Every effort must be made to ease the pressure on the Irish Hare
Another season of cruel coursing has concluded and in the coming months, there will be an application for licences to capture thousands more hares for this deplorable bloodsport.
Hopefully Heritage Minister Darragh O'Brien and Minister of State for Nature Malcolm Noonan will finally stand up for the persecuted Irish Hare and say "NO".
Netting hares from the wild, manhandling them, transporting them in boxes, holding them in captivity and forcing them to run for their lives is undeniably detrimental to these timid and delicate creatures.
Hares caught by the muzzled greyhounds are pummelled into the ground and suffer awful injuries. Among the victims – as revealed in National Parks and Wildlife Service monitoring reports - were a mauled hare “squealing in distress”, a hare who died with a spinal injury, a hare with a broken back who “could not move its hind legs” and a hare in agony with a leg “almost completely broken off”.
There are growing fears for the future of this species which is in depressing decline. The latest population estimate of 223,000 (extrapolated from sightings of just a few hundred hares) is less than half of a 2007 estimate of around 500,000 hares. In the same period, the average hare density has dramatically dropped by 58% from 7 to 3 hares per square kilometre.
As the effects of climate change escalate, the woes of wildlife will worsen. A study entitled “The Irish hare: from the ice age to the present" warned that the hare's “suitable climatic space will contract by 75% over the next 50 years”.
In the midst of a government-declared biodiversity emergency, every effort must be made to ease the pressure on the Irish Hare and this has to include an immediate end to all hare coursing, hunting and shooting.
We can't allow it to become a case of hare today, gone tomorrow for this beloved icon of the natural world.
Philip Kiernan
Irish Council Against Blood Sports PO Box 88, Mullingar, Co Westmeath, Ireland