Think it's time to ban fox snares? Let's start with banning cars?



 

For a number of people, the killing of any animal whether that be; livestock to eat, protection of crops, assistance to a threatened species or gamebirds for sport is, on moral grounds, just wrong.

Such a straightforward and clear-cut position neatly avoids forming a view about what is, and is not, acceptable when tackling complicated conservation issues. I am,  as Ian Carter of Natural England said in British Birds, rather envious of this simplicity.

 

This view of life also works for those calling for a complete ban on snares in England and Wales; on the same moral grounds snares are wrong. They are designed to trap (not kill) animals, like foxes, which may then then be shot.

Discussion about trapping any animal is very serious but let’s continue with this idea of keeping things simple. If we accept that the killing of a fox is wrong on moral grounds – we could have to also say…

…the time has come for us to address one of the bigger killers of foxes - cars

The Mammal Society estimate cars kill an estimated 100k foxes a year. Is your journey more important than a fox? Yes? Well you have had 80 years to sort it out but still the killing by cars continues. The time for a ban has come.

It may sound a bit odd at first, but this fictitious press release calling for cars to be banned from our roads. If follows the same logic as a recent petition calling for the banning of snares.
 

Fox Protection Society launches petition to ban cruel and barbaric cars

Organisation: Fox Protection Society

Date: 25.09.13

A petition has been set up by the Fox Protection Society calling for a complete ban on the use of motor cars in England and Wales.

The petition was launched after the launch of the Society's manifesto to ban cars. The report showed current voluntary code of practice (the Highway Code, which was introduced in over 80 years ago in 1931) simply does not work. Anything in contact with the tarmac (including humans) and anything winging its way across the killing pathway is doomed.

Previous calls for clear “best practice” guidelines for drivers, which includes a national 30 mph speed limit at night to reduce mammal kill and calls to cut driving speeds on warm summer days to reduce insect kill have been ignored. A complete ban on car use is the only way to stop more animal suffering.

Throughout October  the animal welfare charity will be upping its anti-car campaign with the launch of its Car Aware month aimed at raising the public's awareness of the barbarity of cars.

Working alongside fellow animal charities, the Society are releasing daily case studies to highlight the horrific suffering car traffic causes to pets and British wildlife.

Basil Brush, Chief Executive at the Society, commented: "Cars cause a horrendous amount of pointless animal suffering to which car users are generally indifferent, yet shockingly car use remains legal. With the launch of Car Aware Month we seek to change this. Already individuals have given us their support and we are confident that as awareness grows, so will the number of petition signatures."

Almost everyone in Britain uses cars, and the machines commonly kill or injure wild animals and pets.  Although sensible driving taking into account wildlife hazards would prevent much or most of the problem, the evidence is that drivers are heedless of the risks and of the suffering they leave behind them.  The nature of cars also means that all such deaths and suffering are unintended, incidental to the purpose of car driving, and therefore unnecessary.  Despite the enormous value of the car industry, no efforts have been made by manufacturers to improve cars so as to lessen the risk of accidents involving animals.

Supporting the Society's campaign, Vet Jemima Puddle-duck: "Cars are a particularly cruel and inhumane force acting on our wildlife and pets. When accidents are not fatal, the injuries inflicted on animals by cars can be truly horrific and it is well past the time to make these devices illegal. As a vet and animal lover I fully support the move to get the use of cars banned in the UK and urge others to do the same."

The Society is calling on members of the public to write to their local councils to request that cars are not permitted on local roads. The charity has also issued a warning to pet owners to be vigilant to the threat of cars to their pets.

Notes

There are about 30 million motor vehicles on Britain’s roads. To take one wildlife species as an example, the Mammal Society Road Deaths Survey estimated that 100,000 foxes are killed on Britain’s roads annually; an unknown further number are injured. To put this into context, Britain’s gamekeepers – who kill foxes deliberately to protect ground-nesting wild birds – kill an estimated 39,000 foxes annually.

This call for the complete ban on cars, on moral grounds alone, neatly avoids any wider discussion. No mention about why cars are used or what would be lost without their use. The issues are complex. Just like snaring, saying something is wrong, and starting a petition, does not, on its own, make it wrong. The detail needs careful consideration.

Is it acceptable for cars to still kill foxes so you can make that car journey? but not acceptable to use a snare in the spring or summer to save a curlew, or other ground nesting bird? Not even at sites where other methods of fox control become impractical because of the growth of vegetation cover, especially among arable crops?

For those looking for hard factual information about snares the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) has, over the years, contributed to that discussion by conducted research to understand about both the utility of snaring and its drawbacks. For more information on the development on more effective snares and operating practices click here.

Hen harrier recovery - as easy as building houses

Yesterday I had the pleasure of travelling up to London on the train. As we passed though beautiful towns and villages, commuters were reading column inches devoted to the recent idea of capping house prices to 5%. This has been floated as the way we could avoid another housing bubble. For those living along the Southampton to London railway line this is a real issue. On the letters page I saw another solution suggested; increase the supply by building more houses. Sounds like a simple idea.

This got me thinking. If we already have Building Regulations to ensure we build good quality, safe housing and it's old fashioned Planning Permission standing between us and another housing bubble; lets scrap the latter. Let people build where they want to live; start filling trenches with concrete and start bricking up urban Victorian terraces at say 60-80 dwellings per hectare; rather than the 25-30 dwellings per hectare as we do now. The market can take the place of these old fashioned planning laws. People will stop building houses when they can't sell them.

If people want to live in, say, Surrey we could study the maps and identify all the land that could be build on. We could calculate the maximum number of houses that could ever be built in Surrey. This exact number could be the new target. Anything less than that is utterly unacceptable. The builders are busy, farmers sell up and moved further out; why were we ever thinking of farming in Surrey anyway? Housing bubble avoided. Accommodation is maximised. The perfect plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite obviously, lots. However it would not be a complete disaster because the houses are all full. That just leaves one small problem. Now the once beautiful countryside has been trashed, the people the houses were built for have, in turn, left. Let's hope no-one ever checks up on this minor detail.

I feel there are some parallels with conservation. As conservation organisations grapple with a Hen Harrier recovery programme in England, there a temptation to do follow the same simple house building logic.

Step 1 - As with house building - study the maps and calculate the maximum number of Hen Harriers that could live in the English Pennines. Set this as the target. Anything below this is see as utter failure.

Step 2 - Commit every available resource to ensure the maximum density target is achieved. Any other impacts on economic, employment, social or other wildlife species are ignored because there is only one target.

Step 3 - Look confused after the event when the hen harrier population crashes because it no longer wishes to live there. The Pennine moors, now utterly changed, are no longer attractive to hen harriers and many other species. An issue heighted before on this blog here.

Step 4 - Blame the politicians for their failure to avoid the disaster.


I feel this illustrates why any hen harrier recovery programme must be sustainable; just as we must build new houses at a sustainable way:

• new housing must be spread evenly across available space, so does the hen harrier population. The hen harriers tend to aggregate so to achieve even dispersal there will need a proper plan to intervene. They will not be able to do this on their own.
• new housing must be built to a sustainable density which may be less than the maximum possible. So with hen harriers we need to reflect on what the sustainable population number is. A population that can thrive but may not necessarily be the maximum possible. That number has to be agreed at the beginning and so will the ability to intervene when targets are reached. A wildlife population can't always do this on its own.
• new housing must be built with local employment and wildlife impacts in mind - so must the hen harrier. A species that has been proven to, quite literally, put game keepers out of a jobs. The plan will need to explain how these other essentials are protected too.
• new housing must not extinguish the original motivation for living there - Hen harriers want to live on grouse moors because the keepers set the conditions they need to thrive. If the keepers leave we then lose, as we have in Wales, some of the species we cherish the most.

If we over simplify the issues involved, will the new hen harrier conflict resolution process end just as the last one did, with some conservationists simply standing up and walking out of the room? We are fortunate that all these issues are know. The hard facts are there; such as this published scientific paper by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust in 1998, and demonstrated in a real study here. A solution is entirely possible if we recognise the resolution will require a plan that recognises all, not a select few, of the issues involved.

"Mega reintroductions" - a convenient distraction away from our failure to halt wildlife declines?

The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) has been directly involved in reintroductions for over 80 years. These have all been part of planned conservation efforts to either halt local declines or re-introduce locally extinct species; such as our pioneering work on the water vole. Many other organisations have also achieved significant results on butterflies and other species; but are we now tempted by the discussion on "mega-reintroductions", of say the lynx, as a convenient distraction away from the harsh reality that we need a fresh approach to conservation? Is it easier to talk about romantic "once-native" reintroductions than it is to agree that our existing focus on protection and prescription alone is not enough? Is it easier than starting to discuss a whole new approach to conservation? Perhaps we all recognise that a shift is required, but struggle to fully embrace the thought and so are looking for a distraction? Reintroductions provoke many questions and Ian Lindsay, our Director of Advisory & Education, asked some of them in a fascinating article published in the NFU's Countryside magazine. I found it thought provoking and have included it in full for you. The links are mine. Enjoy.

Starts:
The recently-published State of Nature report, a comprehensive review of UK biodiversity carried out by a number of UK conservation organisations, paints a depressing picture of our attempts, to date, to meet important UK conservation targets.

Farmland birds continue to decline, upland waders in Wales, arguably, have reached functional extinction and many of our internationally-important species, black grouse amongst them, continue to suffer from significant range reduction.

Against this background, the fascination by the media and the profile given by conservation organisations and government agencies to the reintroduction of 'once-native species' may seem strange. Perhaps though, to a largely disengaged public, inured to a diet of unremitting environmental angst, it provides an easy win, a good news story diverting attention from our failure to reverse the declines of many species we already have. And, it seems, the bigger, more charismatic and celebrity-friendly, the better!

A high profile is being given to existing and proposed reintroductions, such as red kites, sea eagles, beavers and lynx. But parallel to this are concerns and substantial resources devoted to the control of introduced alien species, including North American mink, ruddy duck and parakeets.

The argument, of course, is that such species are non-native, that our indigenous animal communities lack evolved strategies to compete with them and, as a result, they pose significant conservation problems. Perhaps the best-known example of this is mink and their on-going threat to our endangered native water vole populations.

Of course, the reintroduction of red kites and sea eagles to the UK has proven to be a huge, well-publicised success. No doubt, these are magnificent birds adding to the pleasure of many people who visit the countryside. But how far are we aware, or, indeed, how much do we care about the impacts of many of these species.

Already, concerns exist over the impact of sea eagles on the distribution and abundance of golden eagles and hen harriers; iconic species in the own right, with high conservation designations. Elsewhere, there are concerns in the Chilterns over the impacts of red kite predation on local declining amphibian populations.

Of course, these species have shared evolutionary history and once co-existed in some post-glacial panacea but, like alien re-introductions, seam quite capable of exerting significant consequences on the status quo of today's fragile and fragmented ecosystems.

And all of this is quite apart from impacts on human activities, particularly in economically fragile rural communities. To an urban public or a government conservation department bereft of a good news story the loss of a few crofters' lambs' or the impossibility of keeping free range poultry may seem a small price to pay for the reintroduction of sea eagles, pine martins or even lynxes.

It certainly goes without saying that few crofters on Skye or Wester Ross were consulted as to whether they would actually like to host reintroduced sea eagles or whether they felt that efforts to restore, say, upland waders might be a more attractive conservation priority within their local communities.

Equally, in the case of beavers, in the midst of global warming, recent rainfall patterns and the increased risk to life and property from flooding, to many - particularly those with direct experience of their damming activities in, say, Scandinavia - their reintroduction to the UK might seem like an act of complete folly.

A large part of our problem in the UK is based on a lack of moral courage on the part of conservation agencies. Whether we like it or not reintroduction is 'forever' - a one way street with no prospect of any 'reverse gear' even when a reintroduced species, was shown to have significant and important impacts on property, livestock or other wildlife.

Perhaps even worse is the widely-held belief amongst affected communities of constructive 'censorship' on the part of conservation agencies to reveal the extent of alleged damage or to assess it openly. Imagine the scene: owing to and unseasonably wet summer with frequent flooding and widespread damage to property (or worse!, 'wash-out' from beaver dams has been strongly implicated in local damage.

Faced with urgent calls to protect life and property the Minister authorises the destruction of dams and the removal of beavers from affected catchments. Well, if he did he would be a brave Minister. Within hours aging rock stars would wrap themselves in earnest appeals to protect our wildlife and online petitions would be exploding in the urban blogosphere.

But the real point here is, in the context of our declining wildlife, are reintroductions a part of sound conservation management addressing key environmental priorities - or an expensive, cynical and high-profile diversion from it?
Ends.