Shot hares dumped ‘in message to coursers’
Did a landowner shoot nine hares and leave them at by a road to keep coursers away? Philip Bowern reports
HARE coursing was once a regulated and legal sport. It was banned under the 2004 Hunting Act – quite properly in many people’s eyes – but it has certainly not gone away. Illegal hare coursing has flourished in recent years and this week evidence emerged of what could be the desperate measures some land owners are taking to try to thwart the coursers who trespass on their land.
The BBC reports that nine hares were found shot and dumped along a roadside in Somerset. It quotes the founder of the animal welfare group, Somerset Wildlife Crime, who believes the hares were shot to discourage hare coursers, who have a reputation for using violence against land owners who try to prevent them from entering their fields.
Bobbie Armstrong said: “Landowners have been shooting hares in order to prevent hare coursers from trespassing on their land
“To look at this from my point of view that would be my immediate suspicion - it’s been done by a landowner who’s left a very clear message to any hare coursers in that area that there’s no hares to course on his land.”
The nine hares were discovered on the A372 between Aller and Langport on the Somerset Levels on Friday. The dead animals were placed along the road at six-foot intervals, suggesting whoever carried out the shooting wanted to send a very clear message to anyone expecting to be able to go coursing.
Autumn marks the start of the ille
gal hare coursing season because most arable fields have been harvested opening up the ground for dogs – usually lurchers and greyhounds – to pursue hares. The activity is concentrated in the east of England and southern grain growing countries, but in other areas where there is a population of hares and open ground, it is also said to be spreading.
Brown hares are not protected and can be shot all year round, but pressure on their numbers, mostly due to habitat loss, has led to growing calls for either a closed season to be introduced or a total ban. Many shooting estates no longer take hares. Overall
‘Lots of people are distressed to see such a wanton, needless slaughter’ BOBBIE ARMSTRONG
numbers have fallen from around four million to just 700,000.
In some areas of the country conservationists say they are locally extinct and after the water vole they claim it is the second British mammal to have suffered the greatest decline in the last century.
Avon and Somerset police have been informed about the shooting of the hares on the Somerset Levels and Ms Armstrong said she believed they would have endured unnecessary suffering.
She told the BBC at least one animal she had examined had suffered injuries to its hindquarters. “I would not say it was a painless death. This is probably an animal that endured unnecessary suffering and died as a result of that.”
She posted a picture of one of the dead mammals on social media, has provoked outrage and upset. “Lots of people are really quite distressed to see such a wanton needless slaughter of our hares. People have a real fondness for them,” Ms Armstrong said.
“They don’t any damage – it’s quite upsetting to see nine brown hares dumped on the side of the road when they are in decline.”
The Countryside Alliance has campaigned against illegal hare coursing and the impact it has on rural areas. CA chief executive Tim Bonner wrote, at the end of last year: “If you live in the East of England, or in others areas of the country with a high density of hares, you will almost certainly have come across the signs of hare poaching which has become endemic in many areas.
“Gates blocked, ditches dug along roads, 4 x 4 tracks across fields, and hedges flattened. This is not the romantic poaching of yore when a local took his lurcher out to take a hare for the pot, but organised criminality carried out by people with no respect for private property or wildlife.”
Mr Bonner argues that the Hunting Act is designed only to prevent competitive hunting, in which two greyhounds, one in a red collar, one in a white, were judged against each other in pursuit of a hare and is rarely used to prosecute illegal coursers.
He adds: “A significant number of people have been convicted of illegal hare coursing under Section 1 of the Hunting Act which prohibits the pursuit of any wild mammal with a dog.”
But the Alliance is calling for the law to stop illegal coursing to be strengthened to give the police and the courts powers to seize vehicles, dogs and other property used in coursing and to retrieve kennelling costs from those convicted.
It also wants magistrates advised to dish out tougher sentences for offenders and measures to make sure proper records are kept of hare coursing convictions, to assess the true scale of the problem