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Lord Donoughue: I have sympathy with the noble Lord because this whole area should be subject to a proper animal welfare Bill. As the Committee may be aware, I have introduced a Private Member's Bill that does exactly that. If one links that with the
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Government's proposed animal welfare Bill, one could deal with all these issues in a rational way that is based on evidence. But that is not the instinct of some people, mainly in my party, in the House of Commons and of just a few noble Lords, as we heard today, in this Committee. I sympathise with the noble Lord's view, but that is not the reality with which we have to deal.
Those who oppose submitting hare coursing to the tests and the registration process are rejecting or undermining that process. My noble friend Lord Faulkner may tell us otherwise, but they are apparently unwilling to expose their views to rational scrutiny and evidence. Surely if they are convinced not merely that their instincts lean that way, but that they are right and that the evidence points to it, they should be willing to go through that process in absolute confidence that an activity will be banned under it.
The approach of the amendment is to apply rational scrutiny and evidence. It provides that all activities and animals be treated equally under the law. That might normally be an instinct towards which Members of my party incline, since we have normally supported treating human beings equally under the law, but the law should not pick out certain activities and certain animals for discriminatory treatment. The amendment would leave to this process and the evidence before it the determination of which activities are permitted and which are banned.
As one who does not support hare coursing, I strongly support the amendment and recommend that those who have concerns about coursing too—maybe based on evidence; maybe, unlike mine and those of my noble friend Lord Faulkner, based on ignorance and no experience—should be willing to submit to this process, which will determine those activities which will be permitted and those which should be banned. I support the amendment.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: I shall be very surprised if what I am about to say changes anyone's mind—in fact, I am certain that it will not. However, I am amazed that Members of the Committee who feel strongly that hunting should continue should have any intention of sending the Bill back to the House of Commons with hare coursing included. That would be a red rag to a bull; it is not in the spirit of compromise, and it is entirely irrational.
What offends me most is not the question of hunting hares or hare coursing; it is the fact that including it in the Bill would bring this House into disrepute. I know that noble Lords who are pro-coursing gave the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, a hard time and I am sure that they will do the same to me. Nevertheless, I believe that it would show that the House of Lords was unwilling to compromise, and I feel very strongly about that. Hare coursing has no place in the Bill. It is a Bill about hunting and, because it is a Bill about hunting, it is a difficult place to consider anything carried out as a sport.
I want to address the issues of conservation which were prayed in aid of continuing coursing. The Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group has made a useful analysis
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of the decline of the brown hare over the years. Mostly, it comes down to modern agricultural practices, and the group has listed the things that would reverse the decline in hare numbers, which now seem to have stabilised. None of the items listed will come as a surprise to the Committee. They include: keeping a wide grass strip; broadening the bottom of hedges; and having a wide food source for hares, which do not carry much body fat and so need a regular food source.
I do not think we can say that hare coursing is necessary in order to keep up hare numbers. The types of practice that will come about as part of CAP reform and the types of practice that will encourage more skylarks, and so on, are also likely to encourage more hares.
Is continuing with legal hare coursing likely to prevent illegal coursing or, at least, to have an impact on it? I do not believe that it will. Illegal coursing is horrendous and is an extremely difficult problem which needs to be tackled vigorously, but continuing with legal coursing will not in any way begin to address the issue.
I listened with great interest to the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Best, who made some good points. Nevertheless, I believe that hare coursing is a sport and that it is not practised in order to control hare numbers. We have not heard any arguments to the effect that that form of sport is acceptable in relation to any other animal, and therefore I do not believe that it is supportable. Further than that, I believe that we may as well write off the rest of the days that we are to spend in Committee, Report and Third Reading if noble Lords are minded to vote in favour of putting hare coursing back into the Bill. If they do so, the compromise will be seen to have failed completely.
Lord Denham: I hope that the Committee will be aware that competitive coursing is the only field sport that has been examined in depth and given a clean bill of health by a Select Committee of the House. The Hare Coursing Bill 1975 was brought from the House of Commons and given a Second Reading in this House on 7 November 1975. It was then very properly withdrawn by the government of the day due to lack of time and, in the next Parliament, was introduced as a House of Lords Bill and given a First and Second Reading on 16 December 1975.
The Bill was thereupon referred to a House of Lords Select Committee of the type that can hear evidence, go about the countryside and examine what it is talking about. The late, very distinguished public servant Lord Trevelyan was in the chair. One of the members was the late Lord Cranbrook, a natural history expert of world renown. The committee heard evidence from all interested parties, attended two separate coursing meetings in Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire and then produced their report. The report concluded that,
"The Bill is not a suitable instrument for reducing the suffering of hares. The welfare of the hare would not be appreciably affected by it, since the amount of physical suffering caused by competitive coursing is probably less than 1 per cent of the amount caused by hare shooting and non-competitive coursing".
After that, the Government dropped the hare coursing Bill. That was nearly 30 years ago. The rules maintained by the National Coursing Club are even stricter now than then, but all I would ask is that the National Coursing Club should at least be given the opportunity to put its case among other field sports before the registrar is appointed under this Bill.
Baroness Mallalieu: I usually agree with 90 per cent of what the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, says, but on this occasion I am in the 10 per cent zone. The advice that I hope the Committee will take on the approach to be adopted on this Bill is that given to the Committee earlier by the noble Lord, Lord King, when he said that we should try to do what we believe is right.
I hope that our earlier vote today is an indication that we want to try to send to the other place a fair Bill, rather than one that gives vent to personal prejudices. That is the problem with the Bill that has come to this Committee. In my submission, whatever one's personal views on hare coursing—I do not happen to share those of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner—it must be right that the same test is applied to this sport as to the others with which the Committee is concerned. Hare coursing is a minority sport within a minority and, therefore, we must be particularly careful to ensure that that minority's interests are treated with the same degree of care as others.
When he considered this matter, Alun Michael said that the matter must be determined on principle and evidence and not on personal distaste. With respect, I suggest that those are the words that we should remember now. I urge those who have personal distaste, whether they have investigated the matter or not, to adopt that principle and be prepared to submit hare coursing to the test devised by Alun Michael. If it does not meet those tests, as some noble Lords have indicated they do not believe it will, organised hare coursing will not receive registration and will, no doubt, cease.
I believe that Mr Alun Michael's view was that hare coursing would not pass the tests that he set. You will recall that the first of those tests was that of utility. I anticipate that at a later stage we shall come to the test of utility, which at the moment is very narrowly drafted to deal only with pest control. I anticipate that the Committee will consider whether it should be expanded to include wildlife management. I hope that it will. It is certainly right that if pest control is the test, hare coursing would not make the cut. I do not believe that anyone at the National Coursing Club would suggest that that was so.
If wildlife management were included at least there would be a case—they would say a strong one—for the registrar to consider. I am not in a position to say whether it is one that would find favour or not, but those of us who were fortunate enough a couple of days ago to attend a presentation given in this House heard from a keeper on an estate of 2,000 acres in Norfolk on which there are an estimated 800 hares. He was doing all the things that noble Lords have said should be done to improve and to increase the hare population. He said that if coursing went, because that
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was a coursing estate, the farming policy would change in such a way that he could not possibly continue to maintain that number and that there would undoubtedly be a substantial decrease. Indeed, I have heard it said on reliable evidence that some 30,000 hares are likely to be shot in the event of coursing being stopped because landowners would be anxious to avoid the undoubted increase in illegal coursing which would take place.
I say to my noble friend Lord Faulkner that, if the hare coursing proposals in the Bill as we have received it were to find favour and to reach the statute book, it is the view of many of those who have studied this subject that we could kiss goodbye to the Government's biodiversity programme. The stable hare numbers we have now achieved would plummet.
Mr Michael thought that hare coursing might not meet the test of "least suffering". That could be so. The noble Lord, Lord Best, said that one hare in 10 is killed in the course of a coursing event. That figure has to be looked at against the research done by Dr Douglas Wise, a lecturer in animal husbandry at Cambridge University, who has concluded that when hares are shot some 25 per cent are wounded, of which approximately half are not retrieved. That is an alarming statistic.
I have never been on a shoot where hares were shot, but those who have tell me that it is not a pleasant experience. If that really is the figure—and there seems to be considerable evidence for it—what we are doing is perhaps saving the lives of 126 hares a year and sacrificing a great many more which will be killed or wounded and suffer lingering death. When one looks at the "least suffering" test, I am not sure that there is not an argument for a registrar to consider.
I am not sure either that threats are the best way to achieve good, sustainable legislation. We are told that there is no point in our even considering this legislation because the Commons will regard it as provocative. I feel that that would be an unwise approach to adopt. We have to look at each issue on its merits.
We have also to look—and I am bound to say that I have—at the Bill that we have been presented with. The definition of a hare coursing event is so tightly drawn that the most minute changes to the rules of the National Coursing Club would take it outside the definition contained in the Bill. When I look at Schedule 1 "Exempt Hunting", I can see no reason why people should not walk across a field with two greyhounds, lurchers, salukis or whatever they choose and flush hares in the field, provided that at the end of the day there is somebody with a gun who can try to shoot.
We are told that control of illegal hare coursing is going to be improved by this proposal. I cannot see how that can possibly be. My understanding is that the people who engage in illegal hare coursing are not likely to be making applications for licences. When tackled, the Bill provides them with the clearest possible defence that they were out trying to catch rabbits. At the moment that defence is not open to them when they are charged with trespass.
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Illegal coursing, or poaching as it is properly called, is a curse in many parts of the country. But it cannot be right to go for the law abiding because you cannot catch the law breakers. There was a very valuable adjournment debate in another place which Mr Robert Jackson introduced. A number of helpful proposals were made to the Government for steps that could be taken to try to curb illegal hare coursing; one involved the confiscation of vehicles that were used. If the Government's intention really is to tackle illegal coursing, those sorts of proposals should be coming before us as legislation. But they are not present in this Bill. Indeed, I think that the Bill provides some incentives and I very much fear that it would lead to an increase in illegal coursing.
For all those reasons, I hope that noble Lords who have reservations about hare coursing—I know that there are many on all sides of this House—will take the trouble to find out more before they vote to inflict a direct ban. In any event, I hope that they will take the view at this stage that the right course would be to accept what every side said at Portcullis House. I wish to correct the remark made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, at the outset of our discussions on the Bill, that there was no agreement at Portcullis House. I sat through every word of the evidence on all three days. The one thing on which every witness from each side agreed was that no distinction should be made as between different species; all animals should be treated the same.
That is the principle that I hope we will apply to this amendment—fair treatment right across the board. If hare coursing cannot make the cut, it will go. I appreciate that some feel strongly that hare coursing should stop. If they are right, they will get their way, but in a way that we can all see is just and fair. If we want lasting legislation that will stand the test of time, it must be fair, even for a minority within a minority.
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