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Hunting
with dogs ban passed by Parliament
AFTER two and a half years of heated debate and outright argument,
Members of the Scottish Parliament voted last week to make Scotland
the first part of Britain to ban foxhunting when they passed
a law intended to make in MSPs voted overwhelmingly in favour
of the Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Bill. The voting
was 83 in favour, 36 against with five abstentions.
But within minutes of the Bill being passed, it became clear
that the controversy surrounding the legislation, which could
see foxhunters imprisoned for up to six months or fined up to
£5,000, would not go away. Pro-hunting opponents denounced
the Bill as “an unworkable mess” whilst indicating
that legal challenges would be mounted in both the Scottish
and European courts once the Bill receives Royal Assent.
The credibility of the law-making ability of the parliament
was called into question when some Conservative MSPs suggested
that the Bill did not specifically banmounted hunts. One interpretation
of the Bill’s ambiguous wording even indicated that foxes
could be pursued by mounted hunts as long as the fox was shot
at the end of the hunt, rather than killed by dogs.
This, in turn, brings into question the way in which hunting
would be ‘policed’. Theoretically, a hunt could pursue
a fox, and the dogs might kill the fox, but as long as a huntsman
made sure to put a bullet in the carcass, no one could prove
or disprove that the hounds or the bullet killed the fox, unless
the kill was observed and filmed.
The Scottish Countryside Alliance said it would challenge the
legislation under the European Convention of Human Rights. Legal
action will also be taken under Human Rights laws against the
Parliament’s decision to throw out three amendments calling
for compensation for the hundreds of rural workers who will
lose their jobs as a result of the legislation. More time was
devoted into defeating these amendments than any other part
of the Bill, which many pro-hunting campaigners denounced as
“spiteful” and “petty”, showing just how
out of touch with rural matters the majority of the anti-hunting
MSPs were.
The legal action will begin as soon as the Bill receives Royal
Assent, and thus becomes law, in about four week’s time.
But Lord Watson of Invergowrie, the cabinet minister who drafted
the Member’s Bill when he was a backbencher, said last
night that he was “proud” that the Scottish Assembly
had become the “first legislature to say that suffering
in the name of human pleasure is unacceptable”.
Arrogant
Lord
Watson, the minister for culture, tourism and sport, added:
“The House of Commons will follow this in due course
and it is an example of what the Scottish Parliament can do.”
Opponents of the Bill have long since derided Lord Watson
as being arrogant and completely ignorant of the realities
of rural life, and have pointed out that he has never acknowledged
that banning hunting would actually cause more welfare problems
for foxes as other, crueller methods of control would become
the norm.
During a stormy six-hour session, MSPs considered 107 amendments.
At the end of the debate, a majority of 47 MSPs passed the
law that will see the pastime banned by the autumn.
Earlier in the day, a series of changes were put forward by
Lord Watson’s supporters. Parliament passed the amendments,
drawn up by a cross-party group of anti-hunt MSPs and designed
to close legal loopholes that jeopardised the Bill’s
aim to ban mounted hunts.
But critics claimed that the changes would criminalise gamekeepers
and members of the Scottish hill packs by making their methods
of pest control illegal. Incredibly, a suggested amendment
to ensure that pest control involving the use of a single
dog to kill vermin escaping from the undergrowth was lawful
was defeated.
The way ahead for the legislation looks stormy, and the Westminster
Government, currently under extreme pressure to ban hunting
in England and Wales, will no doubt be watching the outcome
of the legal challenges very closely before committing itself
to providing Parliamentary time for another attempt to introduce
a Bill banning hunting south of the border.
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