Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, this is a well-intentioned but mistaken Bill, which tweaks the heartstrings of many people who do not live among nor manage animals in the wild. They seem to think that a wild animal will live a long, peaceful and contented life if left alone. I am afraid that that does not happen in the real world.

Wildlife must also be kept in balance for the sake of the habitat, or the habitat can be destroyed. I have certainly seen that happen in Africa, many years ago, when elephants wiped out the Maasai Mara for several years and it took some time to recover. So culling will take place: it is part of good wildlife management.

Often, older males who are past their prime and excluded from the herd, group or whatever can die unhappy, cantankerous and alone, while trying to upset the dynamics of the group. Those are the ones that one often wants to cull. They can also make for more interesting trophies, because of their age and seniority, so why not convert the cost of culling to an income and take money from rich people to help conservation?

A hunting safari will employ more local people per tourist, with its few visitors, than big national park photo tourism will ever do. It will also probably employ more experts, who need to know more about the habitat and habits of the animals being hunted. Most of that hunting money will also go straight back into the local economy, because it is being paid directly to the people who manage groups that run safaris. The suggestion is to replace it with government grant aid, which will go in at the top while administrative filters, or whatever you want to call them, leach out a lot of the money so that only a little trickles down into the local area. At least that is the experience of many places.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, mentioned quite correctly that there is already the perfectly good Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES. It has been in operation since 1975. This prevents the import of a trophy from any country where that animal is endangered. Very few species are endangered in every country; you cannot aggregate numbers across continents. In certain areas, there are problems with oversupply and other places are undersupplied. An example that was given to me was of a trophy hunter who might go to Chad to shoot something that is endangered there. First, CITES would not give them permission to import the trophy. Secondly, why would you go to Chad to shoot an endangered lion, when you can shoot better specimens elsewhere? I do not think that happens very often, but I may be wrong. I stand to be corrected.

Poaching, usually done cruelly, has an impact on the gene pool of these animals that is an order of magnitude more serious than that of a few controlled hunters. I am very surprised by the idea that trophy hunting will hugely affect the gene pool because of the number of hunters.

There are an awful lot of experts—and we have been sent this stuff, as well; there are a lot of international signatories to these things—who say that hunting purely for trophies is not a key threat. I have met several representatives from concerned African countries who do not think we should be interfering in their economies and are against the Bill.

Local population management and control is often essential, so why not allow the preservation of an interesting head or trophy? Another interesting thought occurred to me: could there be a new trade or business out there of 3D printing accurate, scanned replicas of trophies? They could then be legally imported or even sold as an NFT.

Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

Finally, a word of caution on the reference of the noble Earl, Lord Arran, to older males who are past their prime and excluded from their herd or group, and who can die unhappy, cantankerous and alone while trying to upset the dynamics of the group. I wondered whether he was referring to this House, but I think in the end he was referring to the animals.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, funnily enough, that is a very good note on which to start. I will come to the specific amendment in half a second. But one of the things people do not realise is that the whole thing about trophy hunting—by the way, I do not go in for it at all, but I know something about herd management from deer in Scotland; not that I manage myself, but I know people who do—is that you do not want to shoot a young male coming along because it has a magnificent pelt. You want it to develop into a full-blooded animal, and when it is just past its prime that is when you cull it, for exactly that reason: the dynamics of the crotchety old male which is causing disruption. The noble Lord is absolutely right. If you are managing the whole thing properly to improve whatever it is people wish to hunt, it will be done in a much better and more sustainable way for nature as well.

It comes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, said. The essential message is financial incentive. This is what I got from the delegates from Africa who came over, whom I also met. They want to be able to manage these things in order to get the funding, and incentive and local buy-in from the low-level population to support this in order to get the conservation side right. That is the trouble: it is all very well pouring aid in from the top, but sometimes it does not get anywhere near the bottom. It is much better to have stuff coming in to give the ordinary people on the ground an incentive to try to work in an environmental and conservation way. The objective is to conserve properly: you get your herd profiles right and then you do some hunting.

The reason this amendment is so important is that it is about the unintended and perverse consequences. The Bill says that you cannot import trophies

“on behalf of the hunter”,

meaning the person who killed the thing. If you think about it, if you are managing a herd, you will have deaths at all age profiles in the herd, and people are going to hunt for meat. Many of the animals that have been taken out for meat will have horns and other bits that are useful for creating mementos for tourists. I should love some reassurance that this is not banning the production of tourist mementos which are not trophies—they are not the thing that the person paid a fortune to go to kill, but what you might call by-products of the results of it. I am afraid you will have culling going on in the herd, and there will also be animals that die, so why cannot their body parts be made useful, for greater sustainable use?

These are not plastics, poisoning the planet; they are naturally produced things. It will be much better to make all sorts of products and ornamental things from them than from fossil fuels. If one of the unintended consequences of the Bill is that it prevents all use of all animal body parts, it really should be examined again. We are just wasting a whole natural resource there, and I am a great believer that we should be using natural products, not artificially produced plastic products, which are killing the planet.

The main thing is that we have to get the financial incentives in the right place, to incentivise at the bottom level, and we also need to use all the animal stuff. This great fiction that people just go out to shoot a few trophies and that these will be animals in their prime is not really how it should work.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I can see that this could be a very constructive Bill, particularly if we got back to our manifesto promises—to refer to what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said. The manifesto pledge was to ban imports from trophy hunting of endangered animals and, when we come to my Amendment 4, that is something I will enlarge on. This Bill goes a great deal further than that and, in doing so, as my noble friend Lord Swire said, it starts to create a very inappropriate relationship with the Governments of countries where trophy hunting takes place. We ought to be working with these countries to help them conserve the wildlife which they have—and which we would be terrified to have.

We in this country cannot even contemplate the return of the lynx, never mind the wolf. As for bears, certainly not, although they used to live here—never, not allowed. The pigs that escaped in the great storm are relentlessly persecuted. We have no concept of what we are asking these people to do in living alongside elephants, hippopotamus and rhinoceros, let alone lions and the other big predators. We should have such respect for and understanding of them, and we should be working really closely with them to enable that symbiosis to continue. If they are telling us that trophy hunting is part of that, we can ask them how they can grow through this and go beyond that, as well as offer real support in getting photographic tourism going and working on how we bring that idea back to the UK—not that it is the easiest, when we are all being told that we cannot fly any more. It ought to be a process where we are working closely with African Governments, not having them come here to protest what we are doing. This ought to be a process we are in together.