Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Logical rule on invasive species – but is it worth it?
Ministers want to stop animal charities treating invasive species. Are they right? asks Philip Bowern
SLEDGEHAMMERS and nuts spring to mind when considering the latest animal-related order to come out of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Licences issued to animal welfare charities, allowing them to release invasive species like grey squirrels and muntjac deer back into the wild following treatment for injury or disease, are set to be revoked. Cue outrage from animal charities and headlines in the national press along the lines of ‘Michael Gove orders killing of sick squirrels and deer’.
The logic for revoking the licences may be sound. But Mr Gove might be asking himself if it is worth all the trouble it is potentially causing him and his department when there are more pressing political issues on the agenda right now?
Animal charities in the South West – including Somerset’s Secret World – have already started a campaign against the order. And approaching 50,000 people have signed a petition on the parliamentary website to make grey squirrels exempt from the ban on releasing invasive alien species. If the petition can gather over 100,000 names by June, the issue will have to be debated by MPs.
That, however, will probably be too late. The orders currently in place allowing the welfare groups to release animals they have treated are due to run out on March 29. Although Defra insists headlines suggesting Michael Gove is ordering the killing of all invasive species are overblown there is a clear intention to make it illegal for charities like Secret World to take in injured mammals like grey squirrels or muntjac deer, because treating and releasing them would be a technical offence.
Yet the numbers – compared to the wild populations of these invasive species – are tiny. Licences to release around 500 grey squirrels are currently in place. The grey squirrel population in the UK measures around 2.5 million. It might be logical for Mr Gove and his civil servants to close a loophole that goes against the overall policy of reducing grey squirrel numbers – but it’s a very small loophole indeed.
That said, the Government is taking a robust response thus far to the howls of outrage. In reply to the peti- tioners who want an exemption for grey squirrels, it says: “Invasive species, including the grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), challenge the survival of our rarest species and damage some of our most sensitive ecosystems. In the case of the grey squirrel, our native red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) is most notably affected. The impacts of invasive nonnative species on our domestic and global biodiversity are severe and growing and are estimated to cost the GB economy more than £1.7 billion per year.”
Yet there is an irony in the fact that as recently as 2014 a law was in place making it an offence to fail to tell the authorities if you spotted a grey squirrel in your garden. Acknowledging they were fighting a losing battle against the grey invaders – brought to the UK from the United States in Victorian times to prettify country estates – ministers scrapped the law. It had been enacted in 1937 to try to halt the advance of the invasive greys, which damage woodland and carry the squirrel pox which infects native red squirrels and has helped to put the reds on the danger list.
Solicitor-General Oliver Heald told MPs in 2014, when the order was dropped, that it was “no longer considered feasible to eradicate grey squirrels so the requirement to report their presence on one’s land is no longer useful or observed.”
The Red Squirrel Trust, fighting to bring back the native species to the British Isles, said it was uncomfortable that the rule had been scrapped saying it was “one step closer to accepting a non-native invasive species”. It is widely acknowledged that where red squirrels are to be successfully reintroduced, greys need to be eradicated. In West Cornwall, where a red squirrel project backed by Prince Charles is under way, there are strenuous efforts to wipe out the greys. Humane methods must always be used – and there is growing interest from top chefs in creating dishes with the meat of grey squirrels to avoid waste.
Nevertheless telling members of the public – including children in urban areas who have little interaction with wildlife – that the baby grey squirrel they took to the local animal rescue centre should be knocked on the head is a difficult thing to do. Michael Gove – forced to admit a nodeal Brexit could lead to soaring food prices and damage to UK agriculture – ought to have bigger things on his mind.
Invasive species are a nut that does need cracking – but with a sledgehammer?
It is no longer feasible to eradicate grey
squirrels’ OLIVER HEALD, SOLICITOR GENERAL,
2014