Snares danger to all animals
NO Santa and Rudolph gags please, but this little critter was in a bad way last week as Joanie Lucy Edge and I were out walking.
Caught up in the undergrowth, exhausted and very shocked, she had a two-day-old injury on her leg which was consistent with a snare, especially the way the skin had slid up the leg, but this wound was in fact healing, and after checking her all over, there were no obvious signs of injury.
I lifted her up on all fours, and she seemed to pick up and steady herself before making off, somewhat gingerly, into the woods.
We retraced our steps half an hour later and there was no sign, so fingers crossed.
This photograph, taken by Joanie, touched the hearts of many people when I shared them on Facebook with over 1,000 likes and comments and I steered them all to these pages. Wendy Peacock of Mossley was on the money with her observation, ‘You can clearly tell by how the little deer looks that although stressed and exhausted it knew you were there to help.
‘Amazing. Great work and on behalf of the little deer thank you. I hope to God that it wasn’t a snare, but if it is then I think a search for these dangerous deliberate items should be done as it’s not just deer that can be caught up in them but other animals’.
Firstly, as you can see from the picture here, Wendy is right, the deer does look calm and it certainly did not struggle when I held in my arms.
Truth is, we didn’t have much time to think about it, as we were trying to ascertain if the deer was okay and Luna the pup was barking.
Thankfully the Schnauzer, Guinness, met the deer nose-to-nose, which strangely, also seemed to soothe the animal and she did not struggle once as I checked her over.
To pick up on Wendy’s other point about snares, she is correct again, they are outdated, barbaric and indiscriminate instruments of torture.
And what makes it worse, in some situations, they are legal.
Snares are used extensively on ‘game’ bird shoots and are simply thin wire nooses set to trap animals which some people view as being a pest or threat, usually foxes and rabbits.
They are intended to catch the animals around the neck like a lasso.
Many people are surprised that this archaic form of animal trapping is still allowed, believing it was outlawed decades ago.
But it is still legal to use a certain type of snare in the UK.
The snare is meant to tighten around an animal and hold it until a gamekeeper from the shoot comes to kill it.
But the reality is shocking.
In their desperate struggle to escape, animals may be strangled or may suffer horrible and sometimes lifethreatening injuries, or a lingering death.
Our deer may have escaped after the wire became loose, which sometimes happens.
Even if the snare does not kill the animal, they may still die at the hands of a predator, dehydration or exposure to the elements.
The League Against Cruel Sports is doing everything it can to protect animals from snares.
Snares are indiscriminate, because these wire traps cannot tell the difference between a fox, your family pet, a protected species or even a child.
As a result, the amount and diversity of animals that fall victim to these snare traps is immense.
Snares capture any animal that happens to step into them.
In 2012 a UK government study found that only around a quarter of the animals caught in snares were the intended targets (normally foxes).
The remaining threequarters of the animals caught, severely injured or killed in these vicious nooses included hares, badgers, family cats and dogs, deer and even otters.
In the UK, snares can be either legal or illegal, depending on the design.
All legal snare designs are intended to be ‘free running’ so that when the animal stops struggling, the wire loop should relax.
Illegal self-locking snares will continuously tighten.
However, the legislation regarding snare design is vague, and dual purpose, or AB, snares have the capacity to be self-locking and are still legal.
Even legal ‘freerunning’ snares can be rusted or faulty and, as such, can still cause severe injuries or death to the animals caught in them.
Legal snares can also be set in the wrong way or the wrong place, increasing their potential to cause more suffering and catch non-targeted animals.
Furthermore, DEFRA’s code of best practices instructs that all snares set should be checked twice a day, morning and night, in order to minimise animal suffering, though high records of animal deaths in snares implies otherwise.
Readers will be pleased to hear that our deer seems to have survived as there was no sign of her.
Fingers crossed.