Tim Bonner: Populism and foxes are killing the curlew

Across all parts of Britain there is a growing hypocrisy about threatened wildlife. On the one hand, politicians weep crocodile tears over species like the curlew and virtue signal about their concern for the environment. On the other, they do nothing to address the fundamental reasons for those declines and, worse, they prohibit the very practices that could protect them.

I was copied into a letter of despair this week from a good friend who has been working to revive an area of the Welsh uplands for the last decade. He wrote to the Welsh Government’s agency National Resources Wales (NRW) after a curlew seminar last month saying, “I came away from the meeting in an utter state of depression. Every single contributor who was working on the ground from RSPB in the North to land managers in Gwent had the same story. Hatching was achieved, but fledging was at such a low level it is unable to sustain the population over the short term”. Then, devastatingly, he went on to detail exactly why “there is suite of predators waiting to gobble up curlew chicks - fox, badger, carrion crow, buzzard, kite and raven to mention just the most numerous”. 

Yet, not only has the Welsh Government done little to help, it has also actively hindered those trying to protect species like the curlew. Wales has one of the highest fox densities of anywhere in Europe, which should be no surprise as the government owns about 20% of the uplands which are planted with commercial forestry and where there is virtually no fox control at all. Prior to the Hunting Act 2004, which applies in England and Wales, farmers’ gun packs were paid by the Welsh Government to carry out fox control and culled an extraordinary 15,000 foxes annually at minimal cost. Now less than 300 are killed by a few operators using the totally ineffective two-dog exemption. Not happy with this devastating restriction on fox control, the Welsh government has just banned snaring, one of the remaining two options, after a wholly inadequate process. It would not even consider a licensing scheme for modern humane cable restraints which would have allowed trained professionals to continue to use this vital tool. As for a debate about buzzard and kite numbers, you might as well save your breath. Faced with any opposition from environmental and animal rights groups (which are equally culpable), the Welsh Government would run for their fox-filled hills.

It is not only in Cardiff, however, that such hypocrisy is rife. The Scottish Government has just wasted eight years consulting and legislating on further restrictions on fox control with dogs. After a long struggle, we did force the Scottish Government to include a licensing scheme for the use of more than two dogs for livestock and conservation purposes, but its ‘nature protection agency’, NatureScot, is being predictably difficult about allowing anyone to protect nature. Now it is consulting on banning snares, which are already subject to a licensing scheme North of the border, as part of its pointless legislation on grouse shooting.

Nor is the Westminster government free from criticism. Its failure to address legacy EU legislation and, in particular, the ‘precautionary principle’ which only seems to apply when land managers want to carry on existing activities and never when the state wants to curtail them. It is this principle in the Habitats Directive, combined with Ministers’ weakness in the face of spurious legal challenges, that has created chaos in the wildlife licensing system and made it increasingly difficult to protect threatened species and biodiversity as a whole.

At its heart, this is a problem of the victory of populism in politics. Ministers (and conservation organisations) are just not willing to stand against what they perceive as public sentiment even when they know full well that a policy is damaging. Sometimes these arguments can seem pointless, but there is always hope. We will continue to respond with the evidence that doing the right thing rarely, if ever, has any electoral consequence as these issues are simply not a priority for voters. We will keep on promoting the tough actions that need to take place to sustain our countryside.