UPDATE 12th September 2022: This event has been postponed due to recent events. It has been rescheduled for 29th October 2022 (here).
REVIVE Coalition partner OneKind, the animal welfare charity, is hosting a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament on Saturday 17th September, from 11.30am to 1pm, calling for a complete ban on the manufacture, sale and use of snares in Scotland.
Thousands of snares are deployed on game-shooting estates every year, which maim and kill animals in order to protect stocks of red grouse, pheasants and partridge for ‘sport’ shooting. It’s currently legal to snare some species (e.g. foxes), despite the inhumane method, but as snares are indiscriminate up to 80% of species caught are non-target species, according to DEFRA figures, and these species include badgers, otters, deer and pet cats and dogs. This shocking report from the REVIVE coalition for grouse moor reform provides more detail.
The demonstration on 17th September is timed to coincide with the Scottish Government’s current review of snaring legislation and OneKind’s CEO Bob Elliot has written an excellent account of why a ban is needed and how this demo could help achieve that aim (see here).
For more information about the demo and to register your attendance, please see here.
If you’re unable to attend, please consider sending a letter to Environment Minister Mairi McAllan using this e-letter template from OneKind, urging the Government to introduce a full ban on the manufacture, sale and use of snares in Scotland.
Raptor Persecution UK 
This charity among others is doing great work to bring an end to snaring. Their field surveys and reports, photos, etc are excellent. However, people need to understand that often it is not just a few snares around a stink pit in one or two woods as if at random. It is, as ever – a well worked out industrial scale effort. On many (buy in fairness not all) big estates it is the case that habitat is manipulated very strategically over a wide area in lower parts of the estate (not on the heather) ie trees felled or brashed, pathways created with strimmers / weedkiller, bits of walls pulled down, stock fencing modified etc across a whole part of (say) a lower valley of small woods interlinked by hedges / walls / streams so that animals are first enticed by curiousity then funnelled in to an area where (unless they retrace their steps exactly) if they seek cover they will unavoidably be encircled by lines of snares. The only idea I sometimes have is for some clever tech person to create a VR POV & aerial view simulation in combination which follows the progress of a fox / badger / deer / dog ‘s point of view as it walks innocently into one of these valleys of death.
*The key principle is (as any upland keeper will tell you) that unless there is unkeepered ground on a high estate boundary, all your problem “vermin” will arrive coming “up” from lower down the valleys eg. juvenile foxes exploring in autumn, so your lower boundaries are where you create your defensive network of heavily snared woods & cover. I don’t advocate the vandalism of any property including snares, but if you chose to walk alongside a line of snares and just happen to be wearing old boots you recently splashed fence preserver / creosote on while doing DIY…then so be it…
Good luck to them!