Schedule 3 - Hunting with dogs: prohibition
Hunting Bill
11:00 am
Mr David Lidington (Aylesbury, Conservative)
My hon. Friend is correct. I believe that farmers on Exmoor and in the Quantocks area are willing to tolerate depredations by red deer of their crops and young trees partly because they support the hunt and want it to continue. They would be much less likely to do so if hunting were abolished.
My hon. Friend's argument has cross-party support. My constituent, Baroness Mallalieu, is firm in her belief that if stag hunting on Exmoor and in the Quantocks were banned, fewer deer would survive and far more animals would die slowly and in pain. Lord Burns made much the same qualification in his conclusions on foxhunting: shooting would be quick, if it worked. Shooting is a good and effective method of control, provided that one can guarantee killing an animal with a single shot and not letting it linger on in pain—or, perhaps, disabled—to die many hours or days later.
Hunting, as I said earlier, has one great advantage: it produces no wounded survivors. Even those who advocate lamping as the most humane method of fox control have yet to produce a persuasive argument that the greater use of shooting or other methods of control in areas where lamping is not feasible would result in an improvement in animal welfare or a reduction in cruelty towards wild mammals.