Category: Hunting

Hares beleaguered on all sides & on the run.

Hares have no legal protection

It may come as a surprise to many that the iconic and much loved hare is designated as a pest and a game animal and unlike other game animals has no close season so is totally unprotected under UK law. Therefore, it has no respite at all from being killed and persecuted by poachers, coursers and hunters and some unsympathetic farmers.

I am lucky enough to live in an area of the UK where hares appear to be prolific judging by the fact that hardly a day goes by when I do not see them cavorting in the fields while I am driving past or when on walks. Not just individuals but sometimes five or six together. I count myself lucky to have so many up close encounters with them and I am always amazed at their size and sheer beauty. They have become one of my favourite UK wild mammals.

Sad then that they are the least protected of all “game” animals and that so many people seem to hate them. Game animals are those that over time hunters have decided are fair ‘game’ to be killed and eaten and over time have had this status enshrined in law. Most game animals have a “close” season of a few months usually during their breeding season to build up numbers to be hunted and shot for the rest of the year.

Give these animals a break

Philip Mansbridge, CEO of Care for the Wild International, said: “I think people would be shocked to know that the people who shoot hares are the ones who get to decide on whether or not there should be a close season. DEFRA needs to step in, involve wildlife organisations to get some balance, and give these animals a break.”

Unfortunately for the hare, a quirky antiquated 19th. century law called the Ground Game Act 1880 (can you believe that?) allows their legal shooting throughout the year including the breeding season, which stretches from February to September, leaving them the only game animal in England and Wales in this situation. Good old Scotland plus 18 European countries have a close season but not the animal loving UK.

Of course, the Countryside Alliance believes a close season would be detrimental to them and that their numbers are stable, so oppose any legislation, while conservationists and welfarists obviously beieve that killing lactating females thus causing the deaths of their dependent young is cruel.

They are being attacked on all sides by illegal hunting, legal shooting, pest control, disease and loss of suitable habitat and food sources
Hare, hare coursing, illegal hare coursing

To compound things further they are also a designated pest being lumped together with the rabbit as an animal that rampages over the countryside destroying crops and eating the bark off trees during the winter when food becomes short. Their natural diet is grasses and herbs. Pest controllers are quick to point out that they carry fleas and carry a disease called Yersiniosis that can cause serious illness or death in humans, just to make them more disliked.

Their numbers allegedly constantly decline and it has been said that if they were not such quick breeders they would be extinct by now. Many decades ago there were some 4 million hares but estimates now put the figure anywhere between 6-800,000. No one really knows as few people have much interest in the poor creature so research is very outdated. There are some outlandish estimates of up to 400,000 being shot each year which on the face of it does not appear accurate.

Hedgerows and meadows, the preferred living areas for hares, have declined and the modern open farmed fields leave them exposed and vulnerable with less food. Herbicides and pesticides can be lethal to them. Hares have also suffered in recent years from the move away from mixed farming, which provided the variety of grassy habitats they need to feed and raise a family, to intensive arable or livestock production.

To add to their misery hares are now threatened by a rabbit disease haemorrhagic disease type 2 which causes lung bleeding and hepatitis and some scientists believe that mxymatosis may be spreading from rabbits to hares.

Let’s face it, hares could do with a few more friends.

Hare, hare coursing, illegal hare coursing, cruelty to animals, animal welfare

The hares also have to face persecution by illegal hare coursing particularly in my area of East Anglia and no walk in the countryside can be completed without seeing signs nailed to gate posts asking for any suspicious behaviour to be reported to the police.

Ironically hares are supposedly a “priority species” under the UK biodiversity plan to increase numbers of vulnerable species. So, why is their protection such a low priority with few INTERESTED IN HELPING THEM?

There is a petition asking the government to make it illegal to shoot them that anyone interested in these wonderful creatures can sign.

Hare petition

Related Articles:

Landowners scramble to suspend fox trail hunts
Hare Coursing – barricading the English countryside
Hunting with dogs and the “unenforceable” ban.
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Releasing captive bred pheasants should be abandonment.

No legitimate reason to abandon millions of hapless birds each year.

On Good Friday 2019, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) allegedly raided a large pheasant and partridge hatchery in Mildenhall, Suffolk and released 9,000 pheasants into the countryside as part of their “dismantle the shooting industry farm by farm, shoot by shoot”. Later thousands were “illegally” released from hatcheries in Cornwall and Wiltshire.

Whether this was of any benefit to the pheasants is a mute point, but every autumn we continue to allow millions of the creatures to be released to be killed by humans, road traffic, starvation and predators alike. To anyone with little knowledge of the pheasant and partridge shooting industry, which is worth £2 billion in revenue to the UK, the number ALF set free might seem colossal, but in reality they only represented 0.028% of the total 30-35,000,000 estimated released each year.

Despite all the arguments, there is no legitimate reason to abandon millions of these innocent birds and leave them to their fate, as it does nothing to preserve the wild pheasant population in the UK or conserve habitat or the countryside as it is purely done for revenue and sport.

I use the word “abandon” advisedly as the terminology everyone prefers to use is “release” as though we are referring to a Born Free scenario of releasing wild animals back into their natural habitat. If it was any other captive bred or companion animal the action would be classified as illegal abandonment.

Unfortunately, these hapless birds have little wild heritage and half of the 30 million pheasants and 6 million partridges are imported into the UK as day old chicks according to the British Association of Shooting & Conservation (BASC), then reared intensively in hatcheries and then put outside in pens to ‘acclimatise’ to the wild.

50% of pheasants die before anyone gets a chance to shoot them.

In reality young captive reared pheasants are completely naïve with no experience of the wild or parental influence to guide them away from danger or instil natural instincts, making them extremely vulnerable to predators particularly foxes.  They have a reduced survival rate and limited breeding success even if they are lucky to survive into their second year. At one point a few years back ‘hunters’ were complaining that the birds were becoming too docile and tame and the industry had to use new pheasant strains with more wild characteristics.

According to the industries’ own research the survival rate of pheasants is appalling with:

  • 36% of them being eaten by predators (23% before anyone has a chance to shoot them);
  • 7% killed in road accidents and from disease;
  • and 3.5% dying while being raised

which equates to 50% mortality before hunting begins. 37.5% are then shot during the four-month season (7% of these not on the shooting estates), making a grand total of a staggering 84% mortality. The few that survive all the carnage are mostly wiped out within a year.  Research has indicated that their release each year has no effect on increasing the wild population and is purely for commercial reasons.

Pheasant in countryside

With all the knowledge and research indicating that reared birds have a reduced survival rate, high mortality, limited breeding success and an inability to fend for themselves adequately in the wild, it could be argued that their release qualifies as illegal abandonment and causing unnecessary suffering, particularly in the context that it is not necessary to release them in the first place, but everyone seems to distance themselves from this point.

Taking a purely cynical standpoint, if this kind of hunting is to continue why not just cut out most of the pre-shoot mortality, road deaths and suffering and just place the birds in large aviaries where the marksmen can kill them at leisure like a kind of turkey shoot, but can you imagine the outcry then. Looked at in purely realistic terms this would lessen the deaths and fewer birds would suffer, but of course it would be no “fun”, not “sporting” and might make people realise what a horrendous sport this really is.

Hares beleaguered on all sides & on the run.
Conservation charities are not always what they seem
Hunting with dogs and the “unenforceable” ban.
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