My Lords, funnily enough, that is a very good note on which to start. I will come to the specific amendment in half a second. But one of the things people do not realise is that the whole thing
about trophy hunting—by the way, I do not go in for it at all, but I know something about herd management from deer in Scotland; not that I manage myself, but I know people who do—is that you do not want to shoot a young male coming along because it has a magnificent pelt. You want it to develop into a full-blooded animal, and when it is just past its prime that is when you cull it, for exactly that reason: the dynamics of the crotchety old male which is causing disruption. The noble Lord is absolutely right. If you are managing the whole thing properly to improve whatever it is people wish to hunt, it will be done in a much better and more sustainable way for nature as well.
It comes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, said. The essential message is financial incentive. This is what I got from the delegates from Africa who came over, whom I also met. They want to be able to manage these things in order to get the funding, and incentive and local buy-in from the low-level population to support this in order to get the conservation side right. That is the trouble: it is all very well pouring aid in from the top, but sometimes it does not get anywhere near the bottom. It is much better to have stuff coming in to give the ordinary people on the ground an incentive to try to work in an environmental and conservation way. The objective is to conserve properly: you get your herd profiles right and then you do some hunting.
The reason this amendment is so important is that it is about the unintended and perverse consequences. The Bill says that you cannot import trophies
“on behalf of the hunter”,
meaning the person who killed the thing. If you think about it, if you are managing a herd, you will have deaths at all age profiles in the herd, and people are going to hunt for meat. Many of the animals that have been taken out for meat will have horns and other bits that are useful for creating mementos for tourists. I should love some reassurance that this is not banning the production of tourist mementos which are not trophies—they are not the thing that the person paid a fortune to go to kill, but what you might call by-products of the results of it. I am afraid you will have culling going on in the herd, and there will also be animals that die, so why cannot their body parts be made useful, for greater sustainable use?
These are not plastics, poisoning the planet; they are naturally produced things. It will be much better to make all sorts of products and ornamental things from them than from fossil fuels. If one of the unintended consequences of the Bill is that it prevents all use of all animal body parts, it really should be examined again. We are just wasting a whole natural resource there, and I am a great believer that we should be using natural products, not artificially produced plastic products, which are killing the planet.
The main thing is that we have to get the financial incentives in the right place, to incentivise at the bottom level, and we also need to use all the animal stuff. This great fiction that people just go out to shoot a few trophies and that these will be animals in their prime is not really how it should work.