My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, for bringing this forward today and Henry Smith MP for steering it through the other place. This is clearly an issue on which there are strong feelings. It is clear from this debate that there are strong views on each side and, frankly, I do not think there is much room to come together in the middle. When the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, was talking about old cantankerous males, I wondered whether he was actually referring to some Members of the House of Lords—let us hope not. I thank the noble Baroness for her very powerful introduction to this Bill; her passion for animal welfare brings her huge respect across the House.
I remind noble Lords, as others have done, that the proposed ban has widespread support from the public and, as we have heard, clear cross-party support in Parliament. As noble Lords have said, it was in the manifestos of major parties. Action against this terrible sport—if you can call it a sport—has already taken place across the globe. France and Australia banned the import and export of lion hunting trophies in 2015 and the Netherlands banned trophy imports of more than 200 species in 2016. The noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso, talked about canned hunting in South Africa. A few years ago, as I am sure he is aware, South Africa unveiled plans to terminate its multimillion-dollar lion-breeding industry, which supplies lions for trophy hunts as well as for tourism and traditional medicine. If there is one point of agreement in this debate, it is how appalling canned hunting is.
I will pick up some of the main points that have been discussed. We have discussed that hunting supports conservation and local communities. We believe that trophy hunting can have detrimental effects on wildlife populations, especially when conducted irresponsibly or without proper regulation. Some endangered or threatened species may be targeted by trophy hunters, exacerbating their decline and hindering conservation efforts. Trophy hunting has a history of mismanagement,
with quotas based on inadequate data, unsustainable hunting quotas and a lack of transparency. The economic benefits generated from trophy hunting have also often been overstated, with only a small proportion of the revenue actually reaching local communities or conservation programmes. Such assertions are data-deficient and have been shown to be false whenever even the most basic interviews with communities and independent analysis are conducted. If such funds reach local communities, they are entirely negligible for conservation efforts compared to the damage inflicted by the industry through the irreversible loss of key natural resources.
There has been much talk about evidence and experts, on both sides of the argument. From my reading and research, the argument that trophy hunting is necessary for conservation funding does not seem to stand up to scrutiny. Surely, it is simply counterproductive to the overall idea of conservation. Why do you need to shoot something you are trying to protect?
Trophy hunting can also disrupt the delicate balance of ecosystems, as noble Lords have mentioned during the debate. We have heard that removing key individuals such as dominant males can lead to social instability in animal populations, affecting their reproductive success and overall health, and that this imbalance can have a cascading effect on the ecosystem as a whole.
There is a wide variety of targets a trophy hunter may focus on. However, the most common targets are the African big five: the African elephant, the Cape buffalo, the African leopard, the African lion and the black rhino. Four of these majestic animals are currently considered to be endangered. In the sport of trophy hunting, it is also common for hunters to find the largest and strongest male. A number of noble Lords have talked about the impact this can have on the gene pool for such species, leaving each generation weaker and making it more difficult for them to survive in the long term.
Although hunting groups will claim that controlled trophy hunting does not harm populations, that evidence seems to show that the opposite is true. Approximately 600 African lions are killed every year on trophy hunts, including those in populations that are already declining from other threats. The adult male lion is the most sought-after trophy by wealthy foreign hunters; shooting an adult male, such as Cecil, can generate a one-off trophy fee of around $15,000.
Let us have a further look at the economics. In its report Big Game Hunting in West Africa, the International Union for Conservation of Nature says:
“Returns for local populations, even when managed by community projects … are insignificant, and cannot prompt them to change their behaviour regarding poaching and agricultural encroachment. The number of salaried jobs generated (15,000 all over Africa) is low considering that 150 million people live in the eight main big game hunting countries, and that hunting takes up 16.5% of their territory.”
Hunting also directly competes with and undermines truly sustainable and economically important revenue generation from alternative means such as ecotourism and photographic. The noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson of Welton, gave some examples of this. Just because the alternatives for economic development may not necessarily work to begin with does not mean that
more work should not be done and they should not be invested in and developed for the future. There is no reason why they cannot generate revenues to cover the real cost of conservation and effective anti-poaching work, as well as providing well-paid permanent jobs for local people without causing harm to animals.
Poaching has been mentioned at length in this debate. We need to recognise that trophy hunting, as well as being cruel and unjustifiable, in my mind, can act as a cover for illegal poaching. While a certain amount of regulation does take place, it is not enough to prevent trophy hunts being used as a cover for poaching. According to a report entitled The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation, by Save African Animals,
“Opening up even a limited legal trade creates a smokescreen for poachers which is almost impossible to police.”
Let me draw a comparison with whaling. Before the whaling moratorium was introduced in 1986, legal quotas were widely used as covers for poaching, driving some species near to extinction. The same is now happening with the trophy hunting of endangered species.
We have also heard about the idea of a licensing exemption—that has been talked about quite considerably. The noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, introduced that element in his speech. I may be wrong, but this appears to propose a model that resembles licences for trophy imports awarded under the United States’s Endangered Species Act. I think it would be disproportionate to include this in the legislation, as it would introduce considerable cost and administrative burdens, as well as creating the risk of judicial review. Indeed, a director for the US Fish and Wildlife Service explained that it faced challenges during a recent lawsuit. He said:
“The International Affairs Program currently has a backlog of applications and insufficient staffing and resources to keep up with the very high workload and backlog. Staff time also must be spent defending against multiple lawsuits filed in federal court concerning the Service’s administration of permits to import sport-hunted elephant trophies and other permitting responsibilities”.
Surely this is not a situation we should seek to emulate.
Moreover, a system to assess whether import permits should be issued for hunting trophies from threatened species according to certain criteria would be heavily, if not exclusively, reliant on data and reports from exporting countries, which have proven time and again to be unreliable. It is of particular note that a letter we discussed mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, signed by African experts, said:
“Trophy hunting has a history of mismanagement with quotas based on inadequate data”—
as I have said.
There seems to have been an element in this debate of picking and choosing which experts you want to believe. It is not reasonable for the people who signed that letter to be completely dismissed, just as we need to listen to other arguments being put forward. I do not believe that trophy hunting is helping to save our planet; it is driven by the trophy hunters’ desire to kill and then boast about it. As inhabitants of our planet, it is our responsibility to address this, as losing animals of such great importance would be a terrible loss. In my personal opinion, trophy hunting is cruel, inhumane and unjustifiable. It is also morally objectionable. Killing
animals for so-called sport or as a form of entertainment is unnecessary and cruel. It also raises questions about our responsibility towards other living beings and challenges the notion of conservation based on killing. I have never been able to understand why anybody would want to kill a beautiful creature then pose for a photograph with a dead animal, let alone bring its head home.
We have heard that society is changing, and it is. Societal attitudes towards animals and conservation are evolving, and there is growing pressure on Governments to re-evaluate their position on practices such as trophy hunting. The noble Lord, Lord Selkirk of Douglas, talked about it as a moral wrong, and I agree with him, so I am proud to support the Government today and hope that the Minister will be able to address many of the concerns, because it is time the UK joined others around the globe and banned the importation of hunting trophies for good.
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