Focus
Looking into the wilderness 18 January 2010 What the Scottish Government’s upcoming Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill will mean for our countryside The iconic image of a stag on a hilltop is something which springs to mind for many when thinking of the Scottish countryside. Not only are the biggest mammals in Britain so impressively beautiful, but the great majority of red deer in Scotland roam free through forests and across hills. However, for those involved in countryside land management, deer status as res nullus - ‘nobody’s property’ - has made the issue of managing deer an extremely complex one. Groups involved in deer stalking have worked alongside conservation groups and governmental organisations in their efforts to manage deer, and the difficulties of keeping tabs on free animals as well as promoting their very different agendas has led to unavoidable tensions at times. In September last year when First Minister Alex Salmond made his legislative statement to the Scottish Parliament, he announced the Scottish Government’s intention to bring forward the Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill in an attempt to ensure “efficient, effective and proportionate legislation” for the natural environment in Scotland. The First Minister said that the Bill would make changes to the area of deer management, as well as game law, invasive non-native species, species licensing, snaring and muirburn. In his statement, he said: “Scotland’s natural environment is, of course, important in itself. It is also economically important - indeed, it is worth around £17bn to the Scottish economy. It is vital that we do all we can to protect and enhance it, and to ensure that our wildlife and natural environment legislation is capable of delivering these ambitions.” The Government’s consultation on proposals that will potentially be put forward in the final Bill when it is laid before Parliament later this year has, as is the nature of the consultation process, thrown up a variety of viewpoints, with opposition to some of the possible changes. While the official Scottish Government response to the consultation and a draft Bill have yet to be published, Minister for Environment Roseanna Cunningham has indicated that the concerns of stakeholders will be taken on board. However, she also acknowledges that: “On some issues the conflicting views of stakeholders may be irreconcilable.” For many of the organisations and individuals involved in the consultation process, it has been the area of deer management and licensing that has attracted the most concern. The proposals have been designed to change the balance of legislation to include considerations on balancing concerns about the environment, public safety and deer welfare, as well as sporting, forestry and agricultural concerns which were considered in previous legislation. Drawn up during the Deer Commission Scotland’s (DCS) 2008 review of Scotland’s wild deer: A national approach (wDNA), the commission hopes the proposals will help to promote a more collaborative approach and a wider understanding of deer management in Scotland. Katy McNeil, director of policy, project and research at DCS explains: “We felt that having expressed the vision that was shared between ourselves, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), the Forestry Commission and the Scottish Government for sustainable deer management, the current legislation that we work with wasn’t fit for purpose to help us deliver it, particularly with regard to delivering the public interest in deer management and ensuring deer welfare. “Our vision is of a sustainable deer management for the future and is a deer management that is balancing the environmental concerns, the economic interests and the social wellbeing of the country as a whole and I guess that’s all about recognising and making the best use of the natural resource that we have in Scotland with our deer.” However, as Scottish Wildlife Trust’s (SWT) head of policy Tony King explains, his organisation does not feel that the proposals will be effective enough. “We think they’re pretty weak,” he says. “We’re broadly in support of the objectives behind the proposals in the consultation draft but we think they could be far more effective and it’s important to get it right.” While deer are currently managed by voluntary Deer Management Groups (DMGs), the consultation contained a proposal for the introduction of statutory responsibilities where voluntary structures have failed or broken down. Explaining the reasons behind the recommendation, McNeil says: “Some DMGs work very well, some aren’t able to work so well and one of the real difficulties they have there is resolving conflict where different land managers have different objectives and sometimes those problems have been allowed to continue because we haven’t had a very strong power to deal with circumstances like that.” But King explains that SWT do not think this will work in practice. “The experience of bodies such as ours, who have got large land holdings is that DMGs don’t really work on the ground,” he says. “The collaborative nature of them is questionable, at best. They’re okay for information exchange, but for setting management objectives and engaging in management, they don’t seem to work. The voluntary approach, which we’ve had for a few years hasn’t been working and I don’t necessarily think it’s the best way forward to say, ‘well, we’ll continue for a bit’.” Another area explored by the consultation which has proved controversial has been the issue of whether or not to revise the operation of close seasons for stags and hinds. Close seasons currently provide separate dates during which time stags and hinds should not be shot and Alex Hogg, chairman of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA) and board member of Scottish Quality Wild Venison, explains that the proposal to change these did not sit well with the members of his organisation. “What we try to promote is a situation where you’ve got the deer stalker on the ground, he looks after the deer, he takes clients out whether it be to shoot a stag or to shoot a hind but he’s got a handle on the whole thing and it works well,” he says, adding: “If the stag were in season for longer periods, you’d end up with a real imbalance. Men being men, they’ll tend to come to want to shoot things with antlers on their head. So therefore you’ll have far too many male deer shot.” He also believes that changing the seasons for hinds would put fawns at risk, explaining: “We currently shoot our hinds until the 15 February and that’s when the season finishes. After that, where a hind is pregnant, the foetus is starting to get really big and it’s a horrible thing to do to shoot an animal and take the foetus out.  “The reason why we wanted the minister to look at the deer in this consultation was because we had photographs of female deer being shot in June and July with wee calves lying in the heather and that had to stop. You cannot treat deer like vermin. You cannot leave young calves disturbed because their mothers have been shot.” However, McNeil says that any consequences arising from the proposals put forward from DCS would not be as drastic as feared. “At the moment, ministers do have the flexibility to change close seasons. They have to set a closed season for female deer, but they have the option of whether or not to set one for male deer and we weren’t really proposing a change to that in primary legislation,” she says, continuing: “But what we were saying was that in the future, if you introduce better deer management through a duty to manage deer, a code of practice that sets out the expectations on deer managers and you introduce competence at an individual level and improve people’s skills at individual level, then further down the line once those two aspects were in place then you could think about potentially removing some of the male close season because you would deal with those resource management issues at a local level through the better deer management processes. You could then potentially shorten the female season so you’re really focusing on the time of year when there’s very much the highest welfare risk to the deer, but we were actually trying to protect that period better by removing some of the automatic rights that certain types of landowners have to continue to shoot deer during that period.” Cunningham feels that the proposals may not be the best way forward at this time after all. “Given the level of concern expressed in responses to the consultation, I believe it is right that we think again on the best way forward in relation to close seasons. In particular, we are mindful of the need to protect the welfare of female deer, especially those with dependent young,” she says. For those shooting deer unaccompanied, at night or in possession of owner-occupier exemptions from close seasons, DCS currently maintains a ‘fit and competent’ register and there are plans to extend this to reflect developments in voluntary qualifications. “What we’d really like to do is raise standards but also to recognise the skills and knowledge that people already have,” McNeil says. “We didn’t perceive this as being something that would be excluding stalkers – far from it. We’d like it to be a quality assurance – it’s something that we can say that Scotland’s wild deer are being managed by some of the very best people in the world.” The SGA is critical of the extension of the register, with Hogg voicing concerns that the system will potentially be more bureaucratic for gamekeepers, but less so for the DCS. He also worries that removing the need to apply for separate licences for things like night shooting will have an adverse effect on deer numbers. “It takes the onus off of DCS to write out night licences and show damage and all the hoops you need to jump through to get a night licence. That would be removed. And it’s wrong, because if we go down that road, deer will just be treated like vermin.” However, McNeil says that the need to keep an eye on bureaucracy was high on the list of considerations when putting the plans together. “When we put forward our proposals, they were on the basis that the net impact would be fairly neutral,” she says. “For example, where there was potentially increased bureaucracy or increased regulation by requiring those who stalk deer unaccompanied to have demonstrated competence, that was then being balanced by proposals to have fewer requirements for authorisation by changing dates of the close seasons in future and by simplifying night shooting authorisations.” Although it’s highly likely that when the Bill is implemented, DCS will have merged with SNH through provisions contained in the Public Service Reform Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, neither Cunningham nor McNeil believe this will have a detrimental effect on the implementations of the Bill going forward, as the two organisations have a history of working closely together. It is also hoped that this will help contribute to the idea that deer management can better fit in with wider environmental objectives, such as a more coordinated approach to invasive non-native species licensing. Developed by the Working Group on Non-native Invasive Species, proposals in this area would seek to limit the damage caused by non-native plants or animals, with a presumption of non-release of a species until its threat level has been identified and, in cases where a species has already been released, the ability for ministers to require individuals to control and remove non-native species on their land. As Cunningham explains, there is a need to ensure the legislation is balanced. “The main challenge is to balance the need to increase the controls on potentially harmful introductions without penalising the legitimate uses of non-native species, for example, in forestry and gardening, and we believe that we have struck a good balance in our proposals,” she says. She also acknowledges that there will be a need to educate about the potential damage non-native invasive species can do. “For the provisions on preventing new releases of potentially harmful non-native species, it will be important to ensure that information is available and understood by relevant people,” she says, adding: “We believe that the new legislation will be easier to understand, as it will remove some of the uncertainties and time lags in the current legislation. Our objective is to ensure that this is an effective guide to the public and to interested sectors, rather than to enforce after the event.” Head of policy at SNH, Ron Macdonald, agrees that education will be vital. “I think the biggest challenge is in terms of the communication programme because we need to target specialist groups such as anglers where there is risk of introducing alien nonnative species to fisheries or gardening – that communication message needs to be targeted to them.” He adds that for legislation in this area to be really effective, a coordinated response is needed. “With global trade and travel plus a changing climate we cannot fully predict what will turn up and where and how it will behave as its climate space expands. The trade in exotic food species which are transported live across frontiers and boundaries is an example,” he explains. “So I suppose the challenge will be to us is that we can have our own Bill but it requires international cooperation to actually make it work across frontiers.” The proposals have been supported by groups such as SWT, Scottish Environment LINK, Scottish Native Woods and RSPB Scotland, and there is little controversy in this section of the Bill. Similarly, the section of the Bill dealing with game licensing has received a generally positive response. The need to have a license when shooting game will be scrapped and legislation will be brought into line with England and Wales and while SWT does not have an issue with this aspect of the proposals, King believes that the status of game crime is an issue that could be looked at. “We would welcome treating game crime the same as any other form of wildlife crime, rather than as a special subcategory. Wildlife crime is wildlife crime and we think there should be consistency,” he says. Snaring is another issue which is touched on by the Bill, and there is potential that the debate surrounding this could reignite later this year. Already, Cunningham has given evidence to the Public Petitions Committee on an unrelated petition calling for a ban on snaring, and following Cunningham’s predecessor Michael Russell’s 2008 decision not to go ahead with a ban, some groups certainly feel there are still unresolved issues.  “We think snaring is illegal and we’re of the view that snaring is contrary to European law, against that habitats directive, which has a prohibition of indiscriminate means of capturing and killing and could cause disturbance to species such as pine marten and otter,” King says. However, he adds that the 2008 legislation, which banned the use of drag snares and introduced the use of ID tags, will improve the situation in the absence of an outright ban. Cunningham says that there are currently no plans to review snaring, adding: “It is my intention to continue with the 2008 proposals. It is expected that an order to amend snaring through secondary legislation will be laid shortly, with any changes requiring primary legislation progressed through the Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill.” When the Scottish Government’s response to the Bill consultation is published, the stakeholders involved will no doubt be crossing their fingers and hoping that the changes they want to see have been made. While SWT is supportive of much of what the consultation proposes, King feels that there are areas that have been left out. “There is an element of slightly missed opportunity on what the Bill doesn’t say, for example, there’s nothing in there about broader biodiversity. We’ve been pretty keen to see the biodiversity duty on public bodies enhanced and this Bill could potentially be a vehicle for that.” He adds: “There could be a bit about establishing a national ecological network, there could be further work to embed an ecosystem approach across environmental protection in Scotland and conservation in Scotland. These aren’t in the proposals that we’ve seen. And while we can’t predict the Bill, there are things like that for which we think there is a need.” Macdonald says SNH would like to see the final Bill making the legislative landscape much simpler. He says: “We’ve an awful lot of moribund legislation or legislation has been superseded by other bits of legislation so there’s quite a lot out there that is either not currently used or requires to be streamlined in terms of its application. So we have a good opportunity in one place to modernise and to streamline and to make it fit for purpose.” Hogg is less optimistic, and is hoping that the remainder of the legislative process does not see the SGA with a fight on its hands. “It’ll be a real worry for this Bill when it goes to Stage 2 and you have all the amendments flying in. It’s going to be a lot of work – it already has been a lot of work. We just hope to god that the Government will listen to the practical people.” Related articles: Being green for a living 3 September 2010 Road to reform 25 June 2010 Bricks and mortar 11 June 2010 Winning hearts and minds 28 May 2010 Bringing it home 26 April 2010 See all articles in this category Submit a comment |
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