Clause 8 - Tests for registration: utility and least suffering
Hunting Bill
2:45 pm
Mr Hugo Swire (East Devon, Conservative)
Thank you for your protection, Mrs. Roe.
I quote:
''When the North Devon Staghounds''—
which was the second of the packs—
''fizzled out in 1825, their small powers of protection went, and the deer population collapsed, just as surely as before. By 1850, it had fallen to about 50—most of them said to be maimed and peppered with gunshot wounds.''
I hope that answers the hon. Gentleman's question.
The symbiotic relationship between hunter and hunted continues to this day and I would suggest that anybody who wishes to question that should pay a visit to the west country—to Exmoor—and look at the Baronsdown situation. The hon. Member for West Ham extended an invitation to some of us to go there—I hope that he would include me in that, because I would welcome the opportunity—to see whether the 30-odd sanctuaries, and some of them are very odd indeed, administered by the League Against Cruel Sports, are keeping their deer in the same way as they live on the rest of Exmoor. I have read reports about how deer are looked after in some of those places and I find the accusations worrying, so I would welcome an opportunity to go along myself to verify them.
I turn to the question of the best way of dispatching an animal. If one has an animal's welfare at heart one must be aware that one is dispatching an animal in the most efficient and least cruel way. I do not believe that that is so in the case of deer shooting. I have never hunted deer on horseback, but I have shot deer in the highlands of Scotland—I have wounded a deer, I regret to say, and it is one of the most horrible feelings that one can possibly have, when the stalker turns to one and says, ''You have to go after it because you've wounded it.'' In hunting with hounds, be it of foxes or red deer, there is no middle way. If one hunts animals with hounds, one either kills the animal at the end of the hunt or it escapes. There is no question of its limping off into the undergrowth to die of gangrene or from attack by a predator—that simply does not happen. That is a key argument that the Bill has repeatedly failed to recognise and to address.
In conclusion, the application of the principle of utility—we have to ignore by stricture of the Chairman the application of the principle of cruelty, which I question anyway—should send out some worrying signals to all those who partake in other so-called field sports. We spoke earlier about the incumbent chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Jackie Ballard.