A POTENTIAL ANSWER FROM HOUSE OF LORDS ABOUT STATUS OF PHEASANTS - LIVESTOCK OR WILDLIFE

FROM RAPTOR PERSECUTION UK

 Last week I blogged about how Green peer Natalie Bennett had posed a question in the House of Lords, asking the UK Government ‘whether they regard captive-reared pheasants released into the environment as wildlife or livestock?‘ (see here).

This question stems from the Government’s ongoing contortions relating to the legal status of pheasants, a status that seemingly is able to morph from being ‘livestock’ to ‘wildlife’ and then back to ‘livestock’ at various points in the year, which provides the pheasant owner/keeper with multiple opportunities to kill native predators and avoid legal responsibility for public damage all at the same time. This flow chart from Wild Justice sums it up well:

WELL HERE IS A SORT OF ANSWER

Conservative life peer and DEFRA Minister Zac Goldsmith has now responded to Natalie Bennett’s question as follows:

‘A released captive-reared pheasant may be regarded as livestock if it remains significantly dependent on a keeper for their survival, for example for the provision of food, water or shelter‘.

Hmm. That’s not especially helpful when ‘significantly dependent’ hasn’t been defined, although we do know from DEFRA’s new General Licences this year that supplementary feeding of pheasants does not count in this context. Hmm, it’s all very odd.

Wild Justice has taken legal advice on this issue this week and you can expect to hear more from them in due course…. and you’ll hear it first if you subscribe to their free newsletter here.