14th February 2015

Working For The Ban

Jordi Casamitjana, Campaigns & Enforcement Manager IFAW UK says:

There are many organisations in the UK that work to protect British wildlife from the cruelty of hunting with hounds, but not that many are international with headquarters in another continent. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) is an exception and I am proud to be leading the team that deals with this issue.

IFAW joined the campaign to ban hunting with dogs as far back as 1989, and it was the coordinated efforts of the RSPCA, League Against Cruel Sports and IFAW working in coalition which proved vital in finally securing a ban. However, all of us soon realised that getting the Hunting Act 2004 passed was not going to be enough, because the hunting fraternity was quite clear in its intention to challenge the ban. Creating the false alibi of ‘trail hunting’ instead of converting to drag hunting was early evidence of this.

So, since 2005 IFAW’s work on this issue has been mainly focused on two tasks: to help with enforcement of the Hunting Act and to protect the hunting ban. However, we never expected that we would be so busy on these two fronts for so long. In fact, for the last 10 years, we could never lower our guard because enforcement of the Act by police and CPS has been, to say the least, quite poor, and the threat of a repeal or weakening of the Act has never gone away (and today, only weeks from the General Election, this threat is sadly as real as it ever was).

On the enforcement front we have come a long way, though. We started monitoring hunts with a couple of hunt monitors, but the enforcement team grew and grew and we can say that we currently have one of the most sophisticated and efficient Wildlife Crime Investigator teams in the country, which uses state-of-the-art equipment and complex forensic techniques that have already produced significant results. Indeed, after many years of countless allegations of illegal hunting and not much progress by the authorities in addressing the problem our enforcement team, together with the RSPCA’s prosecution team, managed to secure the first conviction of a member of a Dorset hunt. A second prosecution of members of another hunt is in progress.

On our work to protect the ban, last year we managed to expose the Government’s plan to weaken the ban by modifying the ‘flushing to guns’ exemption of the Act. We believed this would result in ‘repeal by the back door’ as it would make enforcement even more difficult. We alerted media and public to this, campaigned against the plan and gathered support from other organisations that joined with us on the issue. Soon those plans were postponed, for now at least.

There may be a time when we can all relax and allow the Hunting Act to be applied effectively as other bans are but we are not quite there yet, so we still need to be “working for the ban”.

Tags: foxhunting, hunt monitor, Hunting Act, IFAW, illegal hunting, wildlife crime

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