Clause 6 - Deer
Hunting Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Edward Garnier (Harborough, Conservative)
It would be. I have no doubt that the registrar could be persuaded that the utility test was passed. I could go down the list in clause 8 looking at the various aspects of utility with which the registrar will be concerned. I suspect that the registrar, if he were doing his job properly, fairly and dispassionately, would in some circumstances be able to find a case made in one or other of the various paragraphs of clause 8(1). I regret that the Minister seems to have reached a decision on all sorts of grounds outside the issues that we are currently discussing which have led him to conclude that clause 6 must remain as drafted.
As my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire has said on a number of occasions, we are yet to have a fully rationally based argument in favour of clause 6. I may be wrong, but I have the impression that we have listened to a slightly Louis XIV style of argument; ''I have said what I have said, and that assertion provides the basis of the argument.'' I am not sure that I understand it, nor that people in the west country—for whom I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton will speak far more ably than I—will accept it as an argument worth putting into criminal law.
If clause 6 stands part of the Bill, there will be huge economic consequences for the tourist industry and for the west country in general. I want to be assured that the Minister and his colleagues have done their homework and that their arguments stand up to questions from someone who lives and works there. How can we be sufficiently confident that someone with a gun can assess as perceptively and measure in relevant terms the blend of intuition, instinct and the use of landscape, rivers and havens that has enabled natural selection to develop a truly wild red deer herd on Exmoor?
It is a matter of national as well as local pride that this natural selection has encouraged the selection of the most vigorous and confident herd of wild red deer anywhere west of the Urals. If that ability is lacking or is compromised by whatever factor, what will be the consequences for the wild red deer herds of Exmoor? My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton outlined on Thursday what may happen to the red deer herds. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire told us what happened to the red deer herds pre–1855 when
the Yandle family reintroduced stag hunting on the moor.
What is the Minister's anticipated understanding of what will happen if this clause finds its way into an Act of Parliament? What is our country to do? We are all naturalists in this country. We will look at Exmoor in the future and find that something has gone terribly and avoidably wrong. It cannot be suggested that this is not an anticipated and foreseeable problem. If the confident and vigorous wild red deer herds of Exmoor are weakened or damaged through poor or inappropriate management, who in this country is to bear the responsibility, not only to the diminishing herds, but to succeeding generations of humans who, until now, have enjoyed seeing the herds roaming wild on Exmoor and in other parts of the west country?
One does not have to look too far to see that in other parts of the world shooting has caused terrible damage to wild animal herds. I am not going to make a flippant point because in Africa there were not packs of elephant hounds or elephant hunts in the way that there are in the west country. But unbalanced elephant shooting has led to the development of new populations without tusks. [Interruption.] I know that the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Peter Bradley) is good at sedentary interventions.