Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you for inviting me to give more evidence on the bill. I wrote to the committee in August, saying that I intend to introduce amendments at stage 2 of the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill to ban the use of snares. I also intend to lodge amendments for a limited extension to the current powers of the Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to investigate wildlife crime. Scotland already has strict rules governing the use of snares. However, I cannot ignore the weight of evidence that snares can and do lead to high levels of suffering. Their indiscriminate nature also means that non-target animals are frequently caught, including protected species such as badgers. I do not believe that further regulation would address those fundamental issues, and I believe that a ban on the use of snares is needed. I have, however, only very recently received proposals from land management groups for a licensing regime. I think that that came in on Monday night—I have not had time to consider that proposal fully but will respond in due course.

Regarding the SSPCA’s powers, my amendments will allow inspectors who are already investigating animal welfare offences to use their existing powers to seize and secure any evidence of related wildlife crimes. That will aid the detection of offences by allowing evidence to be gathered without delay.

To be clear, Police Scotland will retain primacy over the investigation of all wildlife offences. These are important issues but they are also very emotive and I have not made those decisions lightly. I have listened closely to stakeholders and have carefully considered all available evidence, including the independent reviews of snaring and the SSPCA’s powers.

Thank you, Mr Fairlie. I hope that you feel better soon. It sounded like that was a struggle.

I can outline the different types of predator control that will be available if snares are banned. The appropriate method of control depends on a number of factors, including the legal status of the predator, the topography of the land and the kind of livestock that is being protected. Mr Fairlie was absolutely correct about that.

The method most used at the moment is shooting, including at night—that is the predominant method for controlling foxes in particular. Trapping is also available, including live-capture traps. Dogs can be used to flush foxes to guns for the protection of livestock, as per the Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Act 2023.

Farmers and land managers can take other steps to protect their livestock, including a lot of the things that they do already, such as housing their livestock during vulnerable periods; using fences, including electric ones, to protect their livestock; and diversionary feeding if they have an issue with a particular predator. Those are the non-capture and non-lethal methods; the humane lethal method that is used is shooting.

Mr Fairlie asked what other countries do. I cannot remember exactly what happens in every country, but I have been given a helpful list. In Europe, snares are banned in most European Union countries; indeed, Germany, which is a big hunting nation—it is probably second only to Scotland for game shooting—has banned snaring. A couple of countries including Spain and France have not yet banned snares, but the majority of EU countries have. Of course, Mr Fairlie will also be aware that our colleagues in the Welsh Parliament and Government recently banned snares completely.

I think that I was given this portfolio in mid-June. The day after I appeared before the committee to give stage 1 evidence, I met with Scottish Land & Estates and agreed to give it and other stakeholders that are involved in land management, particularly on shooting estates, an opportunity to have a round-table meeting with me, specifically on humane cable restraints. That round-table meeting took place in St Andrews house at the end of September. It lasted for a good hour to 90 minutes, during which time stakeholders were able to put forward quite a lot of detail with regard to what you are talking about. I have been in touch with those stakeholders and I have been able to have meetings with them whenever they have asked for them.

On engagement prior to that, I have a list of the ministerial meetings with stakeholders on the bill and I can forward that to the committee, if the convener would like that. I met with Scottish Land & Estates on 28 June and with RSPB on 20 July. I had a round-table meeting on humane cable restraints on 26 September, which included quite a lot of stakeholders. I met with the British Association for Shooting and Conservation on 3 October, NFU Scotland on 17 October and OneKind on 24 October, and I had a further meeting with RSPB Scotland on 20 September. I have made myself available to any group that wants to advocate one way or the other with regard to snares and working practices for groups such as RSPB Scotland, gamekeepers or anybody involved with the management of shooting estates.

I hope that all those bodies would say that I have made myself available. I have watched the evidence that this committee has taken—I watched it very thoroughly before my first appearance at the committee—and I have continued to engage with all those groups. However, well before I was given this appointment, in June, my officials were working on the bill and with all those stakeholders.

I gave a commitment to SLE and other partners off the back of the round-table meeting, at which they were advocating for a licensing scheme and the use of humane cable restraints in some situations. I offered them the opportunity to provide me with the detail of what they would want to see in a licensing scheme. I got that detail only on Monday night—48 hours ago. Given that I made the offer to them to look at what they proposed, it is incumbent on me to do so, and I and my officials are still looking at it.

I could not agree more. There are people who are acting completely responsibly and who care about the environment, wildlife and animal welfare who are being tarred with the same brush as the very small number of people perpetrating wildlife crime. I hope that we will look back on all the legislation that we are proposing and say that it has been a good thing for the reputation of people who have been maligned in many cases and tarred with that brush. It is a very good point.

It is a question of whether we have that data. I do not know how we would know how many foxes have been shot as a result of being caught in a snare—I do not know what record keeping would be involved in that.

I completely take on board the convener’s point about scrutiny, and I have said that we will lodge amendments.

Let me go back to our reasons for not putting a ban on snaring in the original draft. We did not do so because of the work that Rachael Hamilton is asking us to do; we were approached by stakeholders who were advocating for us to look at humane cable restraints. That is what we have been doing over the summer: we have been working with those stakeholders and others, we have been taking advice, and we have put out a consultation on that specific issue.

In good faith, I have not steamed ahead and said, “We are not even going to look at that—there is going to be a full ban.” From June to November, we have been doing everything associated with arriving at a final position. We had the round-table meeting and I offered to look at what stakeholders would like to see in a licensing scheme, but that information came back to me only on Monday.

Yes. I was saying they are allowed to be used only in certain—very limited—circumstances by law.

Let me go back to my initial point in my statement. Regardless of proposals that have been put to us about licensing—which we need to dig into, and which we need to take time to consider—we believe that more humane methods of wildlife control, such as shooting and trapping, are available to land managers here as they are in other countries across Europe. The Welsh Government and Parliament have also made a decision on that.

I am confident that a ban on the use of snares would not prevent anyone from undertaking necessary wildlife management. As I have mentioned, there are other landowners involved in conservation who do not believe that snaring is necessary. Snares are already used only in very limited circumstances under the current legislation; they cannot be used in situations where they might attract other species or where species that they are not intended to trap might unintentionally get caught. That still happens, regardless of the professionalism of the individual who sets the snare.

That is my starting point. Had we not had calls from SLE to consider humane cable restraints, we would have put that in the bill. That would have been our starting point, and I would have dealt with all of that in the initial evidence session. We are taking the time, however, to do all the work required in that respect.

My starting point is that I am not at all convinced that we can continue with snares in Scotland because of the animal welfare issues with any kind of snare. There are other methods that have been used successfully in other countries in Europe, and we might need to adapt and use those methods, which are effective.

The monitoring aspect, to my knowledge, also came up during the passage of the Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Bill, so how we are going to monitor the effectiveness of the bill is a reasonable question. Obviously, the Scottish Government will monitor the effectiveness of any legislation that it introduces. Also, committees can do post-legislative scrutiny, and it is within the gift of the committee to do its scrutiny.

The Government and the agencies will obviously monitor the effectiveness of what they are doing. We have routine tranches of work that are done on things such as the impact on biodiversity—the state of nature report, for example. NatureScot has the task of monitoring biodiversity and species management. The Scottish Government also has strong relationships with land managers, and, if the bill is passed, I will continue to have conversations with stakeholders about the effectiveness of the laws that the Parliament has put through and where there are issues that we might be able to look at.

Jim Fairlie just brought up the issue of licensing under the Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Act 2023. I will take that away. I should have said to him before he went that he is welcome to write to me about that issue. In the same way, the Government will continue to listen to people who are impacted by the legislation that we pass.

I guess that data collection will relate to biodiversity as well, but it will be about the conversations that we will have with stakeholders over the time in which that legislation is put in place.