Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s taken three weeks and a maddening amount of paperwork, but I have finally received a snaring ID number through the post. I would be happy to publish it here, but given that I am now responsible for every snare in Scotland bearing that number, I’d rather not broadcast it. It’s one of the major short-falls of the new legislation, and opens a whole world of opportunities for people to make up their own tags with the number of their choice and then photograph snares in illegal places with that number clearly visible.

You wouldn’t have to be a spiteful genius to concoct some nasty situation around somebody else’s ID number, and it’s not at all clear how you would prove that a snare with your ID number on it had been set by somebody else  – maybe I’m just being cynical, but I don’t think it’s so much of a challenge to imagine what a three digit number looks like that I would have to go public with mine as a demonstration.

However, I do wonder if snaring numbers are being allocated on a “first come, first served” basis like the larsen trap numbers were, because if they are and judging by my number, not many people have managed to get one yet.

It’s a little confusing because I have heard that a keeper in the Highlands has been allocated a number which was six characters long and was a mixture of numbers and letters. There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern, but all will become clear in due course. The next job will be to find a way of putting that number onto my snares so that it doesn’t come off at an inopportune moment. At least a three digit number won’t be too complicated to print or take up too much space.