Robert Goodwill – 2023 Speech on Snares
The speech made by Robert Goodwill, the Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby, in Westminster Hall on 9 January 2023.
First, it is important to say that no civilised person will view the taking of any animal’s life lightly, or do anything other than limit or mitigate any suffering involved. Animals are not just chess pieces to be knocked off the board. As a farmer and a countryman, I understand the need for humane tools for the control of predators. We have no livestock on my farm at the moment, and I am not a game shooter, but I understand the importance of having a balance.
We no longer have the predators, such as lynx and wolves, that will take out foxes—in the main, we are talking about foxes—although the EFRA Committee, which I chair, is starting a report on the reintroduction of species, and we may touch on those species. It is important that we have effective predator control, not only for agriculture but for wildlife.
This is not just about game shooting and the interests of gamekeepers. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out, sheep farmers often have problems with foxes as lambs are born; while the ewe is having her second lamb, the fox can come and take the first lamb before it has had a chance to get to its feet. We have more and more outdoor pigs, and we should be encouraging that more environmentally friendly and humane method of rearing pigs, but, sadly, those piglets are subject to predation. With poultry, although most farmers manage to shut their hens up at night, which is when foxes generally operate, we have seen situations where foxes that have been trapped in urban areas are released into the countryside. Sadly, those urban foxes do not understand that they are nocturnal, and they have no fear of humans. We have often had problems in rural areas where urban foxes have been hunting in the daylight; that has been an additional problem for poultry keepers.
It is important that we can protect game; the game industry is very important for rural communities and the rural economy. In a way, we are in a win-win situation. On the moorland in my constituency where grouse shooting is prevalent, the management practices—heather management and predator control—benefit not only the grouse, which cannot be bred artificially, but ground-nesting birds such as curlew, golden plover and lapwing.
Indeed, an interesting situation is developing in my constituency, where one of the estates is seeking to plant quite large areas of woodland. Those plans are being opposed, or certainly not being smiled upon, by Natural England, which is worried that those woodland areas will become a harbour for predators, which will go on to the neighbouring moorland, where there is not a grouse shoot and so no gamekeepers are operational, and wipe out large numbers of the ground-nesting birds that Natural England seeks to protect. Those ground-nesting birds, particularly the curlew, are very important.
Of course, it is also important for scientific research that there is a humane method of capturing foxes and, for example, tagging them to allow them to be tracked. I have seen video of a fox that was caught in one of the new types of cable restraint—in fact, foxes are sometimes caught on a number of occasions—and released unharmed.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) about how the new type of humane cable restraints is very different from the old self-locking snares that were made illegal in 1981—and quite right, too. As we have heard, such restraints have a number of features, including a stop that means that they will not strangle a fox, and smaller species that go into a snare will escape unharmed. They have a breakaway, meaning that if a large animal such as a deer gets into a snare, it will be able to escape by breaking the breakaway —of course, if the gamekeeper knows his job, he will not put a snare in a place where those species could be present. Finally, there is a swivel, which means that if the animal twists and turns a little when it is first caught, it will not strangle itself in the process.
It is important that cable restraints are not set near fences, for example, and that they are well anchored so that if an animal is restrained, it remains there. When the gamekeeper visits the snare, he can humanely dispatch the fox. We can have a debate about whether foxes should be a protected species, but if we need to control foxes we need to do it in the most humane way.
What are the alternatives? Shooting is the most obvious, but shooting can be very difficult near settlements and in dense vegetation. The most important argument against shooting is that if a fox is wounded—often the shots are taken from quite a distance, given the cautious nature of foxes—it can go off and die in agony of gangrene or its wound. At least with cable restraints we do not have a situation where an animal is wounded and goes off to die. There are other alternatives such as gassing and poisoning, but, again, those could mean that non-target species are affected and cannot be released unharmed.
I believe that the continued professional use by trained personnel of cable restraints is important to our management of the countryside and our wildlife. The alternatives do not bear much scrutiny in terms of their relative humaneness. Set correctly and checked every 24 hours—indeed, checked before 9 o’clock in the morning, because most foxes are nocturnal—cable restraints are an important tool in our wildlife management. I hope we will continue to responsibly use cable restraints as a way of managing our countryside and ensuring that our wildlife and our economic interests in terms of game and agriculture are protected.
