They don’t even really get caught at that size
of stop in most cases. So, that, again, means that we’ve
targeted the snare to hold foxes as well as other designs from the
past, but to minimise the numbers of non-target animals that would
be retained.
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[112] Mark
Reckless: I think Vikki Howells has some questions about what
happens when we have these non-target animals and on whether
she’s been reassured by what you say or not.
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[113] Vikki
Howells: I’m interested in what you said there about
minimising the numbers of non-target species being caught in
snares. Certainly, if that’s the intention, then the
statistics do not suggest that that is actually bearing fruit.
According to the 2012 report of the UK Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs, 81 per cent of fox snares were found to be
catching non-target species, including badgers, hares, pheasants,
deer, cats and dogs. If you have a wide range of animals like this
being caught, and injuries including limb amputation, strangulation
and often death, to me the simple question is: why don’t we
move to a system where we use traps instead of snares?
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[114] Mr Swan:
Can I answer that in two halves? I think those statistics refer to
non-code-compliant snares, not code-compliant ones. Code-compliant
ones don’t retain the same high numbers of non-target
animals. In the specific example of the Home Office licensed trial
of the code-compliant snare that was carried out for DEFRA, which,
again, the wildlife conservation trust did—we were the
science behind it, as it were—we were allowed to catch 20
foxes to try and meet the requirements of the agreement on
international humane trapping standards. The AIHTS says that at
least 80 per cent of a sample of 20 animals has to be basically
unharmed, and there’s a whole list of indicators of poor
welfare from small injuries to death. When we caught 14 foxes, all
of which were completely uninjured other than that they were
humanely dispatched and then given a postmortem to see if there was
any sign of snare-related injury, at that point, we had already
passed the requirements of the agreement on international humane
trapping standards by so far that Home Office protocol says,
‘Stop. You do not need to experiment with any more animals to
prove your point. You’ve got there; you’ve done
it.’
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[115] In that process,
the capture rate was 60 per cent foxes, 40 per cent other species.
The other species were five badgers, two hares, one dog and one
pheasant. None of those animals showed any signs of injury; they
were all liberated unharmed with no sign of any problems. A further
21 animals were recorded to have got into a snare and escaped. By
tufts of hair and the smell from different animals and all sorts of
other things, the operator was able to tell us what all of those
were and, again, there was no indication that any of them suffered
any injury in any way; they were able to get away unharmed. So, I
hope that indicates that we can meet the agreement on international
humane trapping standards and that any non-target animals that are
retained, are, in large measure, unharmed and can be liberated
without any further problem.
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[116] Your second
question: why don’t we swap to cage traps instead? There are
two issues here. One is that while it’s relatively easy to
catch a suburban fox cub that’s used to negotiating fences
and things. Catching real wild foxes in cage traps out in the
countryside is very, very, very, very hard. They very rarely are
daft enough to go into a cage. So, we substitute a system that does
catch foxes for one that doesn’t, but will still catch
non-target animals, because they might come to the bait or
whatever. There’s this widespread misunderstanding that
animals caught in cages are all right. Domestic rabbits carried
around in a cage are fine. Wild animals try to get out of cages,
and in the process they injure themselves. We haven’t tried
to test it, but it’s my firm belief that if you did try to
test against the agreement on international humane trapping
standards, you would find that cage-trapping foxes fails. They bite
their way out and break teeth. They break their claws, and so on
and so forth, and non-target animals, similarly—especially
predatory ones—will cause themselves considerable injury.
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[117] Mark
Reckless: Rachel, you wanted to come in.
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[118] Ms R.
Evans: Yes, thank you, Chair. You’ve mentioned the
non-target species getting caught, and we’re forever hearing
the stories and accusations of domestic animals being caught in
snares, and let’s make this clear: that’s something
that none of us want to see. But if I can go back to the meeting
that you mentioned, Chair, at the beginning—the 16 November
meeting, where all the stakeholders were together working with the
Minister’s team, we had several members from various police
forces—
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[119] Mark
Reckless: Sorry—you say ‘with the Minister’s
team’. Was the Minister not present?
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[120] Ms R.
Evans: Not at that meeting, no. It’s basically the same
group of people, to include the league, who put the code together.
We met for a one-year review of the code to see how things were
developing.
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[121] Mark
Reckless: So, that was the review—that meeting that
happened?
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[122] Ms R.
Evans: Yes, that is what I would consider as being a review. We
would welcome that review on an annual basis.
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|
[123] With regard to
domestic pets getting caught up in snares, and the number of
incidents that the police are called out to, it was interesting
what we picked up from that. If I take one particular police force,
they have 10 wildlife crime officers working within that force, and
the stats for what they called ‘snare-trapping
incidents’—which could include some other types of
traps as well—in 2014, there were seven incidents; in 2015,
there were 10, and, in 2016, there were seven. So, if we are going
to take any notice at all of the insane figures that have been put
forward by the league of 370,000 mammals a year being snared in
Wales—that’s more, incidentally, than the mammal
population—and that goes by their statistics, which are
something in the region of 125,000 hares and badgers; that’s
pre-breeding season.
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[124] When we look at
the police figures, they give us a clear indication that, if we are
trapping that many animals or mammals in Wales on an annual basis,
we would be seeing a lot more. We would be passing them every time
we took a walk in the countryside. Again, going back to the police
figures and the statement that they put forward that day, the type
of what they would call ‘a snare’, which they have
found with regard to those incidents, are home-made. They are found
mostly in the urban areas, and that, I’m afraid, is a
practice that needs to be dealt with separately from the review
that you’re currently looking at, which seems to be quite
heavily focused on gamekeepers. What we are missing here, and
I’m sure it will come out later on in the evidence session,
is that we don’t have any farming representatives here with
us today.
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[125] But going back
to the issue of the non-target species being caught in the snares,
we’re talking now about code-compliant snares and not the
man-made ones that the police unit have been finding throughout
south Wales.
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[126] Mark
Reckless: Thank you. It was a fair point in terms of farmers.
We had a short session with two panels today, and that’s the
scope of what we’ve decided to do at this stage. I think
Jayne had a quick question, and then Jenny.
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[127] Vikki
Howells: Could I just come back, please?
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[128] Mark
Reckless: Yes. Sorry, Vikki—it’s your question. Do
come back first.
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[129] Vikki
Howells: A few issues there: firstly, in relation to the
statistics, DEFRA’s own statistics say that 1.7 million
animals are caught each year across England and Wales in snares.
I’m interested in your evidence, Mr Swan, where you talked
about the fact that, in the trial that you oversaw, animals were
released unharmed at the end of that. I’m sure that that
would be within the given 24-hour period in which people are
supposed to go back to snares. We’ve already heard a lot of
evidence about the fact that so many of these snares are set in
open areas, where it’s very difficult to return to them
within an acceptable time limit. But I think the key point that you
seem to be raising is the fact that—. You seem to suggest
that traps are actually less humane than snares. That is your
belief.
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[130] Mr Swan:
Yes. I would never use a cage trap to try and catch a wild fox in
the countryside, and I know quite a lot of gamekeepers that have
tried it, seen the injuries to the one fox that they finally manage
to catch, and have said, ‘I would never do that again’.
Quite unacceptable. Whereas an animal in a snare, caught around the
neck, is basically unharmed.
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[131] On DEFRA’s
statistics, it seems to us that what the League Against Cruel
Sports have done is take the results of one research scientist,
operating in the south of England, to carry out that piece of work
that we talked about a moment ago, where we caught 14 foxes and
satisfied the AIHTS, and then multiplied that up by a number of
snares that they think people, on average, are using, and then
multiplied that by a guess as to how many people are using snares
in Wales. Now, that ain’t exactly sound statistical analysis.
Taking one person’s results and multiplying up, and
multiplying up again, is a very, very spurious thing. And, indeed,
the report authors said you should not extrapolate in that sort of
way from these figures.
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[132] Ms R.
Evans: Chair, we do have some thorough workings-out on how the
league came to those figures, which I don’t really want to
use up the 10 minutes to go through.
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[133] Vikki
Howells: I wasn’t talking about the league’s
figures, though, I was talking about the figures from DEFRA.
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[134] Ms R.
Evans: But the way in which the league has interpreted DEFRA
research is why we are looking at this petition in the first
place.
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[135] Mark
Reckless: I think you did put in further evidence to the
Petitions Committee on—
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[136] Ms R.
Evans: I’d be quite happy to share that evidence with the
committee through a letter, but I think it would take up too much
of our time this morning.
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[137] Mark
Reckless: Yes, we would be happy to receive that letter.
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[138] Ms R.
Evans: But we’re not saying that by adding A and B you
get C. Yes, you do get C by adding A and B in that respect, but
that’s not the way to use the data—those scientific
data.
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[139] Mark
Reckless: I think we’ve heard that point, but I think
Vikki’s source was a DEFRA study. Do you accept that, or are
you saying that Vikki Howells is simply using the League Against
Cruel Sports data in extrapolation? Or do you accept that she has a
source from DEFRA, used in an appropriate way, at least, in her
questions to you just now?
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[140] Ms R.
Evans: No, apologies for that. I didn’t realise that it
was—. Could you name the report? And, again, it’s
something that I can come back to the committee on too, if
that’s all right.
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[141] Vikki
Howells: Yes, it’s a report from 2012 by DEFRA, which is
entitled, ‘Determining the Extent of Use and Humaneness of
Snares in England and Wales’. It covered a period from 2008
to 2012, and that’s where the statistic comes from about 1.7
million animals being caught each year across England and
Wales.
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[142] Ms R.
Evans: Are you familiar with that section of the report, Mike,
because I’m not familiar with that section of the report?
|
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[143] Simon
Thomas: I think, again, we need to record that there is a
multiplication—[Inaudible.]—come to that figure.
And that is in our research briefing.
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[144] Mr Swan:
I’m happy with the ‘extent of use’ statistics,
but I’m not at all sure that the DEFRA report contains that
1.7 million figure. So, that’s the one I would like
to—
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[145] David
Melding: It was the House of Commons library that came up with
that figure.
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[146] Mark
Reckless: Yes. So, my understanding is that there’s a
DEFRA report, which may have an extrapolation from a UK to a Wales
basis, but I think your suggestion is that the league has a further
layer of extrapolation from a single figure.
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[147] Mr Swan:
Yes.
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[148] Mark
Reckless: I think, when we consider the evidence, we’ll
have further advice from our research team on that, but thank you
for helping to explore those issues. Vikki, did you have anything
further, or are you happy for Jayne to come in now?
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[149] Jayne
Bryant: Thank you, Chair. I’ve got a couple of questions.
Do you recognise, then, that snares cause suffering to animals,
whether domestic or non-domestic?
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[150] Mr Swan:
Any animal caught is not happy about being caught.
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[151] Jayne
Bryant: I’m not asking about happy; I was asking about
suffering.
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[152] Mr Swan:
An animal is distressed; it’s fearful. Yes, of course it
is.
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[153] Jayne
Bryant: Thank you. So, what proportion of the animals trapped
in snares are killed? Do you have any figures on that?
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[154] Ms R.
Evans: The intended species for capture?
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[155] Jayne
Bryant: Any species, really. I’d be interested on cats
and hares and rabbits and—.
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[156] Ms R.
Evans: Well, non-target species would be released, and then
target species would be dispatched, and this is our target species
that we speak of today, which is the fox.
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[157] Jayne
Bryant: How many of them are killed in snares?
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[158] Mr Swan:
Killed by the snare, you mean?
|
|
11:00
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[159]
Jayne Bryant:
Yes. Well—
|
|
[160]
Mr Swan: Sorry, I misunderstood the question. If the
snare follows the code of practice and if the snare is set
following the code of practice—. And those are two important
points. The snare alone or how you set it alone is not the answer:
it’s the combination of the two things. If the snare is set
in accordance with the code of practice and it’s a
code-compliant snare, then death in snares is very, very
rare.
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[161]
Jayne Bryant:
Do you have any specific figures on
that? Have you done any studies on that?
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[162]
Mr Swan: The figures achieved so far are a small number
of hares being killed by other things when they’re caught in
the snare. And that’s basically all. I can’t give you a
number on that—sorry, but I haven’t got it off the top
of my head.
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[163]
Jayne Bryant:
So, we don’t have
figures.
|
|
[164]
Mr Swan: I’m sure that I can work you up a figure
from the—
|
|
[165]
Jayne Bryant:
Okay, perhaps the committee
could—
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|
[166]
Mark Reckless:
Yes, we will have another letter on
that, if we may.
|
|
[167]
Mr Swan: Yes, please.
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|
[168]
Jayne Bryant:
That would be great. And I’d
just like to read out the testimony to the Scottish Parliament
given by Professor Ranald Munro, who is a leading veterinary
pathologist. He said that, from the veterinary perspective, snares
are primitive, indiscriminate traps that are recognised as causing
widespread suffering to a range of animals, and he goes on to
detail the suffering, and he says that these unfortunate animals
suffer immensely. What conclusion would you draw from that or what
would you take from that?
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[169]
Mr Swan: The whole point of developing the snare that
meets the code of practice with the break-out, with the stop, the
research on the stop size to minimise the number of hares that you
hold, with the swivels to make sure that the wire doesn’t
twist and kink and get animals ravelled up, and so on—the
whole point of all of that is to get through that problem with what
I would call ‘primitive snares’ and use well-developed,
well-refined snares in a way in which you don’t hit against
those physical injury problems.
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[170]
Jayne Bryant:
Do you think that you would feel
comfortable that that doesn’t cause the animal any suffering,
then, or kill animals in that situation with these snares as
you’ve described?
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|
[171]
Mr Swan: I feel absolutely comfortable. I use snares
myself; I feel absolutely comfortable that, using code-compliant
snares and following what that code of practice says, I am not
causing physical injury of any significant nature to either the
animals that I’m trying to catch or the occasional non-target
animals that I catch, with the exception that occasionally I catch
a hare that doesn’t get out, and a hare is sometimes killed
by a predatory animal, usually, I suspect, a fox.
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[172]
Ms R. Evans:
I think it’s important as well
to keep in my mind that this is the Welsh code, which has come
forward in leaps and bounds with regard to animal welfare, and
it’s the code-compliant snare that we’re trying to
promote and push forward as well, which will lessen suffering in
the exact—you know, what you’ve just described to us.
So, I think it’s important to keep sight of the fact that
this is the Welsh code of practice, and the fact that we’re
promoting code-compliant snares.
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|
[173]
Jayne Bryant:
And you say that code-compliant
snares are—you feel happy that they don’t cause any
injury to animals.
|
|
[174]
Ms R. Evans:
Yes—
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|
[175]
Mr Swan: Used properly, they meet the agreement on
international humaneness—
|
|
[176]
Ms R. Evans:
Used correctly. They have to be set
correctly and the code has to be followed, and then, personally,
no, I don’t have an issue with it. I’m far more
comfortable with it than what we had before this.
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|
[177]
Mark Reckless:
Jenny.
|
|
[178]
Jenny
Rathbone: Sticking with these code-compliant
snares, then, how do we enforce code compliance, because the vast
majority of these snares are being used on private land? We heard
earlier, from the earlier witnesses, that most private landowners
won’t allow people onto their land to see what is going on.
So, it’s not possible to check whether snares are
code-compliant or not.
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|
[179]
Ms R.
Evans: It’s through work by
organisations like ourselves that the message is getting out there
to begin with. This is still a very, very young code.
|
|
[180]
Jenny
Rathbone: How
do we know, because, as I say, we don’t have the right to
roam, so people are unable to go onto private land in order to
check these things?
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|
[181] Ms R. Evans: Yes, well, as I said, this is now just over 12 months
of age, and we have marketed this code very, very hard. We’ve
held various awareness sessions, but Mike and Glynn have gone
further than that, because they are the practitioners in the field,
and they can give you more details on the courses that
they’ve run. All I can advise, really, is that we know as an
organisation that this has been very well received. Our message has
been pretty hard: you either use this code, use code-compliant
snares and get on with the job correctly, or you will face losing
the use of the snare in Wales. So, our message can’t
really be any harder. What we’re offering up, by means of
training, has given us confidence, as organisations, that this is
getting out there into the field, literally. But we do understand
that this is a new code and we do have a lot of work to continue to
promote this.
|
|
[182]
Jenny Rathbone:
Because there’s no penalty for not
using the code, is there?
|
|
[183]
Mr Swan: No, not directly.
|
|
[184]
Jenny Rathbone:
Well, not at all.
|
|
[185]
Ms R. Evans: Indirectly.
|
|
[186]
Mr Swan: Indirectly, through the Animal Welfare Act 2006, your
compliance or otherwise could be called in evidence.
|
|
[187]
Jenny Rathbone:
Could be—but there have been no
prosecutions, have there?
|
|
[188]
Mr Swan: Can I elaborate in a slightly different direction,
please, on that self-same topic? One of the other things that I
think is very important is that we have a sort of system that goes
with the code in terms of how you use the snares. As well as being
more target specific and reducing your risk as a user of being
called into question through catching a non-target animal, if you
follow the recipe, as it were, and build the whole thing, then the
likelihood is you will catch more of what you’re trying to
catch and you will be more successful at controlling your foxes and
more successful at avoiding non-target animals. There’s so
much to something so simple in terms of how you use it—silly
little things. One of my colleagues, who uses these regularly, says
to never roll your sleeves up when you set a snare because you
might brush human scent on the vegetation around and the fox will
then stop and not get itself caught because it smells the human
scent. Don’t set snares on a hot afternoon when a bead of
sweat might land on the ground. There’s lots and lots of
refinement and improvement that people can use. What I’m
really keen on is selling that whole package of, ‘Use this
snare, use it this way, maximise your efficiency, maximise your
effectiveness, minimise the risk to non-targets’.
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|
[189]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, do you support the measures that have
been introduced in Scotland to require training in the use of
snares?
|
|
[190]
Mr Swan: I am very keen on training. I’ve trained about
2,000 gamekeepers across England and Wales.
|
|
[191]
Jenny Rathbone:
The responsible people will always be
keen on training, but the problem is we’re obviously having
to deal with those who are not so responsible.
|
|
[192]
Mr Evans: Could I come in there?
|
|
[193]
Jenny Rathbone:
So that there’s a requirement on
training—do you think that that is appropriate?
|
|
[194]
Mr Evans: I think we are, as has been mentioned, perhaps
looking at compliance in the wrong way. People who set snares want
to do it well. We want to do it—
|
|
[195]
Jenny Rathbone:
Some people want to do it
well.
|
|
[196]
Mr Evans: Well, I would say—taking aside the people that
Rachel referred to earlier who, in the towns, and perhaps
elsewhere, are trying to catch things that they shouldn’t be
catching, which would be illegal anyway—people want to
comply. As someone who sets snares in Wales, I have an obligation
under various Acts—the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, the
Animal Welfare Act 2006—to do it to a high standard. If I
don’t, I then run the risk of being prosecuted and all the
issues that come from that.
|
|
[197]
Jenny Rathbone:
But, with respect, you wouldn’t be
here if you weren’t compliant with the code of practice. So,
what I’m trying to find out is whether or not you would think
that it would be a good idea to require everybody who wanted to use
a snare to be trained in how to use it.
|
|
[198]
Ms R. Evans: I think we’re going back to the situation where
everybody who wants to do the job right, the law-abiding people,
will go for their training. What do we then do with the others,
outside of our industry possibly—
|
|
[199]
Jenny Rathbone:
Well, the other measure they’ve
used in Scotland is to require the use of tags so that, when you
set a snare, it’s clear who the author is.
|
|
[200]
Ms R. Evans: And, again, those who are used to abiding by the law
and regulations will do so, but how do you then tackle those who
won’t? How, in a 500-acre block, are we going to find them
for a start—when you can buy them on the internet? Again, I
think those who play by the rules won’t mind their snares
being tagged, but those who don’t—. How do we then
enforce best practice? I think this particular code is a great tool
for embedding the right way to set a snare.
|
|
[201]
Jenny Rathbone:
But that takes us back to this issue of
code compliance, and that is why 80 per cent of the public appear
to be wanting to ban snares, simply because it’s impossible
to ensure compliance.
|
|
[202] Mr Evans: Could
I just add to the question of tagging? Yes, you could tag a snare
to say whose the snare was, but, if that snare is used for an
illegal act, as I think it was referred to earlier, there are ways
of monitoring. So, the police could have surveillance on
that snare to catch whoever is using that snare incorrectly. So,
the actual tagging of the snare, I’m not convinced that the
evidence is there that it’s of benefit.
|
|
[203] Jenny
Rathbone: Because there are alternative ways of doing it. Why
not the tagging?
|
|
[204] Mr Evans:
Snares are tagged in Scotland. I’m not sure the evidence has
come forward from Scotland that that has been a successful policing
tool, and even if that policing tool is needed. There’s a
huge burden. It’s another layer of burden, not only on the
people who set the snares, but, importantly, on the police and
whoever administers the tagging.
|
|
[205] Jenny
Rathbone: Okay. What the previous witnesses told us is that
what the police would like is a law, because, a code of practice,
there are too many grey areas. Whereas if we had a law saying
snares were banned, then it would be perfectly clear if somebody
was using a snare.
|
|
[206] Mr Evans:
As someone who sets snares, there are a multitude of laws that I
have to abide by. What this code of practice does is it draws them
together in a really useful aide-memoire, for want of a better way
of putting it, for anybody who uses snares, to come to. I’m
looking at it now. It’s got reference to the Animal Welfare
Act 2006, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981—it just draws
it together, and it also has other best practice advice, and goes
beyond what the law says.
|
|
[207] Jenny
Rathbone: So, would you then agree that mandatory training
would be a useful way of ensuring that everybody understood the
code?
|
|
[208] Mr Evans:
I’m not convinced that mandatory training is the way forward.
I think there are many ways of upskilling people. One of the things
that we’ve done at BASC is we’ve produced a little film
that people can watch. It’s already, in less than 11 months,
had approximately 11,000 people view it. There are many ways of
gaining skills, whether that’s reading, watching, or
attending a course. What suits one person may not suit another one.
It’s about doing the job properly.
|
|
[209] Mark
Reckless: Thank you. Can I call on David now, please?
|
|
[210] David
Melding: This code is very recent, as you indicated.
Presumably, because you’d reflected on the DEFRA report, and
the unsatisfactory nature then of the former snares that were
used—I mean the legal ones, not the illegal ones, which,
obviously, is another problem altogether.
|
|
[211] Mr Swan:
The code is a Welsh Government code. We were asked to meet and
discuss the future of snares in Wales a little over two years ago,
and this code was already—aspects of it, shall we say, were
in draft form, as a consequence of the DEFRA work, and as a
consequence of the previous code that DEFRA published in 2005. So,
the paperwork was there, and, from there, and meetings two years
ago, a year ago we published a code of practice.
|
|
[212] David
Melding: I’m trying to establish whether we have a more
humane snare now than we had previously in common practice.
That’s my point.
|
|
[213] Mr Swan:
Yes. Yes, you’ve got to—. The snare to comply with the
code is dramatically more humane than what has gone before.
|
|
[214] David
Melding: Okay. And what would you say is the current use of the
code-compliant snare compared to general illegal snaring?
|
|
[215] Mr Swan:
Not as good as we’d like it, which is why we have—. The
organisations that are signed up to this, and the relevant ones
across England as well, are in the—. I’ve written to
all of the manufacturers very recently to ask them, ‘Please
stop supplying the wrong thing so that when people go to the farm
supply, they can buy the right thing.’ And we’ve got
code-compliant snares in front of them and copies of the code lying
alongside, so that they can take them.
|
|
[216] David
Melding: Have you any idea of the current use of code-compliant
snares? Are we talking 50 per cent, 20 per cent? Where would you
say we are?
|
|
[217] Ms R.
Evans: We don’t have the figures.
|
|
[218] Mr Swan:
We just don’t have the figures.
|
|
[219] Ms R.
Evans: We don’t know how many snares are sold in Wales
for a start. We’ve done a snapshot of the sales of snares,
which I’ve presented in a brief for the Minister’s
team, but—
|
|
[220] David
Melding: And what did that find?
|
|
11:15
|
|
[221] Ms R.
Evans: This doesn’t necessarily mean code-compliant
snares at the moment, you see. But I can give you a rough idea.
This is research going back for the 12 months, and the research
date was 18 November this year. There were 13 agricultural stores
in south Wales selling 1,963 snares. There were six stores in mid
to north Wales selling 570, and the comment in the e-mail from the
regional manager said, ‘Most sold before lambing
season.’ Thirteen stalls in north Wales sold 451. Most of the
sales are in March or April, with a peak in September. That
September peak would tie in with game rearing. I was quite
interested in those figures because, if you take the ones in my
area, for example, we don’t have a shoot within 20 miles, but
they sold 75 snares in 12 months. But there’s another store
six miles to the east and there’s another store six miles to
the west. So, within that radius, I thought that was quite a lot
for a sheep farming area of Wales.
|
|
[222] David
Melding: And how many of those snares were code-compliant?
|
|
[223] Ms Evans:
I doubt many of them were, in the last 12 months. But, don’t
forget, this came in 12 months ago.
|
|
[224] David
Melding: I realise it’s new. So, are the code-compliant
snares much more expensive than the old ones?
|
|
[225] Ms R.
Evans: They are more expensive, which is why, as organisations,
we’ve come together to work with manufacturers so that we can
get more on the market and that will obviously reduce the cost of a
snare. But the cost implications shouldn’t be taken into
consideration when you’re talking about animal welfare. And
they need to be—
|
|
[226] David
Melding: I certainly agree with that, but we don’t live
in a perfect world. Are they twice as expensive, three
times—
|
|
[227] Mr Swan:
Fifty per cent more, but, and it’s an important
‘but’, there are lots of components in it that are
reusable, recyclable, and one manufacturer offers rebuilds at the
same sort of price as you would buy an ordinary non-code-compliant
snare. So, that, I hope, helps take things forward, too.
|
|
[228] Mr Evans:
Could I just add something on the cost of snares? As someone who
snares, I want to catch the fox that’s causing the problem,
so probably the biggest—I don’t know whether
‘cost’ is the right word, but the biggest cost is my
time. The individual cost of the snare, whilst it may be a
consideration, it’s a minor consideration, provided that it
does the job well.
|
|
[229] David
Melding: Okay. Mr Swan, you said that training was very
important. So, unless you’re properly trained, are you likely
to be able to use the snare in an efficient way?
|
|
[230] Mr Swan:
Someone who’s got experience with snares and takes a copy of
that code would be able to do a very effective job. Getting 15
people together in a room and exchanging knowledge and ideas at the
same time as working through the code and working through an
understanding of why we are where we are invariably means an
exchange of ideas that results in people having better knowledge
and better understanding.
|
|
[231] David
Melding: Are the code-compliant snares more difficult to use
than the ones that you hope they are now replacing?
|
|
[232] Mr Swan:
No.
|
|
[233] David
Melding: So, there’s no barrier there?
|
|
[234] Mr Swan:
There’s no barrier.
|
|
[235] David
Melding: Secondly, we’ve heard evidence that the UK is
one of very few countries now in Europe that permits any snaring.
Have you reflected on that and do you have any—? Well, do you
challenge that evidence or do you have any explanations for why
there’s been a shift away from the use of snares as an
acceptable way of catching target species?
|
|
[236] Mr Swan:
Can I pick up on a couple of things there, because I think
it’s really quite an important question? In parts of Europe
where snares are illegal, foxes and fox control is as much about
producing fur, if not more, possibly, as it is about controlling
fox predation on the likes of game and wildlife or indeed in
relation to lambs and so on. In those kinds of countries, the snare
doesn’t fit the requirement in quite the same sort of way
anyway.
|
|
[237] I remember
particularly going to Strasbourg to understand fox control in that
part of Germany, about 15 or 20 years ago. We were shown all sorts
of devices for catching foxes and other species. We were also told
all about the radio-tracking work that they were doing on foxes and
we said, ‘But how do you catch your foxes for radio
tracking?’, and the reply was, ‘We use your beautiful
snares. We may not be able to use them in any other circumstance,
but we license snares as the best means of catching a fox to put a
radio on it and to understand what it does.’ So, we’re
back to the situation where the efficiency and effectiveness of the
tool make it so much more superior to other forms of trapping.
|
|
[238]
David Melding:
So, Germany allows
snaring.
|
|
[239]
Mr Swan: Germany doesn’t allow snaring on a
day-to-day basis, I believe; I don’t know for certain. My
understanding from 15 years ago was that it wasn’t allowed
there, but it was licensable for scientific purposes.
|
|
[240]
David Melding:
I see. And your experience, then, of
the general practice in European countries we’ve been told
that don’t allow snaring is that they never used much of it
anyway, because they want—
|
|
[241]
Mr Swan: Some may well have not used much of
it.
|
|
[242]
David Melding:
Okay. That’s interesting.
It’s something we can obviously explore in our own
research.
|
|
[243]
Mark Reckless:
Vikki.
|
|
[244]
Vikki Howells:
So, all the panel are unanimous in
your view that snares are a humane method, and more humane than
some other methods too. So, to follow on from David’s point
that only five countries in Europe actually permit the use of
snares, does that mean that you as a panel believe that countries
that permit snares have more regard for animal welfare than all the
countries that have banned them?
|
|
[245]
Mr Evans: I think it’s a mistake to compare
countries, really, to be honest, because different countries have
different cultures as they have developed. One thing that I have
found interesting—I came across some research on snow
leopards, which are exceptionally rare, and they are caught for
research purposes to have radio collars fitted by the use of a
modified foot snare. So, you know, snares are used
elsewhere.
|
|
[246]
Vikki Howells:
That doesn’t answer my
question as to whether you think that countries are more
progressive in terms of animal welfare if they have snares, rather
than if they ban them.
|
|
[247]
Mr Evans: The short answer is I think it’s unfair to
compare countries, because I’m not sure what other methods
they are using to control foxes in those countries. I’m not
sure whether, for instance, they’re allowed to use poisons
and things such as that, so it would be unfair.
|
|
[248]
Mark Reckless:
Good. Thank you. I’ll now go
to Simon Thomas.
If he asks his questions in Welsh there’s translation
available on channel 1.
|
|
[249]
Simon
Thomas: Diolch, Gadeirydd. Yn gyntaf oll, fe fyddwn i’n
licio jest gofyn ynglŷn â’r sefyllfa bresennol,
achos mae yna lot o—. Wel, mae’n rhaid i mi ddweud fy
mod i wedi drysu gyda’r gwahanol ffigurau sydd yn cael eu
defnyddio gan y gwahanol garfannau yn y maes yma. Felly, dau
gwestiwn i ddechrau. Yn gyntaf oll, ers i’r cod presennol
ddod i rym yng Nghymru, a oes yna gasgliad o ffigurau o’r
defnydd ac o ba anifeiliaid sy’n cael eu dal yn y maglau? A
yw’r math yna o gasglu data yn digwydd? Yr ail gwestiwn yng
nghyd-destun data yw: fe ddywedwyd yn y sesiwn flaenorol mai dim
ond 5 y cant o ffermwyr a oedd yn defnyddio maglau, a oedd yn
awgrymu bod 95 y cant o ddefnydd yn cael ei wneud gan giperiaid, ac
ati. A ydy hwnnw yn ffigur rydych chi yn ei adnabod yn y cyd-destun
Cymreig?
|
Simon Thomas:
Thank you, Chair.
Firstly, I’d like to just ask about the current situation,
because there is a lot of—. I must say that I am confused by
the different figures that have been used by the different bodies
in this area. So, two questions to start. Firstly, since the
current code came into force in Wales, is there a collection of
figures on the use of snares, and what animals are caught in these
snares? Have those data been collected? The second question in the
context of data is: it was said in the previous session that only 5
per cent of farmers use snares, which suggests that 95 per cent of
use was done by gamekeepers, and so forth. Is that a figure that
you recognise in the Welsh context?
|
|
[250]
Ms
Evans: I ateb y cwestiwn cyntaf, nac oes, nid oes data gyda
ni. Nid ydym wedi ceisio chwilio i mewn i gael y data, i fod yn
onest, i weld faint o’r snares newydd sy’n cael
eu defnyddio. Wedyn, o ran yr ail gwestiwn, buaswn i’n
meddwl, dim ond drwy edrych drwy ffigurau un siop rwyf wedi gofyn
iddi—mae sawl man arall lle byddech wedi gallu cael gafael ar
snares—drwy dim ond gofyn i’r un siop, o’r
atebion rwyf wedi eu cael, rwy’n credu bod y ffigur o 5 y
cant o ffermwyr yn defnyddio magl yn lot mwy, i fod yn onest. Fel y
dywedais i, dim ond un siop sy’n eu gwerthu nhw yn fy
mhentref i. Maen nhw’n gwerthu 75 jest cyn wyna, a does dim
saethu yn yr ardal o gwbl. Felly, rwy’n credu bod mwy na 5 y
cant o ffermwyr yn eu defnyddio nhw, yn enwedig yn yr
uplands, yn y mannau lle mae’n really anodd i
lampio, ac yn y blaen, hefyd. Achos rydych chi’n siarad am
lampio a saethu ac a ydy hynny’n well, wel, os ydych
chi’n lampio cadno unwaith a bod chi’n
‘miss-io’, chewch chi ddim siawns i’w wneud yr
ail waith—maen nhw’n mynd yn
lamp-shy.
|
Ms
Evans: To answer the
first question, no, we don’t have any data. We haven’t
tried to look into getting that data, to be honest, to see how many
new snares are used. And then, on the second question, I would
think that just through looking at one shop’s
figures—there were several other places you could get hold of
snares—but by just asking one shop, from the answers that
I’ve got, I think that the figure of 5 per cent of farmers
using snares is much more, to be honest. As I said, only one shop
sells them in my village. They sell 75 just before the lambing
season, and there’s no shooting at all in the area. So, I
think that more than 5 per cent of farmers use them, particularly
in the uplands, in the areas where it’s very difficult to
lamp, and so forth. You talk about lamping and shooting and whether
that’s better, well, if you lamp a fox and you miss, you
won’t have a chance to do it the second time because they
become lamp-shy.
|
|
[251]
So, we need opportunities to control
foxes.
|
|
[252]
Simon Thomas:
Felly, rydych chi’n awgrymu bod
y defnydd o faglau i reoli cadnoid yn fwy ymysg ffermwyr, yn
enwedig ffermwyr defaid yn y bryniau a’r mynyddoedd yng
Nghymru, er bod dim ffigurau, ond dyna beth rydych chi’n ei
awgrymu. Yn y cyd-destun hwnnw, beth yw eich casgliad chi am y
ddadl y dylid rheoli cadnoid mewn ffyrdd mwy naturiol, neu y dylid
trapio? Rydych chi newydd sôn am lampio a saethu—mewn
geiriau eraill, mae’n dod i lawr i fugeilio defaid, yn
hytrach na rheoli cadnoid.
|
Simon Thomas:
So, you’re
suggesting that the use of snares to control foxes is greater
amongst farmers, especially sheep farmers on the hills and
mountains of Wales, even though you don’t have figures, but
that’s what you are suggesting. In that context, what is your
conclusion about the argument that foxes should be controlled in
more natural ways, or whether they should be trapped? You’ve
just talked about lamping and shooting—in other words, it comes down to shepherding,
rather than controlling foxes.
|
|
[253]
Ms R. Evans:
Rwy’n credu ein bod ni wedi hen
fynd heibio’r diwrnodau pan oeddech chi’n gallu
fforddio rhoi bugail ar ben y mynydd dim ond i reoli cadnoid. Yn fy
marn i, mae hynny’n hollol ridiculous. Mae’r
defnydd o reoli cadnoid wedi mynd yn llai; nid oes hela fel hynny
rhagor nac oes? Felly
rydym yn gorfod chwilio am y
methods gorau i’r ardal. Felly, mae’r fagl yn
rhan bwysig iawn o fugeilio’ch defaid. Nid ŷch chi’n mynd i roi gwaith i rywun i
eistedd ar ben mynydd y dyddiau yma—mae hynny’n hollol
afresymol. Ond wedyn,
rŷch chi wedi bod yn siarad â’r league,
sydd yn meddwl nad oes rhaid rheoli cadnoid a hefyd bod llawer o
farwolaeth ŵyn i lawr i’r ffarmwr ac nid i’r cadno. Felly, rydych chi’n
clywed—
|
Ms R.
Evans: I think we’ve moved on from the days when you
could afford to put a shepherd on the top of a mountain just to
control foxes. In my opinion, that’s ridiculous. The use of
fox control has gone down; there’s no hunting anymore is
there? So, we have to look for the best methods for the area. The
snare is a very important part of shepherding. You’re not
going to give somebody a job to sit on top of a mountain these
days—that’s totally unreasonable. But then,
you’ve been talking to the league, which believes that you
don’t need to control foxes and that a lot of cases of lambs
dying are down to the farmers, not the foxes. So, you
hear—
|
|
[254]
Simon Thomas:
Nid oes yna gytuno ar y pwynt yna,
rwy’n cymryd.
|
Simon
Thomas: There’s no agreement on that point, I take
it.
|
|
[255]
Ms R. Evans:
Na, achos rŷch chi’n
siarad nawr â merch ffarm—.
|
Ms R.
Evans: No, because you’re talking now to a farmer’s
daughter—.
|
|
[256] You know,
you’re talking to a farmer’s daughter here and if you
think that farmers could employ a shepherd for the hill just to
look after or to control the fox population, which is something
that doesn’t need controlling at all—it is just totally
ludicrous in this day and age, I’m afraid. It just
doesn’t happen. We have to give farmers the tools in order to
protect their livestock and the snare is an essential tool for
that.
|
|
[257]
Simon Thomas:
A oes yna ddefnydd o faglau ar dir
Llywodraeth Cymru, hyd y gwyddoch chi?
|
Simon
Thomas: Is there use of snares on Welsh Government-owned land
as far as you know?
|
|
[258]
Ms R. Evans:
Bydd yn rhaid ichi ofyn i Lywodraeth
Cymru. Nid wyf yn siŵr sut mae’r gweithwyr yn
rheoli—
|
Ms R.
Evans: Well, you’d have to ask the Welsh Government that.
I’m not sure how the workers control—
|
|
[259]
Simon Thomas:
Rŷch chi’n adnabod y
ciperiaid sy’n gweithio ar y tir.
|
Simon
Thomas: Yes, but you know gamekeepers who work there.
|
|
[260]
Ms R. Evans:
Y ciperiaid sy’n gweithio ar y
tir—wel, heb fy mod yn pigo mas un o’n haelodaeth ni yn
bersonol—
|
Ms R.
Evans: The gamekeepers working on the land—well, unless I
pick out some of our members personally—
|
|
[261]
Simon Thomas:
Fe wna i ofyn y cwestiwn mewn ffordd
arall: a ydych chi’n ymwybodol bod yna waharddiad ar faglau
ar dir Llywodraeth Cymru?
|
Simon
Thomas: I will ask the question in another way: do you know
that there’s a ban on snares on Welsh Government–owned
land?
|
|
[262]
Ms R. Evans:
Na, rwy’n siŵr eu bod nhw
yn defnyddio nhw, ond mae’n rhywbeth y bydd rhaid ichi siarad
â rheolwyr yr ystadau amdano.
|
Ms R.
Evans: No, I think that they do use them, but you’d have
to talk to the estate managers, really.
|
|
[263]
Simon Thomas:
Ocê. Mae’r cwestiwn olaf
am y tro, sydd gen i, ynglŷn â gwerthiant y maglau
newydd—y rhai sydd yn code compliant. Fel y byddai pob
un, rwy’n credu, yn dymuno gweld, gan fod cod
gennym—ocê, mae’n newydd—ond gan fod cod
gennym, gan fod yna hyfforddiant yn digwydd a chan fod yna ddysgu
oddi ar ein gilydd yn digwydd, un o’r pethau gwaethaf y
gallem ei gael yng Nghymru, a dweud y gwir, yw bod rhywun yn gallu
cerdded i mewn i siop, prynu magl sydd ddim yn code
compliant, darllen rhyw lyfryn bach, gosod hwnnw a meddwl eu
bod nhw wedi ymddwyn o fewn y cod a’r gyfraith, pan, a dweud
y gwir, mae yna siawns nad ydyn nhw. A oes yna unrhyw ffordd
ymarferol i sicrhau, yn eich barn chi, nad ydym yn gwerthu maglau
sydd ddim yn code compliant yng Nghymru? Anghofiwch am yr
internet am y tro; rwy’n sôn am siopau
a—
|
Simon
Thomas: Okay. The last question I have for now is about the
sale of these new snares—the ones that are code compliant. As
everyone would like to see, since we do have a code—okay, it
is new—but since we do have a code, since there is training
going on, there is learning from each other going on, one of the
worst things that we could do in Wales is that someone could walk
into a shop, buy a snare that isn’t code compliant, read a
little booklet, set it and think that they’ve behaved within
the code and the law when, in reality, there’s a chance that
they haven’t. Is there any practical way of ensuring, in your
opinion, that we don’t sell snares that are not code
compliant in Wales? Forget about the internet for now; I’m
talking about shops and—
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[264]
Ms R. Evans:
Ie, ond mae’r internet
yn rhan fawr o brynu maglau, achos maen nhw’n siepach ar y we
hefyd.
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Ms R.
Evans: Yes, but the internet is a large part of buying snares,
because they’re cheaper online as well.
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[265] The internet
sales are far more competitive than somebody who has to pay their
rates for their shop. So, the internet plays a huge part in the
supply of snares, whether they’re code compliant or not. I
think for somebody to be able to walk into a store and pick up a
code-compliant snare with one of these leaflets is far better than
somebody trying to put something together at home because
they’re approaching their lambing season, or what have you,
and saying, ‘Oh, God, I haven’t been trained, I
haven’t got this and I haven’t got that’. So,
this is what needs to be embedded into the culture. Perhaps in
years to come, you might be moving further down the line more
towards the Scotland model, but for now, I think that this is an
essential tool of education to get people used to setting a
code-compliant snare with the full package that my colleagues have
mentioned—how you set it, where you set it. That’s a
huge part of how effective this is for this to be done
correctly.
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[266] Simon
Thomas: Would it not be a very effective step to make the
setting of a non-code-compliant snare in Wales illegal?
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[267] Ms R.
Evans: I think you’d just drive it underground, to be
honest. I would rather see more emphasis on getting people to do it
properly and to be code compliant, than to ban the sale of those
snares. We need to give this time to bed in, otherwise, I think
people will just be buying them off the internet anyway and you
haven’t really improved welfare, but by pushing this, this
improves. I’m not convinced, to be honest.
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[268] Mark
Reckless: I’m very grateful. Could I actually just go to
Huw Irranca-Davies, who has some questions to finish the
session?
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[269] Huw
Irranca-Davies: I’ll try and rattle through these
quickly, thank you, Chair. The first one follows up on
Simon’s point. Surely the two could run alongside. You
promote the code of compliance hard, but you also take steps to
deal with the sale of hundreds, you’re telling us, of
non-compliant snares in mid Wales and north Wales. Surely you do
both at the same time.
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11:30
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[270] Ms R.
Evans: Yes, but hold on now, those figures were for ones sold
in the last 12 months.
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[271] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Right.
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[272] Ms R.
Evans: Okay? So, this has been going on whilst this has been
brought forward. We are working with those organisations. We sent
out a joint letter from ourselves, the NFU and the FUW, which just
came to fruition about a week last Thursday, asking everybody who
sells snares to sell code-compliant snares. This is us doing it as
organisations now. It’s not coming from anywhere else, but
it’s us, as organisations, promoting this. So, we have
written to suppliers and we are working with manufacturers; again,
with the Welsh Government team—I think it’s fair to say
that the team has approached the manufacturers as well—so
that we can get more compliant snares on the market.
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[273] Huw
Irranca-Davies: That push and nudge is really helpful, but why
wouldn’t you, for example, say that, in three years’
time or in four years’ time, we will move to a situation,
with all that push and encouragement and so on, with the
manufacturers, with the retailers, that there will be a date on
which these non-compliant ones are banned? I know we’ve got
the issue on the internet, but we’re selling these.
Shouldn’t we be saying, in line with your logic, that there
is a date at which we stop selling, manufacturing and distributing
them?
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[274] Mr Evans:
I understand that. By pushing to the end user so they are looking
for code-compliant snares, by pushing to the manufacturers and the
stockists so they only stock code-compliant snares, in two or three
years’ time we may get to the situation where the market only
wants code-compliant snares.
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[275] Huw
Irranca-Davies: And if we don’t, would you rule out a ban
on selling and distribution of non-compliant snares? Are you ruling
that out?
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[276] Ms R.
Evans: Well, let’s see where we get.
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[277] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Are you ruling it out?
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[278] Ms R.
Evans: Say that again. Can you give me the line again?
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[279] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Are you ruling it out?
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[280] Ms R.
Evans: Which bit?
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[281] Huw
Irranca-Davies: A ban on the sale and distribution of
non-compliant snares if, in two or three years’ time, you
don’t find that it’s squeezed it down to nothing.
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[282] Ms R.
Evans: Oh, well, we’ve got to do something then,
haven’t we?
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[283] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Then you’ll be open to—
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[284] Ms R.
Evans: In two or three years’ time.
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[285] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
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[286] Ms R.
Evans: Because we want this as well.
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[287] Mr Swan:
Can I pick up on the story in one slightly bigger way too?
Remember, Wales has been pioneering here. That is now an industry
code rather than a Government code, but it’s in England now
as well. The Scottish situation is up for review and it looks as
though—because Scotland legislated in haste,
slightly—the improvements on snare design that are contained
in that code will become current for Scotland as well. From the
manufacturers’ point of view, there is now a United Kingdom
marketplace, which is rather bigger than a Welsh marketplace, in
which to be trying to develop and sell code-compliant snares in a
much bigger way.
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[288] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Okay. Thank you for that. You’re putting
a lot of reliance on this code, industry led, working out there
with people on the ground. Why should we have more faith in that
code than we do in the lead shot code? The lead shot code, as you
know, has been similarly trying to effect good practice on the
ground, change the culture of working around the use of lead shot,
and yet it’s been openly criticised for not actually
achieving the outcomes finally. So, tell me why we
should—
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[289] Mr Swan:
The lead shot code—
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[290] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Sorry, I don’t want to touch on the lead
shot code, but the criticism—
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[291] Mr Swan:
The lead shot code is not a code, is it? The lead shot code is
legislation. Wales has its—
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[292] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Yes, and there is a code as well. The lead
shot—
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[293] Mr Swan:
The code of good shooting practice says, ‘Thou shalt not
deposit lead in—’
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[294] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Why should we have faith in that? That is what
I’m saying.
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[295] Mr Swan:
There is a point, I think, actually. There are plenty of shotgun
users out there who still have never quite understood the problem
that you are trying to address.
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[296] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Exactly.
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[297] Mr Swan:
But I think they do understand the problem that they are trying
to—
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[298] Huw
Irranca-Davies: We’re selling hundreds of non-compliant
snares. Okay, let me move on. Sorry, have I got time for a couple
of—?
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[299] Mark
Reckless: Two more questions, I think.
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[300] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Okay. Very quickly, you’ve highlighted
the issue of not the landowners, the gamekeepers, the farmers, but
the other sale. Do you want to just touch on that? And maybe
you’d want to write to us. I think you’re hinting there
at the one-man-and-his-dog sort of operation of using snares. What
are you talking about with this ‘other use in urban
areas’?
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[301] Mr Swan:
The police story was that nearly all of the snaring incidents that
they were involved with were in suburban sorts of environments, and
it was malicious use of snares to try, perhaps, to deal with
next-door’s cat if it’s causing them a problem, or
something like that. They weren’t being called into the
countryside to look at snare-related problems. Those snares were
being illegally set—
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[302] David
Melding: Well, there are access issues there, I think.
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[303] Mr Swan:
Yes, well, there are access issues. One policeman said that snares
hanging in the fence around a school playground—those sorts
of stories are not going to be addressed by the code, but
they’re also not going to be addressed by a ban on snares,
are they, if it’s a home-made snare being used in a malicious
sort of way in that kind of environment?
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[304] Jenny
Rathbone: But it also goes back to the point I made, which is
that most land is private land and there’s no access.
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[305] Huw
Irranca-Davies: My final question—thank you, Chair, for
some latitude on this. We’ve heard evidence suggesting that
there is almost blanket use of snaring around issues of game bird
estates and game bird shooting. Would you acknowledge that that is
happening—that there is more extensive use of snaring around
those particularly when they are released—or would you say
that actually there is no misuse or no overuse of snares on
privately managed game bird estates?
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[306] Mr Swan:
No, of course I wouldn’t say that.
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[307] Huw
Irranca-Davies: Is there blanket use?
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[308] Mr Swan:
I don’t think there’s blanket use either, but I do
think that, again, a part of this code and a part of the training
is: spend more time finding what the foxes are doing, spend less
time setting snares and checking snares and use them less and in a
more targeted way. That is very much a strong theme that I
personally use in training as well, because I believe that people
get a better result out of that.
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[309] Mr Evans:
Could I just add something? We’ve spoken about different
methods, or briefly touched on them, and it’s important to
remember that not every method is suitable for every situation. So,
when we talk about shooting foxes, yes, for me, that may well be a
preferred option. This time of year, the cover is low, but when we
move into the spring and the summer when there are lambs about and
I set snares on behalf of the farmers, also you have birds such as
curlews, red-listed birds et cetera—I can’t shoot foxes
that time of year because the cover is this high. So, I need
another method to catch those foxes that are a problem at that time
and snares are the only method that fit the bill.
[Interruption.] Sorry?
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[310] Vikki
Howells: Not trapping.
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[311] Mr Evans:
Not trapping. I mean, logistically—again, I’m talking
about myself, I live in mid Wales. If I have a fox that’s
causing a predation problem on the hill, how am I going to carry a
big trap across the farmer’s field, damaging the crops? I can
put three or four snares neatly in my bag, walk up a wheel mark and
set them, catch the fox and bring the snares back.
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[312] Mark
Reckless: If I could give Rachel the last word.
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[313] Ms R.
Evans: Just picking up on what you said about trapping—as
Mike has already said, the fox can have injuries in a trap as well.
It’s not trouble-free, so it’s not the answer to
everything. I think we have to keep that in mind, really, that
it’s just not the answer for everything.
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[314] Mark
Reckless: Can I thank all three witnesses for coming in and
giving us their perspective on this panel?
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11:38
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Cynnig o dan Reol Sefydlog 17.42 i Benderfynu
Gwahardd y Cyhoedd o weddill y Cyfarfod
Motion under Standing Order 17.42 to Resolve to Exclude the Public
from the Meeting for the Remainder of the Meeting
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Cynnig:
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Motion:
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bod y pwyllgor yn penderfynu gwahardd
y cyhoedd o weddill y cyfarfod yn unol â Rheol Sefydlog
17.42(vi).
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[315] that the
committee resolves to exclude the public from the remainder of the
meeting in accordance with Standing Order 17.42(vi).
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Cynigiwyd y cynnig.
Motion moved.
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[316] Mark
Reckless: The committee’s now going to move into private
session to consider the evidence we’ve had. And I’ll
move a motion under 17.42 to do that, if no one has any objection.
Good. So, thank you very much indeed.
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[317] Ms R.
Evans: Diolch yn fawr iawn. Thank you for the opportunity.
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[318] Mark
Reckless: Thank you for coming in.
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Derbyniwyd y cynnig.
Motion agreed.
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Daeth rhan gyhoeddus y cyfarfod i ben am
11:38.
The public part of the meeting ended at 11:38.
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