Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting
Hunting Bill
3:30 pm
Mr Paul Holmes (Chesterfield, Liberal Democrat)
I cannot comment on that, as I have not read the report. All I can say is that all the other reports from other societies, as well as the Burns inquiry, concluded that the use of terriers to dig out animals from underground seriously compromised the welfare of those animals and that there should be better methods of dealing with such situations.
Some more seriously injured animals will be less able to hunt and get their food in the natural way. They would therefore be even easier to bait and bring into humane traps in the way that healthy foxes can be on a large scale. With a humane trap one could easily establish whether the animal was injured seriously enough to warrant humane dispatch or whether it should be treated and released. That is the purpose of paragraph 7. The idea of a hunt catching an injured fox, treating it and releasing it is nonsensical, but a number of parts of the Bill presuppose that the hunt will do some nonsensical things. A humane trap is far more effective than hunting with 40 dogs or two dogs.