Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, this is a very bad Bill because, while we all support what it is trying to achieve, which is to ensure that endangered species of animals do not become extinct, it will actually achieve the opposite if it takes effect in the way that is intended.

I am going to talk about Africa. I shall start at the beginning. Population growth is finally stabilising in this world. It will probably top out at about 9 billion. One of the reasons for that is that, with better health services in China and the one-child policy, it looks as if the Chinese population is not growing any more, and India is closely following. The exception to this is Africa, where, for many reasons—I suspect it is the inadequacy of health services as much as anything—populations are still growing exponentially. I shall therefore concentrate most of my remarks on what is happening there. There are trophy hunters who export trophies from countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, Mongolia and indeed of course the United Kingdom. As many people have mentioned, we export a large number of trophies, mostly from people who have shot red deer.

I would love to be able to say that I am not a trophy hunter and it has never appealed to me as something I want to do, but actually I have shot a significant number of red stags in Scotland and have on occasion taken their horns down to England, where I live. I therefore suppose I have to qualify as a trophy hunter—it is quite difficult to say that I am not one—but it has certainly never appealed to me to shoot a magnificent beast in Africa. But, of course, it does bring significant income into those countries.

As we know, the growing populations of many of these African countries mean that the demand for land is getting greater all the time. You preserve endangered species from the predations of man only by having conservation areas, and they cost serious money to maintain. Indeed, where the whole essence of a conservation area breaks down in civil war, of which Africa has had far too much experience, invariably what happens is that poachers run wild, the predations of man get much worse and endangered species decline as a result. So we must do everything we can to ensure that as much finance finds its way into these areas as possible. For that reason, if we have qualms about trophy hunting in these areas, we should suppress them, because it is channelling funds into areas of Africa where they are most desperately needed—and where in many cases the populations of endangered species are actually growing rather than shrinking, which is an essential requirement if we want to ensure that they do not become extinct.

A noble friend of mine who has now left this House produced a special breed of pig. He always said that if you wanted to keep a special species of pig, the best thing to do was to eat it. I am afraid we have a very complicated relationship with animals, because we do eat them in prodigious quantities, and for that they have to be slaughtered. We cannot get away from that contradiction, with which we live in this country, and our complicated relationship with animals, because at the end of the day we have to manage wildlife in a way that keeps them in existence and enhances their prospects of living on this planet with us. If we do not do that, we will lose everything.