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.
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