Bog Myrtle & Peat

The Scottish Government has moved to ban snaring, and the decision drifts across the landscape like a bad smell. There was no clear conservation case to be made during the consultation, largely because that specific point is probably impossible to prove. We can’t say “if you ban snares, curlews will decline” – because curlew decline is complex and variable. But if that stands, the counterargument is equally true; we’re also unable to say “if you ban snares, curlews will be unaffected”. It’s a leap into the dark at a dangerous moment for birds like curlews and lapwings.

It was noticeable during the consultation that animal welfare campaigners professed to recognise “the benefits of predator control” in conservation while simultaneously driving to ban snaring. That’s a contradictory pickle, because predator control is not an activity in its own right – it’s the name we give to lots of different activities, from shooting to working Larsen traps. Support for the concept is one thing, but refusing the specifics of delivery allows for a two-speed engagement with the issues at hand. And as restrictions around predator control gather pace, trust is undermined by these contradictory messages. Those of us who work in predator control understand these contradictions in the context of bad faith – because it’s very likely that now snaring has gone, the offensive will pivot to undermine other predator control techniques.

Since there’s no data on the ecological value of snaring as a conservation tool, it’s likely that the question was resolved on the grounds of animal welfare. Snaring can look ugly, even when the reality is humane and carefully transacted. But it was dramatically improved by legislation introduced by the WaNE Act (Scotland) 2011. This implemented mandatory training for all snare operators, and it developed stringent restrictions to ensure that snared animals were kept safe and secure for as short a period as possible. When I first came to snaring, it was still possible to set snares in places which were designed to hang or drown a captive animal. Snares could be left in place for months at a time without checking, and snared foxes sometimes endured slow, lingering deaths from starvation, exposure or the tearing abrasion of wires which frayed and dug into their bodies. This approach was largely out of date by the 1990s, and it was generally the exception rather than the rule. I know folk who used to set snares in a deliberate attempt to kill, knowing that death would come slowly and ineffectively over several consecutive days. But these were the old-timers, and some of their thinking was bizarrely obscure. Even in the coldest and most pragmatic terms, it makes no sense to leave a fox mouldering in a snare for days or weeks at a time. You want it killed as quickly as possible so you can set another snare and catch another fox. The old ways weren’t just bad in welfare terms – they were pretty dodgy for predator control too.

When the law was changed, it became much more complicated to use snares – welfare standards were of paramount importance, and things were substantially tightened up. Unless you had a damn good reason to set a snare, many people gave up – but the fact that so many people went through the expensive training process and invested money in more costly snares seemed to demonstrate that the effort was worth the reward. 

When this latest consultation expressed concern about welfare issues in snaring, it seemed to ignore any improvements delivered by the 2011 legislation. The political worry had no basis in new evidence or fresh data to show that the WaNE Act had been ineffective at raising welfare standards. Nobody even asked to gather that evidence. In fact, the general standard of snaring in Scotland was probably dramatically improved by the 2011 legislation – but I can’t say for certain, because there is no data to inform the statement. We do know that there have been no problems with legally set snares since 2011, and if my anecdotal opinions are inadmissible, at least I’m thinking about it. The Scottish Government showed absolutely no interest in gathering evidence on current welfare standards. They preferred to think of snaring as it was in the bad old days, and it’s pretty clear that during the debate which was transacted at Holyrood a fortnight ago, snaring was smeared by evidence drawn from the time before the law was changed – that is to say, lurid images which showed a kind of snaring that is already illegal. 

Further, developments in technology have resulted in the development of a new kind of snare which is fitted with measures to improve welfare standards, including break-away clips to automatically release non-target animals. Opinions vary on these, but the debate made no attempt to consider their use as an alternative to a ban. In fact, they were never even sent to be tested against internationally established standards of humane trapping. The Government had already decided what that they didn’t want snaring to continue.

I have to confess that I don’t love snaring. It’s no personal passion to catch and kill foxes, but it’s a means to an end. And I would rather not spend my time traipsing around snares – it’s a boring chore, and I don’t get paid for it. Like you, I’d prefer to spend my Saturday mornings in bed or reading through a towering pile of books beside my stove. But this work has to happen, and I’m committed to doing everything I can to protect the birds I love. If my tone is rather shrill, it’s only because I’m confounded by legal processes which not only fail to understand snaring, but actually refuse to try.

So now it’s as if the WaNE act changes never happened; changes which represented a compromise between efficiency and welfare; changes which I was stupid enough to endorse for the sake of saving an important conservation tool. And it’s fair to assume that politicians “just don’t like” snaring in the same childish, subjective way that I “just don’t like” broccoli – and they’re legislating accordingly. In the aftermath of the 2011 WaNE Act, I jumped through the new regulatory hoops in good faith. The message from Government was “you can keep snaring if you do it differently”. We did it differently – and we lost it anyway.