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Hunting Bill
8:45 pm
Mr John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon, Conservative)
It would be interesting to be privy to some of the discussions that are going on. However, I hope that the two Ministers who are dealing with the Bill have started to understand that there are some difficulties with it, and that it goes way beyond the abolition of organised hunting. We all know what we mean by organised hunting—it is a few dogs with several people following them. However, the Bill goes much further than that. It bans the activities of one dog, for instance, hunting rabbits and, as I have said, draws distinctions that seem to make no sense. The Bill will land us in trouble. It will land the Government in difficulties when it comes to administering it and it will land the countryside and farmers in trouble over how they control animals that, under any definition, are clearly pests. It draws arbitrary distinctions between methods of killing categories of animals.