Month: November 2019

Proposed new legislation in Scotland will have significant ramifications for those who continue to kill birds of prey.

The Animals and Wildlife (Penalties, Protections & Powers) (Scotland) Bill was introduced by Environment Cabinet Secretary Roseanna Cunningham on 30th September 2019 (see here for associated docs) and will, amongst other things, increase the maximum available penalties for the most serious animal welfare and wildlife offences.

For example, under the Wildlife & Countryside Act, the current maximum penalty available for intentionally or recklessly killing, taking or injuring a wild bird is six months imprisonment and/or a £5,000 fine with the case being heard in the Sheriff Court.

Under the proposed new Bill, the case could still be heard in the Sheriff Court where the maximum penalty would be 12 months imprisonment and/or a £40,000 fine, but the case could also be heard on indictment in a higher court where the maximum sentence would be five years imprisonment an/or an unlimited fine.

This policy document from the Scottish Government is worth reading for a clear explanation of what else is proposed under the new legislation.

These proposed changes are significant and very welcome – especially in light of the monumentally inadequate sentencing of convicted Scottish gamekeeper Alan Wilson recently (see here) although the new proposals still pale in to insignificance when compared with the zero tolerance penalties imposed in Spain (e.g. see here, here and here).

This Bill has been a long time coming – six years in fact – from 2013 when the then Environment Minister Paul Wheelhouse commissioned a review on whether penalties for wildlife crime should be increased, as a direct response to ongoing illegal raptor persecution. Professor Mark Poustie submitted his report and a series of recommendations, including a penalty increase, in 2015. The then Environment Minister Dr Aileen McLeod broadly accepted those recommendations in 2016 and the Scottish Government committed to progressing them in its 2017/2018 Programme for Government.

Importantly, the five-year custodial penalty is big news because effectively it would mean that Police Scotland would now have the authority to apply for permission, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Scotland) Act 2000 (RIPSA), to install covert cameras on private sporting estates for the purpose of detecting wildlife crime.

Currently, Police Scotland do not have the authority to seek permission to install covert cameras as part of an investigation simply because raptor persecution crimes do not merit a custodial sentence of three years or more. Authority can only be given if the activity is considered ‘proportionate’ and when the crime being detected is considered ‘serious’ (i.e. where the penalty would constitute a term of imprisonment for three years or more).

As we’ve seen in recent years, the RSPB has installed covert cameras at the remote nest sites of specially protected birds of prey and has recorded what is obviously a wildlife crime, but because the RSPB is a charity and not a statutory agency it is ineligible for RIPA/RIPSA authorisation so clever defence lawyers have been able to get cases thrown out of court on technicalities, and more recently some of these cases haven’t even reached court because the Crown prosecutors have decided the footage is inadmissible (e.g. see here and here).

It’s ironic that a law (RIPA/RIPSA) intended to protect the innocent has actually been exploited to protect the guilty and has undermined justice time and time again.

The Bill is currently at Stage 1 and is open to Parliamentary scrutiny. On 29th October the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform (ECCLR) Committee took evidence from a number of Scottish Government policy officials and there was an interesting discussion about the implications of the Bill for police-led video evidence, and also questions about why the Bill didn’t include proposals to extend vicarious liability and increased powers for the Scottish SPCA. You can read the transcript here: ECCLR Animals and Wildlife Bill stage1_29Oct2019

In early December RPUK will be participating in a round-table discussion on this Bill at the Scottish Parliament.

A couple of weeks ago the RSPB announced it was going to conduct a review of its policy on game bird shooting (see here). That’s all it was – a statement of intent to review a policy, nothing more, nothing less.

However, this statement elicited a surprisingly strong reaction from the game shooting organisations who mostly appeared to be terrified at the prospect of such a review and responded by hurling characteristic abuse at the RSPB. For example, Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance was quoted in the press as follows:

“Disappointingly this seems to be the final step in the RSPB’s long journey to becoming an anti-shooting organisation. 

It displays the organisation’s bizarrely warped priorities in the face of so many other pressing concerns that face the countryside we know and love“.

This morning the RSPB’s Martin Harper has responded to the media frenzy with a measured blog setting out the facts and dismissing the hysteria – well worth a read (here).

There’s another example of the RSPB hitting back this week….

In the Oct 9th edition of Shooting Times there was a spectacularly crap article based on a claimed conversation between an unknown gamekeeper and the article’s author, Jamie Blackett, claiming that two people who said they were from the RSPB were ‘inspecting‘ the property of the unnamed keeper and in doing so, according to Blackett, were ‘likely to be acting unlawfully‘, acting ‘contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights‘, ‘were probably trespassing‘, and ‘acting as if they were the police force’.

There was also some very strange and embarrassing drivel about allegations that another [unnamed] organisation had been removing eagles from nests without licences to fit trackers which “would probably be a criminal activity“. Er, yes it would be ‘a criminal activity‘ if the people removing eagles from nests to fit trackers weren’t licensed to do so – if Mr Blackett has any evidence of this we’d urge him to report it to Police Scotland without delay.

The text of this article appears to be based entirely on unsubstantiated claims and innuendo but also looks to have been carefully ‘lawyered up’, peppered with language that would prevent any accusations of libel from sticking. It says a lot about Shooting Times that it would publish this dross.

The RSPB wrote a letter of complaint to Shooting Times the following week and the letter has finally been published this week, as follows:

‘We note, with considerable disappointment, the recent article by Jamie Blackett (Country Diary, 9 October), which contains many false and totally unsubstantiated allegations about the RSPB.

It appears that this article seeks solely to damage the RSPB’s reputation and create suspicion and distrust in the minds of your readers. Its publication does nothing to encourage constructive discussion between the shooting industry and nature conservation NGOs, and is all the more disappointing in the light of recent discussions and meetings between RSPB staff and Shooting Times, where we are trying to build bridges between our sectors.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support the apparent source of this story’s assertion that the two individuals he claimed to encounter were from the RSPB, other than his claim that they told him this. The falsities are compounded by the fact that no attempt was made either by the author or your editorial team to put them to us for comment.

RSPB staff have no powers or right to ‘inspect vehicles’ – the only time we would be involved in carrying out any search would be when we are specifically requested by the police to assist them under their instruction and immediate close supervision. Similarly, the further accusations that RSPB staff were ‘trespassing’ or are vigilantes do not stand up to scrutiny.

The final paragraph of the article suggests that the RSPB may have brought the law into disrepute by acting dishonestly. Again, we repudiate this baseless accusation.

This article is constructed entirely on false accusation and allegation and on unevidenced opinion. For clarity, we refute the allegations completely and request that you publish this letter and provide us with an apology‘.

Allie McGregor, Communications Officer, RSPB

ENDS

The Shooting Times editor chose not to publish an apology.

The article’s author, landowner Jamie Blackett, is not new to this game. George Monbiot called him out earlier this year (see here), arguing that an article in the Telegraph that had been written by Blackett was likely to encourage further harassment of Chris Packham at a time when Chris had been receiving death threats.

And according to Blackett, sacking Chris Packham would ‘save our songbirds’. Ahem.

 

Last month the Scottish animal welfare charity OneKind lodged a petition at the Scottish Parliament calling for ‘an end to the killing of wildlife on grouse moors and elsewhere in Scotland’.

Below is some background information from OneKind on why they’re calling for the Scottish Parliament to conduct a full review of the animal welfare impacts of the use of traps and snares on grouse moors and elsewhere in Scotland.

[A gruesome stink pit photographed on a grouse moor in the Angus Glens. This fox, some rabbits and a cat had been killed and then dumped in a heap so their putrefying corpses would attract the attention of passing scavengers who would then be caught in snares set close by, killed, and then added to the pile].

The focus of the review called for in this petition should be:

• The ethics and sustainability of the routine and repeated killing of the same species in the same location;
• The case for banning snares, Larsen traps and certain other types of live traps outright, on animal welfare grounds;
• The animal welfare issues surrounding lethal traps such as spring traps, both approved and non-approved categories;
• Mechanisms to ensure proper scrutiny of all practices undertaken by hunters, shooters and trappers and only to permit the use of traps under exceptional circumstances; and
• Whether activities closely associated with causing unnecessary suffering by means of trapping and snaring, such as driven grouse shooting, should be banned.

[A stoat killed in what is currently a lawful trap, set on another grouse moor in the Angus Glens. This sort of wildlife abuse is routine, with some estates hosting thousands of traps like this].

Petitions at the Scottish Parliament are different to those at Westminster – they are generally active for about six weeks, anybody from anywhere in the world can sign them and there is no minimum number of signatures required before the petition will be considered by the cross-party Petitions Committee.

OneKind’s current petition is doing moderately well with 5,542 signatures and one more week to go before it closes on Weds 13th November. It would be good to send a strong message to the Scottish Government that the systematic abuse of wildlife on Scottish grouse moors is no longer tolerable.

If you agree, please consider signing the petition HERE

Thank you

In its desperation to appear ethical and sustainable, the game shooting industry has often pretended that shot game birds all end up in the human food chain.

For example, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph in November 2005 headed ‘Game birds for eating not dumping’, Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance said this:

“Every bird shot in Britain goes into the food chain, whether into participants’ freezers, or through game dealers into an increasing number of supermarkets, butchers, pubs and restaurants“.

Regular blog readers will know this claim has been debunked time and time and time again. We’ve previously blogged about how dead game birds have been dumped in the Scottish borders (here), Norfolk (here), Perthshire (here), Berkshire (here), North York Moors National Park (here) and some more (here), Co. Derry (here), Cheshire (here), West Yorkshire (here), N Wales (here), mid-Wales (here), Leicestershire (here) and Lincolnshire (here).

As we’ve written before, it seems to be a widespread problem, doesn’t it? That’s hardly a surprise when the game shooting industry is permitted to release as many non-native pheasants and red-legged partridge as it likes (estimated to be almost 60 million EVERY YEAR), with minimal regulation, and no requirement to report on what happens to those birds once they’ve been shot for a bit of a laugh.

Well guess what? Here’s another example, this time from Clackmannanshire in Scotland. Thanks to the blog reader who sent us these images, photographed on Tues 29 October 2019 in a lay-by on the A91 between Tillicoultry and Dollar.

In defence of this vile behaviour, it’s often argued that the dead birds have been ‘de-breasted’ (i.e. the breast meat has been removed) before the carcasses are dumped. Oh well that’s alright then, nothing to be concerned about, eh? Apart from showing zero respect for the quarry and zero consideration for the local residents who’ll have to foot the bill to have the carcasses removed.

This particular case has been reported to the local authority as a fly-tipping offence.