Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am a practical person and, for me, the practical benefits for wildlife outweigh any considerations of my sensibilities. My judgment is that this Bill as it is will damage conservation; I therefore support the suggested direction of amendment that my noble friend Lord Bellingham proposed.

The flow of money is important to conservation; we can see that in this country. Let us take the example of the long-standing RSPB reserve Lake Vyrnwy in Wales and the RSPB’s recent application for many millions of pounds of funding. The RSPB says that, unless it gets all this money in this area of Wales, red grouse, black grouse, hen harriers and waders will all become extinct—and I can understand why. It takes a great flow of money to achieve effective conservation. By contrast, the RSPB, as reported in its publication today, is heavily opposed to driven grouse-shooting—but if you go on a well-managed driven grouse moor, as I had the privilege to do this spring, it is a place alive with waders and, indeed, as a properly managed moor, with raptors too. It is a buzzing ecological community, and that is managed because of all the effort put in to maintain grouse-shooting.

In contrast to the RSPB seeing hen harriers as dying out in Lake Vyrnwy, the picture in England is that we have gone, since 2017, from 10 chicks fledged to 190 chicks fledged due to the collaboration between Natural England and grouse-shooting. The high principles and purity of the RSPB are leading to the hen harrier dying out; the “killers” and their policies are leading to it flourishing. That seems to me to be an interesting parallel to what we are being asked to consider in this Bill. We may not like trophy hunting, but the proceeds of trophy hunting, flowing into a well-managed conservation effort, are immensely beneficial to wildlife.

We are asking African people to live alongside lions and elephants and yet, considering the debates in this country on the reintroduction of the European lynx—a little baby cat—we ought to understand what we are asking of these people. It is not just, “Be nice”; it is, “Do something that will have an immense impact on your life”, or, in many cases, “Put your life in danger”. People are killed with some regularity by the wildlife in these areas outside reserves. We are asking people to take a huge responsibility. For us, 30 by 30 is nice—it just means more butterflies—but when you talk about more big game and letting it thrive, you are talking about a big impact on your life. We must support the efforts these countries are making to make conservation possible. We must respect what they say is necessary and what they say works and find ways of supporting that.

We might deprecate the people who trophy hunt—it is not something that I wish to do myself—but very many of us watched the first episode of the recent Attenborough series where the white-tailed eagle was hunting the goose. The experience of that is so close to the experience of hunting an animal oneself that I could not separate it. We are built as hunters; we are not descended from rabbits. We are hunters, and that which is expressed as pleasure by trophy hunters is in most of us. We ought to recognise that; they are not something apart but an expression of one aspect of humanity.

I hope we will be able, without too much argument, to amend this Bill to allow whatever structures we think appropriate in this country to collaborate with conservation structures and Governments abroad and allow trophies to be imported from those countries where we are absolutely clear that this is making a substantial contribution to conservation in those countries.

Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

Would my noble friend reflect on one specific point around all this? When we started out on this Bill, all those months ago, I do not think any of us believed for one moment that the importation into this country of, I think, two lions’ heads a year and 115 trophies a year would give rise to so much interest and concern from those countries in southern Africa that he mentions. Surely now they have made their point so clearly and powerfully, we should really take that on board, and therefore consider the amendments they support to improve the Bill.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I would have thought so.

We need to be rational about conservation. Conservation often involves killing. It is one of the reasons why the RSPB is not as successful as it should be in preserving wildlife; it is not good at controlling predators. Humans create predators—foxes live in towns, and the number of crows is enormously increased as a result of human activity. Together, they make wildlife extremely difficult to maintain, unless you do something about the predators.

We should understand that our nature as hunters and the role that we have taken on as the top predator carry with them responsibilities. In looking at what is going on in a community in Africa with a lot of wildlife, if we do not collaborate in providing it with income—something that makes that symbiosis profitable for them—that community will choose a different balance. That balance will be the balance we have chosen for ourselves here: “Let’s not have anything that causes us inconvenience”. We here are the example of what we wish Africa to become, as symbolised in this Bill. We want wildlife eliminated, or at least restrained only to parks, and not part of people’s lives.

We should revise our thinking on this and, as my noble friend says, go back to our friends in Africa, work out how we can do this well and support what they are doing. If that involves trophy hunting, and that results in good conservation, that is something we should support for as long as it is necessary—though I have not, and never hope to, taken part in it myself.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

4: Clause 1, page 1, line 3, leave out “an animal” and insert “a species classed as threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List”

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in search of this rather elusive rapprochement which my noble friend on the Front Bench referred to, I suggest that we bring the scope of this Bill closer to what was in our manifesto —endangered species—broadening it slightly to “threatened” species, since that was mentioned when this Private Member’s Bill was launched. These definitions belong to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, which has nine categories, with “threatened”, “endangered” and “critically endangered” being the top three.

If we covered these species only, we would fulfil what we said we would do in our manifesto, would do what the proposer of this Bill said in another place that it was intended to do, and would avoid the huge burden of it covering the enormous variety of species that it does, with the administrative difficulties that would result. As a way forward, to fulfil our commitments and produce something effective and sensible, I urge this amendment on my noble friend. I beg to move.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I compliment my noble friend on his amendment, which has the great benefit of substantial simplicity and great logic behind it. I urge the Minister to look at it. This may be the compromise that we are looking for and could come back to on Report.

Everyone agrees that we are very concerned about endangered species; no one can say for one moment that they are not. However, under the very wide drafting of this Bill, less than 4% of the species it covers are trophy hunted anywhere in the world. I do not know whether noble Lords knew that. Only 1% of species covered by it have been imported to the UK since 2000. Some 79% of hunting trophies are from species that are stable, increasing and abundant, which is quite a compelling figure.

As I pointed out earlier, on average two trophies of wild lions and 115 trophies in all are imported into the UK every year. We are talking about a very specialist, niche issue here, yet we have all those unintended consequences, which I shall talk about at a later stage—maybe if my noble friend Lord Mancroft’s amendment is reached later this evening or on another occasion, and certainly on Report.

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[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We are seeking to implement the manifesto commitment.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am naturally disappointed in that, but I shall not give up during the course of rest of this Committee trying to find other ways in which we might reach a compromise and a way forward.

I reassure my noble friend Lady Fookes that I view these amendments as alternatives—different ways of dealing with what I regard as a Bill that has gone too far. I do not wish it to die a death by a thousand cuts; I wish it to flourish as an effective and important piece of legislation. I think it needs improving but, given the Minister’s response, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 4 withdrawn.