My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Mancroft and I am very pleased to hear that he would like the Bill to reach the statute book, for I rise to speak in support of it and of my noble friend Lady Fookes.
I am not going to go over the arguments as to whether trophy hunting is important for conservation. As we have heard already, plenty have used the science to say that it is and others have used it to say that it is not. Frankly, I very much doubt that either side will change its mind by listening to the evidence put forward by the other. Instead, there is another and more fundamental question to consider. It is whether we really believe that, in this day and age, trophy hunting can be seen as a reasonable endeavour, even in the name of conservation, as its supporters claim.
Many in this Chamber have talked about how distasteful this is as a practice. We have not actually spelled out the reality, so I will take a minute and go through what it means. A group of men, sometimes women, will pay to go on what seems, on the face of it, to be a standard safari. There is a nice lodge, a glass of wine and plenty of time to relax in between game drives, but there the similarities end. You do not have a guide on these drives; you have a PH—a private hunter—and there is a difference. A safari guide has to learn how to interpret and be respectful of the wilderness and its wildlife. They are the link between nature and guest. A private hunter just has to know how to hunt. What they really need to do is make sure that, if their clients miss, they can tell them where to shoot next. In truth, that is the only tricky bit. It is called hunting but very often there is no chase, and it does not take great skill.
I asked the South African wildlife journalist and academic Dr Adam Cruise, who is here today, to tell me a bit about it, as he has been on many of these hunts. He explained:
“The animals are used to the vehicles and the elephants and the lions don’t run anyway. It’s as simple as going out, seeing the zebra, say, getting out of the jeep, taking a few steps and shooting the zebra—if they get it wrong the first time, which they often do, the PH is there to guide them ... bit lower, bit higher … while the animal writhes on the floor. It can often take them 10 or 15 minutes to die but when the job’s finally done, the staff clean off the blood, the client has his picture taken, jumps back in the jeep and the team will either put the animal in the back if it’s small enough or chop off the head if it’s a lion or an elephant and leave the carcass behind.”
He went on to talk about one hunt he was on:
“A lot of the animals are bred for the purpose so even something like a rhino can be quite tame—”