Trapping legislations clarified: Our letter to Shooting Times

Letter sent to the Shooting Times on February 25^th

Stephen Salmon (letters, Feb 20^th) accuses representative organisations of ‘complete indifference’ towards the phasing out of Fenn traps for stoats under the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards (AIHTS). He could not be more wrong. GWCT has followed and warned about the global pressure to improve trap humaneness since the 1990s. In 2005, Fenn traps were shown to fail the emerging AIHTS standard for stoats, and the writing was on the wall – it’s impossible to defend a trap in which animals take more than 5 minutes to die.  Sensing a crisis ahead, in 2006 GWCT submitted DOC traps – which were known to pass the standard – for UK approval, to ensure that at least one trap would be available into the future. At that stage AIHTS had not been ratified, so we were 10 years ahead of the expected crunch-point.

Defra were slow to begin implementing AIHTS in the UK. When they did start in 2015, very little time was left before the deadline (July 2016), and very little government money for trap testing.  Concerned organisations (GWCT, NGO, BASC, Moorland Association, Countryside Alliance, and Scottish Land & Estates) argued cogently for more time to find acceptable replacements for Fenn traps, and put together a fund to finance this. Since 2016 we have worked with Defra, manufacturers and individual inventors to hurry candidate stoat traps – including prototypes – to testing stage. However, designing a good trap is far from easy. Disappointingly few new designs have been put forward. Of the ten or so tested, the majority have failed humaneness tests, and now we have run out of extra time. As things stand, DOC traps are one of only three that have met the AIHTS standard and may lawfully be used for UK stoats after 1^st April 2020. See www.gwct.org.uk/AIHTS for much more information.

Everyone would prefer more options and more familiar-feeling options, and maybe they will emerge later. But Stephen Salmon is right on one thing: gamekeepers – and vicariously their employers – must take the current reality very seriously. Failure to withdraw Fenn traps and other failed stoat traps by April 2020 will expose those individuals to potential prosecution and the whole sector to reputational damage. 

Jonathan Reynolds

Head of predation control studies at GWCT