My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment, which makes a great deal of sense. I think it is also just worth pointing out that he touched on a pertinent point: everyone is concerned about endangered animals. A lot of people feel strongly about animals in the wild, but what we have heard this evening, and what is obviously apparent, is that not all of these animals are wild. There are canned lions and the shooting of animals in enclosures. When I researched this, I was surprised that animals can be shot on the internet: you go online, pay your subscription—whatever it is—and then line up the crosswires on your computer to shoot an animal in an enclosure. I think most of us find that pretty distasteful and unnecessary, which is why there is a distinction between animals kept in artificial conditions and those that are completely wild. So I absolutely agree with what my noble friend said.
This goes to the essence of one of the points that many of us have made: the Bill is well intentioned. I have to say that I really resent some of the comments made this evening about how people on this side of the House—I am not a hereditary Peer, by the way—somehow want to sabotage the Bill. We do not. Surely the essence of any Committee stage is to improve a Bill. So, although some complain about the number of amendments—at the last count, it was over 60—and say that they are somehow unhelpful to the Government, egregious and wrong, I argue that this is actually the Chamber at its very best, trying to improve a Bill. It went through the other place very quickly, without any amendments, and it came here. We had a substantial debate on it, and a huge amount of information came our way over the summer and the latter part of the spring, from experts around the world, to help us to improve it. Surely that is the House taking this matter seriously. My noble friend’s amendment is one of many small but technical amendments. I really do find it hard to accept the idea that this is an all-male group of refuseniks living in a colonial world that is somehow trying to turn the clock back. We are actually acting in the best spirit of this House. We need time to get Bills like this right, and it may require a lot of technical amendments to be looked at, discussed and voted on.
It is incredibly important that we listen to the experts, who have not only commented on the generality of the Bill but picked up on some of the points regarding animals that may be wild or tame—that obviously goes to the core of my noble friend’s specific amendment. The Joint Nature Conservation Committee, which was mentioned, gave us evidence, but there are many other bodies, which I will come to at a later stage of the Bill. It is also worth mentioning that, when there is so much consensus among international bodies, we have to stop and take note. The International Union for Conservation of Nature made a strong case for the conservation arguments and highlighted the point about wild animals, as opposed to those kept in captivity. The Government have referred to that organisation in a favourable light on other occasions, but now they appear to be ignoring it.
There are other bodies as well. There is the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the IUCN, which is a global conservation authority. What is interesting about the advice that it has given your Lordships’ House and the Minister and the Government is that it is obviously not particularly comfortable in supporting trophy hunting. In fact, I would say that it is probably instinctively against it. But it is pragmatic. What it said was that trophy hunting was a possible threat to nine of the 6,200 species covered by the Bill, whereas it offers a very clear benefit to 25% of the wild species to which the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, referred.
Then you have the specific Governments who have given evidence to Members of this House and put arguments and sent letters to them, including Botswana’s Minister for the Environment and Conservation, who made it very clear that the
“importation ban of legally harvested wildlife trophies will negatively impact wildlife authorities, including Professional Hunting Associations and Community-Based Support Organizations”
and conservation bodies. What is relevant to this is that, recently, representatives of the community-run conservation areas in the four African countries that make up the Kavango-Zambezi trans-frontier conservation area—the so-called KAZA—stated that the Bill would have a “highly detrimental effect” on the protection of wildlife and the way of life of these communities. The way of life of the communities is something that is highly relevant to this specific amendment, which is why I support the noble Earl in his amendment.