AMs consider ban on snares in Wales
Snares could be banned in Wales if farmers and gamekeepers do not abide by a voluntary code of best practice, a crossparty group of AMs has said.
The National Assembly’s climate change, environment and rural affairs committee wants the Welsh Government to prepare draft legislation to be used if snare-users flout the code of best practice on their use, launched in 2015.
However, the committee stopped short of recommending an immediate ban on the use of snares.
Critics such as the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS), whose 1,405name petition prompted the inquiry, had argued snares were inhumane and killed thousands of non-target species.
The committee advocated a stepped approach to the issue, starting with an annual review of the code of best practice.
If this threw up failures, AMs want the Welsh Government to tighten the law with sanctions for non-compliance.
And if this voluntary approach was shown to be failing, the committee suggested a Scottish-style system, including the potential licensing of snare-users.
In Scotland, snares must have safety loops fitted, users must attend a training course and their personal identification number must be displayed on individual snares.
The committee also recommended that the liability for prosecution be switched from users to landowners – this would overcome the traditional difficulty of securing convictions for illegal snares.
Only if these “reformed enforcement measures” failed to curb illicit snaring should the Welsh Government consider a complete snare ban as a last resort, said the committee.
The Countryside Alliance gave the report a cautious welcome, but said an annual review may be an unnecessary and costly process.
Director for Wales Rachel Evans said: “We very much welcome this report and on balance the recommendations are sensible. We emphasise the committee’s recommendation to work with stakeholders and to improve training and enforcement, and feel strongly that those using snares should only use code-compliant snares and abide by the code.”
Snares are typically used to control foxes and rabbits. Other species that can legally be snared include rats, grey squirrels and mink.
However opponents argue that significant numbers of non-target species are caught, including badgers, hares, pheasants, deer, cats and dogs.
It has been claimed that an increase in the use of snares in Wales may be linked to a rise in game bird rearing.
“As the committee found, there is a lack of evidence on the scale, efficacy and humaneness of snare-use in Wales,” said Plaid Cymru AM Simon Thomas.
Self-locking snares, which continue to tighten the more an animal struggles, are already banned. Freerunning snares, which are designed to slacken once an animal stops pulling, are legal in the UK.
In its evidence to the inquiry, LACS claimed that enforcing the code of best practice was difficult as most of the snares were on private land.
It said: “The only person who’s going to see them is the landowner or the person that set them up. How do you ensure that the code works when it is self-policed by those that set the snares?”
In the Senedd, Rural Affairs Secretary Lesley Griffiths pledged to accept another of the report’s recommendations – to ban the use of non-code-compliant snares on Welsh Government-owned land.
As Natural Resources Wales does not use snares on its woodland estate, this ban is largely in place already.
LACS believes that, as snaring can be indiscriminate, trapping and shooting are both preferable.
In evidence it argued there were alternatives such as shepherding and allowing the “self-regulation of the fox population”.
In response, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and Countryside Alliance said pack fox-hunting was long banned and shooting was not practical at certain times of the year.
The Alliance said: “I think we’ve moved on from the days when you could afford to put a shepherd on the top of a mountain just to control foxes.”
While LACS has been denied an immediate ban, snare-users may not yet be out of the woods. The Welsh Government has issued a further call for evidence on snare use.