DEFRA publishes Animal Welfare Strategy – includes a ban on snares, trail hunting & a review on traps & gamebird rearing

Three days before Xmas, DEFRA published its Animal Welfare Strategy for England, laying out the Westminster Government’s priorities and a framework for the changes it seeks to achieve by 2030.

The policy paper is wide-ranging and covers farmed livestock, companion animals and wildlife.

Two Labour manifesto pledges are included – “We will ban trail hunting and snares“, and it’s encouraging to read, “We will also conduct a review of the use of other wildlife traps“.

The strategy document can be downloaded / read here:

The key ‘actions’, of interest to me, are as follows:

1. We will put an end to trail hunting and consult in early 2026 on how to deliver a ban on trail hunting.
2. We will deliver on the manifesto commitment to ban the use of snare traps in England.
3. We will conduct a review of other traps used to catch wildlife in England for which welfare concerns have been raised and carefully consider any recommendations for further action. (E.g. Older spring traps, mole traps and live capture traps used to catch corvids).
4. We will consider how to bring forward and introduce a close season for hares.
5. We will review and look to strengthen penalties for cruelty against wildlife so that they are consistent with higher levels of sentencing available for animal welfare offences against pets and livestock.
6. We will improve our understanding of the welfare issues on how gamebirds are reared in the gamebird sector through issuing a call for evidence.

Whilst a timeframe for the consultation on how to implement a ban on trail hunting has been given as ‘early 2026’ (good!), no timeline has been given on when the ban on snares will be implemented.

Given the indiscriminate level of cruelty and suffering caused by snares, this ban really needs to enacted without delay. Snares have already been banned in Wales (since October 2023) and Scotland (since November 2024).

YouGov polling commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports last year showed 71% support for a snare ban in England (the figure rose to 80% among people living in rural areas) – see here.

Last month, in response to DEFRA’s animal welfare strategy, the independent and authoritative Wild Animal Welfare Committee (WAWC) published an excellent position paper on snares – well worth a read:

I’m especially pleased to see in the animal welfare strategy for England that a review on other wildlife traps will take place (although again, no timescale is given for this), and particularly pleased to see that it includes crow cage traps.

The use and mis-use of these traps have featured heavily on the pages of this blog over the years, especially on gamebird shooting estates. Apart from the appallingly low welfare standards they afford to both decoy and trapped birds, they are also frequently used to facilitate the illegal killing of birds of prey.

Sometimes the use of these traps for illegal persecution is targeted (i.e. by using decoys specifically to attract raptors, e.g. pigeons and doves) but it can also be non-targeted. When a raptor is caught, accidentally, inside one of these traps, by law the trap operator should release the bird, unharmed, at the earliest possible time. However, repeated evidence, usually provided by RSPB covert cameras, has shown gamekeepers taking the opportunity to kill the trapped raptor, typically by bludgeoning it to death with a big stick there and then, or in recent years, the trapped raptor has been bagged up and carried away from the location, presumably to be killed without the risk of it being filmed.

Any proposal to improve animal welfare standards is to be welcomed and I applaud the Westminster Government for acknowledging that measures are needed across the board.

There’s clearly a lot of work to do and we are fortunate to have some excellent animal welfare charities and organisations in the UK whose input will be crucial to ensure this strategy is implemented as comprehensively, robustly and quickly as possible.