*This article was first published in Scottish Gamekeeper magazine, Autumn 2024 edition
I have decided to dedicate this month’s article only to the pending changes on use of traps. There are a number of key elements which you should be aware of:
Snaring is being banned and my understanding is the ban will take place in October.
Secondly, some good news – it is now a criminal offence for a person to tamper, disarm or destroy a trap in a manner that leaves it non-compliant.
All traps are going to require a trap licence on it. The licence can be displayed either directly on the trap itself or on a tag. Those trap numbers must apply to all traps.
A wildlife trap is going to be either a crow cage or any trap approved under the Agriculture (Scotland) Act 1948. We would commonly know these as spring traps. The Spring Traps Approval Order has a significant number of traps on it which are approved by the Secretary of State. If you are in any doubt about which traps are on the Spring Traps Approval Order, these can be found online.
An application for a wildlife trap must be approved before you can use it. There will be a fee, which I do not anticipate will be significant. That is yet to released.
In order to qualify for a wildlife trap licence, the applicant needs to complete an approved training course in respect of the relevant trap.
In terms of the appropriate training courses, these are about to be rolled out soon and I anticipate that the SGA will be able to announce soon its programme to undertake these courses. Alan Tweedie will run these courses and is a leading expert in this area. He is regularly used as an expert witness in legal cases. SGA members will be entitled to the benefit of a discount on these courses.
Licences may be modified and they can also be suspended or revoked if a licence holder fails to comply with any conditions or if the relevant authority is satisfied that the licence holder has committed a relevant offence. The relevant authority is likely to be NatureScot and a relevant offence is essentially any wildlife crime.
We await details of the approved training courses, what they will involve and the form and content of those. I anticipate the SGA will be reporting on that shortly. Members should therefore keep a close eye on any updates.
Landowners require to provide authorisation for traps to be used.
From an overview perspective, my view is that this is further regulation by the backdoor in terms of the Act, which was meant to be about grouse licensing.
However, if one looks at it positively, not only has our pressure for the last fifteen years paid off in that tampering with traps is now a criminal offence, but as an industry, members will already be used to keeping records for snares and crow cages as well as having tags and numbers on those.
I hope that this new regime will not create too much of a burden for members in the circumstance.
As always, I will be happy to assist any members with any questions arising.
