Results 1-20 of 33 for hunting speaker:Paul Holmes

Orders of the Day: House of Lords Reform (7 Mar 2007)

Paul Holmes: ...this Chamber. We could ensure that it always acted within the conditions of the Parliament Act 1911 that limit any delay or check to a maximum of two parliamentary Sessions—as we saw with the Hunting Act 2004—and of course was unable to delay or affect at all any legislation to do with finance. People have asked why the second Chamber should be elected. I find that...

Business of the House (10 Jun 2004)

Mr Paul Holmes: Will the Leader of the House clarify his earlier comments about the reintroduction of the Hunting Bill? The Government have made various apparent commitments in that regard, but they chose their words very carefully—as the right hon. Gentleman did—by talking about "resolving" the issue. The House has repeatedly voted, by large majorities, to ban that cruel sport, and all...

Hunting Bill: New Clause 13 — Registered Hunting: Absolute Bans: Deer, Hares, Foxes and Terrierwork (30 Jun 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: The Bill, as amended in Committee, bans all hare and deer hunting with dogs. It is highly likely that the House will pass new clause 11, thereby adding the fox to that list. Of the existing hunting packs, that would leave only the mink hunts to be able to attempt to register on grounds of least cruelty or utility. On those grounds, I think that the case against mink hunting with dogs is as...

Hunting Bill: New Clause 13 — Registered Hunting: Absolute Bans: Deer, Hares, Foxes and Terrierwork (30 Jun 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ..., and have cited extensive evidence submitted to the Burns inquiry and the clear-cut conclusion on three separate pages of the Burns report that trapping was far more humane and effective than hunting with dogs. The Burns inquiry was specifically told not to look into cruelty issues surrounding hunting or pass judgment on them. None the less, as with most of the hunted species that Burns...

Hunting Bill: New Clause 13 — Registered Hunting: Absolute Bans: Deer, Hares, Foxes and Terrierwork (30 Jun 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: I agree completely. I referred earlier to the fact that mink hunting may be left as a fig leaf for the registration process. However, given the assurance that we received earlier—and I have been present throughout our debate—that defence, or fig leaf, is, as the hon. Gentleman says, no longer necessary. Mink escaped into the wild after their introduction to the UK for fur farming...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: As I have already said twice, if it is diseased or injured to an extent that affects it, it will not be able to hunt or get its natural food in the normal way. In the case of urban foxes, natural food means a McDonald's meal scavenged from a waste bin. However, we are talking about foxes in the countryside. An injured fox would be more likely to go for food put out as bait because it would be...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...the use of one or two dogs to locate and possibly flush an injured animal from cover—we heard an hon. Member some time ago talking about mangy foxes inside a haystack that were uncovered by a hunt—would be justified under paragraph 7 and would have utility. I cannot see how using a pack of 40 hounds would be an effective and efficient way of locating a seriously injured animal...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: I think that the hon. and learned Gentleman is making precisely the point that I made. If hunters could argue that they thought that an animal was injured, in the loose sense of the word, it would be impossible for an autopsy to establish whether some very minor injury made the fox or stag appear to be limping so that the hunt thought that it had better hunt it. On the other hand, an autopsy...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...described as follows: ''Fox 2 (Royal Artillery, Salisbury plain, 3 April 2000) Post Mortem conducted for the Burns Inquiry by the University of Bristol''. The report stated: ''This animal was hunted with hounds for approximately 7 minutes. The fox then went to ground and a terrier equipped with a radio collar was sent down. After approximately 25 minutes of digging, the fox was...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...trapping? That is a question for the Minister to answer, not me. It is his legislation; I am trying to improve it. I have some doubts about its purpose. The intention in paragraph 7 is to exempt hunting designed to locate a diseased or injured animal—I think that we should remove the word ''diseased'' and replace ''injured'' with ''seriously injured''—and then to assess...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...It certainly will not be the organised fox hounds. We have yet to vote on amendment No. 347, which was grouped with a previous amendment. It would restrict the number of dogs to be used in humane hunting, trapping, assessing and releasing, or humanely dispatching, to a maximum of two to locate an animal, not 40, because that number of dogs would kill the animal before anyone could carry...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...season that number rises to about 600,000. The figures are not precise. About 400,000 die during the course of the year, many of which are young cubs. Of those animals, 25,000 are killed by hunts and 150,000 are shot. Some 9,000 were caught by humane traps in London alone. I am not sure how the figure of 1 per cent. matches up to those figures. The hon. Gentleman will have to go back to...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...the cause of death. More to the point, the hon. and learned Gentleman again shows that he has not read paragraph 7(6), which relates to the fifth condition. That states clearly that that sort of hunting is exempt only if ''reasonable steps are taken for the purpose of ensuring that as soon as possible after the wild mammal is found'' not hunted and torn to pieces by the pack, but...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...hounds does? The autopsy found a few old shotgun pellets—the fibrous tissue around them showed that the wounds had healed—and that the dog had been badly savaged. After seven minutes of hunting, it had been savaged and had gone to ground. The autopsy could document the severe injuries to the fox: his eye and cheeks had been ripped and so forth. The fox was then located by a...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: I shall give the hon. Gentleman the reference when I look at my notes. I may be confusing two separate autopsy cases. One was in the Burns inquiry and one was about terrier hunting, but they make the same point. The autopsies were used to establish a sequence of injuries, some old and some current. There were several different sets of current injuries, but the autopsy could clearly...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: ...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...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: I shall speak to amendments Nos. 344, 345 and 346. As I pointed out when dealing with amendment No. 347, we are discussing not the general arguments on hunting with hounds but specific provisions. Paragraph 6, for example, concerns rescuing or recapturing an animal that has escaped. Paragraph 7, to which these amendments refer, deals with rescuing a diseased or injured animal. It is not...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: The hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) asks from a sedentary position why the hunters were hunting in that case. Given the legislation's vague wording, they could claim that they thought that the fox was diseased.

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: Hunters could genuinely or spuriously argue that they had pursued and killed a moulting fox because they had mistaken it for a fox with mange. The word ''disease'' provides a loophole because it is so vague. It has to be questioned how far dogs, whether it is 40 hounds or two labradors, can distinguish and ignore the scent of a healthy animal and only follow the scent trail of the target...

Public Bill Committee: Hunting Bill: Schedule 1 - Exempt Hunting (6 Feb 2003)

Mr Paul Holmes: The argument has been advanced that the mange epidemic in Bristol, where, of course, there is no foxhunt, is evidence of foxhunting's effectiveness in controlling diseased animals. [Hon. Members: ''What?''] One has only to look at the verbatim record of previous sittings of the Committee. My point is that the mange epidemic in Bristol is generally accepted to have spread through the Mendip...