Hunting Hearings - Minutes of Proceedings
DEPARTMENT FOR ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS
MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS
at a
PUBLIC HEARING
on
HUNTING WITH DOGS
held in the
Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House, Westminster, SW1
on
Monday 9 September 2002
SESSION C
DAY 1
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Rt Hon Alun Michael, MP, in the Chair
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(From the Shorthand Notes of:
W B GURNEY & SONS LLP
Westminster House
7 Millbank
London, SW1P 3JA)
In attendance:
MR DOUGLAS BATCHELOR, Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals.
MS PHYLLIS CAMPBELL-MC-RAE, Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals.
DR ARTHUR LINDLEY, Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals.
MR JOHN ROLLS, Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals.
BARONESS GOLDING, Middle Way Group.
MR PETER LUFF, MP, Middle Way Group.
MR LEMBIT OPIK, MP, Middle Way Group.
MR SIMON HART, Countryside Alliance.
MR JOHN JACKSON, Countryside Alliance.
MR RICHARD LISSACK, QC, Countryside Alliance.
MR CHRISTOPHER BRAUN, Defra.
MR NIGEL LEFTON, Legal Directorate, Defra.
DR PETER ROBERTSON, Defra.
MR ANDREW SHERROTT, Stewardship Advisor, Defra.
ANNA WALKER, Defra.
THE CHAIRMAN: Before we start, can I remind everybody to switch off their mobile phones and pagers? As far as people speaking is concerned, the acoustics can be good or not so good. The loudspeakers are at full power so please lean forward to get the best possible results.
What we are doing here is hearing evidence from experts on topics that have been agreed, as have the experts invited, by myself and the three campaigning organisations. What we are about is not scoring points but exploring the evidence that is put forward and seeing whether that can help the longer term process of enabling Parliament to reach a conclusion on this issue. We have segmented the topic in order to try to make sense of different topics. Our third topic is managing and controlling the quarry species, foxes, hare, deer and mink populations.
I am very pleased to welcome our experts for this session, Dr Jonathon Reynolds, a wildlife biologist with the Game Conservancy Trust; Professor Stephen Harris, professor of environmental sciences at Bristol University; Hugh Thomas, chair of Exmoor Deer Management Society and Dr Piran White, wildlife ecologist, previously based as researcher at Bristol University, now based at York University.
Can I ask Dr Reynolds to present his paper first and then Professor Harris, Mr Thomas and Dr White?
DR REYNOLDS: In the Game Conservancy Trust written submissions to you we stress the logical desirability of a consistent approach to wildlife issues founded on secure ethics and this will be a recurrent theme in my evidence today.
You have asked me to address utility in managing and controlling species and I confess I am immediately rather stuck because in population control several definitions of "utility" can reasonably be proposed.
A practice could be said to have a utility if it is one component of an effective control or if it is effective in itself as a control strategy, if it makes effective control easier and cheaper or if it is essential for effective control -- that is to say, if no other method will substitute for it.
All of these make sense but which of them would justify the practice? Lobbies at the extremes of this debate take very different views here. The Countryside Alliance argue that utility under any of these definitions would be justification for the practice. The CPHA take the view that only the last of these -- i.e., that the practice is irreplaceable -- helps to justify the method.
The CPHA argues additionally that the necessity of the aims must be demonstrated. In population control, the aim is to reduce numbers or prevent their increase but of course this is only in order to reduce damage or prevent its increase and that is in order to fulfil ultimate aims such as farming, other commercial interests, harvesting, hunting, shooting and angling, or to protect other species.
It seems unlikely to me that there can be agreement over the assessment of aims such as these between those who control wildlife populations or hunt or harvest and those who fundamentally oppose them.
For instance, the RSPCA which publishes its policies is opposed in principle to the taking or killing of wild animals. Judging the utility of any form of hunting is difficult where the aims of population control, recreation and harvesting are intermixed. In the course of time, most recreational uses of wildlife develop forms of self-regulation and conservation methods to ensure sustainability.
These are recognised within angling and shooting and most are also seen in hunting with dogs too. Thus, in judging the utility of dogs in population control, you must bear in mind that in many places the practice has already assumed a restrained role. We should not confuse its performance with its potential.
What is the utility of dogs in fox population control? Stephen Tapper has already referred to the Game Conservancy Trust's 3-region study which was examined by Lord Burns. This is the situation we found. Culling methods involving dogs were one component of the overall fox cull in all of the three regions we studied, but the cull was regionally effective in only two of these regions; hence my tick in brackets.
Methods involving dogs took the major part of the regionally effective cull in Wales. Probably those could have been effective in themselves. Hunting with dogs makes control cheaper or more or less universal because it is to a large extent funded by those who have an interest in it and it is cheap or free at the point of delivery.
That leads us to ask is hunting with dogs anywhere necessary for effective control? We did not conceive our study to answer that question and for other methods too the evidence simply does not exist to say whether it is necessary. To my knowledge, this question of necessity has been answered in very few population control contexts. Exceptions might be the use of poisons in large scale rodent control programmes or the use of poisons in the intensive control of introduced stoat from New Zealand.
Most pest population control is difficult and the range of available methods allows the operator a flexible approach. In making his choice, he will weigh up effectiveness, humaneness, cost, target specificity and human safety.
Novel methods must usually go through an assessment process at least if they are poisons, fumigants, repellants or killing drugs. The entry rules are different in each case but they are all pragmatic in the sense that utility can override concerns about humaneness.
Deletion rules are what we are discussing today: when should a method be made illegal? Surely, it is logical that both entry laws and deletion laws should be guided by some consistent ethic? Okay, that ethic might again be a pragmatic one but it is desirable -- I would say essential -- that it is both explicit and consistently applied across all wildlife issues.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: In my submission, I have highlighted that management and control have to be viewed as two separate, complementary issues. There has been not enough work on managing problems posed by species as opposed to managing numbers about species.
One of the problems I have highlighted is that there is a difference in the way mammals and birds are perceived. Birds were given blanket protection in 1954 and that laid down the framework in which we manage and protect our bird population in Britain. We have nothing comparable for mammals and much of that probably relates to the fact that there has been dissent on all the attempts to achieve this by those who have been present at hunt meetings.
I talk about the issues relating to foxes and what widespread fox control is currently achieving. I quote Lord Burns concluded that fox hunting made little contribution to controlling fox numbers and that a ban on hunting was unlikely to result in an increase in fox numbers. I then report on the independent study undertaken by The Mammal Society which shows that the ban on hunting during foot and mouth disease had no impact on fox numbers. Those data have now been published in a peer review journal.
It is also probable that during foot and mouth disease there were restrictions on other forms of rural activities impinging on fox control. It may have improved the level of fox control. We know that fox control in the countryside declined and I doubt that there is very much evidence of other forms of control being increased to compensate for lack of hunting.
There are a few independent studies that have looked at the impact of population management on fox numbers in Britain. I quote an example in Bristol where fox numbers have shown very little change in terms of number of social groups over 40 years in the absence of control. I also highlight work done in Scotland in the 1970s by Kolb & Hewson which shows that changes in fox numbers are driven by variations in food supply rather than changes in culling pressure.
I also point out that there are currently two published and a third survey that estimates the fox numbers in Britain is about to be submitted for publication. As far as we can see, over the last 20 years there has been no change in fox numbers overall in any significant way. Again, I present some data from the work done by the British Trust for Ornithology that over the last six years have shown that although there has been variation between fox numbers there is no significant trend in fox numbers overall.
I also discuss briefly the fact that it is claimed that hunting plays a role in maintaining a healthy fox population. There has been no evidence to support such an assertion. I finally make the point that we have more and more data coming in that show that culling is not the most effective way of managing problems. Hugh White will talk some more about the data we have received recently on that which suggest that landscape management and other forms of management may be more cost effective in dealing with problems where they occur.
I talk about deer and I point out that there are now around 1.25 million deer in Britain and up to 300,000 are killed largely by culling, about 40,000 on the roads.
As far as hunting with dogs is concerned, we can confirm about 150 animals being killed each year from a population of around 2,500 in the hunted areas, perhaps slightly more. Some estimate up to 4,000 but it is still a very small proportion of the overall deer population in south-west Britain. Despite the ever current pressure, it is currently growing at around two per cent per annum and it is regulated to about three square kilometres a year. It is now firmly established at the western end of Cornwall and it is a healthy herd. Again, there is no evidence that the areas where the minority of the deer are hunted are being managed better or are better quality than the rest of south-west Britain.
I have already highlighted the problem for hares. There is a BAP species for which there is no clear management. We are the only country that does not have a closed season for it and the problem we face is that although the BAT numbers will be at spring numbers by 2010, in seven years the published numbers have continued to decline and we are not quite sure why those declines are occurring.
Finally, I talk a bit about mink. It is a species that has a significant impact upon species of conservation concern and the key aim should be to eradicate mink populations. This may be possible on offshore islands and this is done most effectively by trapping.
The key point is that the effective period for trapping is between January and April and that is likely to remove the local breeding stock and these are unlikely to be replaced that season. For much of mainland Britain, mink numbers are more likely to be regulated by competition with otters than by culling operations. in this instance it is probable that effective habitat management is a more important factor for the conservation of water voles than mink trapping.
MR THOMAS: It might be helpful for me to explain at the beginning that my perspective is that of a rural land manager. In my day to day employment as a Chartered Surveyor in the Rural Practice Faculty over the past 35 years, I come across the hunt from time to time as part of the rural community but I have never been hunting(nor have I ever killed a fox or a deer).
As part of the wet, western side of England, the greater Exmoor area comprises many individual ownerships and small unit sized farms and woodland blocks. It is a livestock rearing/timber growing area converting the high rainfall into grass and trees. The wilder parts of Exmoor have a sense of remoteness but all over the area there are rural isolation and low incomes. It is in the nature of our extensive upland farming and lowland beef and sheep farming that these are low output/low profitability enterprises.
As a rural practitioner, I am interested in the practicalities of land management and hence perhaps I can comment upon the utility of hunting as far as this affects the red deer of our greater Exmoor area.
Hunting is not just a “quaint anachronism” but a robust part of our local culture that is a positive element for the good of the quarry species. It works because of a complicated and delicate consensus across the mosaic of small blocks of the land based economy that make up the character of the greater Exmoor area. There is a delicate web of social, cultural and economic strands that have evolved over centuries in our locality so that, despite the legal entitlement of land managers to kill deer in their crops and trees, the deer are widely recognised as "belonging" to the hunt.
The hunt is able to maintain this because it does not just control the population but actually manages it. What happens is this: the deer may lie up at night in the woodland and come out to graze by day in the neighbouring farmland. Depending on the size of the woodland, there may be five or fifteen farmers whose land abuts the woodland and there may be even more farmers than that.
The woodland owner is suffering some damage and all of those people on the outskirts and on the periphery of the woodland are also suffering that damage by the presence of the deer herd on their land. For example, in the woodland, natural regeneration (the growth of new trees from seedlings) or new woodlands being planted are at risk from deer eating the shoots and rubbing the trees with their antlers. On the neighbouring farmland, there are losses to crops, either by lying in the corn or by running down the banks or grazing in the maize crops for silage. Heather regeneration projects on Exmoor are at risk from the deer where over-grazing by the herd needs to be managed.
Why do these people tolerate the continuous damage? The answer to this is that the hunting interests are a longstanding traditional management practice that extends beyond the boundaries of individual land-ownership in our area, so there is a feeling that the deer belong to the hunt and not to the individual.
If this ever changed, this delicate web where all tolerate some damage for the benefit of the general good, an umbrella of management, will be removed. If this does happen in the event of hunting being banned, the individuals who suffer damage now will need to take some action to reduce the number of deer on their land.
When one neighbour shoots the deer on his land, the others who have suffered the damage too and fed them, (in fact have provided bed and breakfast for the deer), will have no benefit from the death of that deer; but somebody else will benefit from the carcass. Next time, they may well get up first and shoot the deer. In this way, the commonality of ownership (which is so important for the health of the deer herd) will break down. That, it seems to me, is the real danger to the herd of deer in greater Exmoor. Hunting prevents this happening at present.
It is a popular misconception that hunting and deer management is about killing things. This could not be further from the case. The presence of the hunting tradition provides an alternative to the shooting of deer which are not currently regarded as pests.
The benefit of hunting is that although a small number, 160, are killed, many more (a large, healthy populations of wild red deer) are preserved. Shooting is necessary to reduce the inevitable growth of the herd numbers but it cannot do what hunting does, either to protect deer or to alleviate the land management problems.
The difference lies in the two words, "management" and "control". Most forms of deer management concentrate exclusively on control which is a euphemism for shooting. Shooting is a necessary activity, together with hunting, to maintain the population numbers which would otherwise expand because there is no natural predator and available feed is not a limiting factor on the deer population in our area.
The management functions of hunting include dispersal, breaking up of large groups, a mixing of the groups and the role of the harbourer in selecting the particular animal to be culled. The Chase itself has a function in being able to find the injured deer perhaps, or sickly ones -- perhaps they may be suffering from lung worm or tick worms -- and to despatch them humanely. (It is in the movement of the deer that these problems are reserved and in severe cases a severely injured deer may be lying in dense cover and can only be found by the hounds).
It is the commonality of ownership and the cooperation of disparate groups of people that have resulted in the present satisfactory size and health of the herd of red deer in greater Exmoor. It is difficult to see a management practice or structure that could be put in place in the event of a ban on hunting to achieve the same aim.
If the support from local people, which is the biggest determining factor, is not there, then we are in severe trouble. It is the other important functions implicit in the Chase that shooting cannot achieve on its own. The principal factor in preventing the establishment (or an efficient working) of an imposed structure is the multiplicity of varied interests arising from the pattern of small land areas under individual management.
DR WHITE: I am going to talk briefly about three bits of research. Firstly, fox predation of lambs on hill farms, which was done with Mike Hutchings and Jo Conington of the Scottish Agriculture College. Secondly, the cost of foxes to agricultural interests in Britain, which was done in collaboration with Rebecca Moberly and Stephen Harris and thirdly a questionnaire study of the management of foxes, red deer, brown hares and mink which was done in conjunction with Stephen Harris.
For the first study, we examined two farms in Scotland, one in Midlothian and one in Perthshire, and recorded the fate of over 4,000 lambs between 1993 and 1996. The two main columns, the one on the left and the one on the right, show that the overall lamb mortality on both farms was around about ten per cent and the proportion of lamb mortality due to fox predation was between two and six per cent. These studies show that the rate of fox predation of lambs is low, which coincides with the Burns Report. It also suggests that addressing other causes of lamb mortality is going to bring greater economic and welfare benefits to sheep farming.
The second study was quantifying the costs of fox predation to try and identify the factors associated with fox predation and to develop financial models to determine the extent to which foxes can be reduced and how this could be achieved. This was a questionnaire based study examining sheep, poultry, outdoor pig and game production sectors. The table at the bottom summarises the fox predation rates as percentages. For sheep farmers, the percentage of confirmed fox predation rate was 0.4 and for all the other sectors it was relatively low, the highest being 1.4 per cent.
In deriving financial models, we took the objective of management to be to minimise the total cost of fox predation from the farmer's perspective. The total cost of predation includes the loss of stock plus the expenditure on preventative measures. The extent to which costs of predation can be minimised varies according to different farms. The most favourable situation eliminating foxes has the greatest effect in reducing losses, is illustrated here, for, a 200 hectare farm in the south west with 800 ewes, seven foxes on the farm and game rearing in the nearby surroundings.
On the graphs, the vertical axis is the total cost of fox predation per ewe. On the horizontal axis we have on the left the expenditure of indoor housing per day per day and on the right, the days for which ewes are housed. Both these increase towards the bottom of the graph.
What we are interested in is minimising the total cost of fox predation. Where these surfaces reach the lowest point on the vertical axis is where the total cost of fox predation is minimised. You can see that this point of minimisation is roughly equal on both graphs.
The important thing from the point of view of the utility of fox control is that in the left hand graph, you leave six of your foxes and only kill one of them whereas on the right hand graph you leave only one fox and kill six. Even in this most favourable situation from the point of view of using fox control to minimise losses, control has a very limited impact.
The final study is the management of foxes, red deer, hares and mink, which was a questionnaire based study of land managers and the general public. We were after their perceptions in terms of the use and effectiveness of different culling methods, which they rated on a scale of nought to ten.
We examined all four species and the only species for which hunting was relatively important in terms of its use and effectiveness was for foxes. The graphs here show the mean ratings on a nought to ten scale on the vertical axis and the various different forms of control on the horizontal axis. They are not very legible so hunting is the third column from the left on the left hand graph, which is about use; hunting is the second column from the left on the right hand graph about effectiveness.
Hunting with hound packs is roughly the same in terms of perceived use as shooting at night with rifles and shooting by day with shotguns. However, in terms of effectiveness, the single most perceived effective method is shooting at night with rifles and hunting is perceived as significantly less effective along with shooting with shotguns, gun packs, terriers etc
We also found that a ban on hunting would have effect on the management of these species by the majority of practitioners, although up to a third of practitioners may increase levels of shooting.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much indeed. The purpose of this session is to hear the views and the evidence on which people will base certain conclusions. I picked up two very contrasting statements from Stephen Harris saying there is no evidence that the deer population is healthier and better managed where they are hunted. Hugh Thomas asserted that the importance of hunting essentially is as a form of glue which holds together the land management systems to the benefit of the deer, referring specifically to Exmoor.
I suppose I should ask the question to Stephen Harris. What would amount to evidence that there was that impact and, to Hugh Thomas, where is the evidence for the outcome that he refers to and the evidence for the prediction of a change of behaviour?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: The point I tried to make in my submission is that we have 1.25 million deer in Britain with 2,500 in hunted areas. In all the evidence, I see no data anywhere other than assertion to say those 2,500 are healthier, better, bigger, stronger and less diseased than the other 1.25 million.
If you look at the deer populations throughout Britain, as far as I can see from published data, they are healthy deer. Okay; deer are smaller in Scotland but the healthiest red deer population in Britain in terms of body size and antler size is in East Anglia and they are essentially bigger but they are not hunted. The size of the deer relates to the habitat and all the evidence is that where the habitat is good the deer are perfectly healthy, irrespective of whether they are hunted or not.
MR THOMAS: I do not have any significant evidence about the size or weight of deer between the areas where they are managed by hunting because I do not think such evidence exists but definitely we have a size of herd that would not be tolerated in our area were it not for hunting. That herd is in good order; it is in a very good balance; it is active, being mixed up and turned around by the presence of the hunt. That is inevitably a good thing for the deer. It must be a good thing for the stags to be taken away from their daughters and it must be a good thing to alleviate the damage on individual farmers so that the herd is broken up into small groups. Otherwise, they would be shot. Quite honestly, that is really important for the health and maintenance of the herd of deer.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Perhaps I can just reinforce the point that something like 80 per cent of the red deer herd in south west Britain is outside hunted areas so for the majority of that herd there is no evidence of hunting impact whatsoever.
One of the arguments made is that the purpose of hunting is to take stags away from their daughters. I have no understanding of that argument. I thought it involved a system whereby the avoidance of in-breeding was managed; otherwise, I guess the all the stags would be having a relationship with their daughters. I do not see the logic.
MR OPIK: Almost from the first sentence of Professor Harris's evidence, you do of course accept that there is a difference between the concept of controlling to eradicate and controlling to manage a population?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Yes.
MR OPIK: A lot of this seems to depend on the size of the populations. You said in last week's report that there was no evidence of an increase in the fox population but this morning you said in the earlier session that there had been an increase in the fox population. Which is correct?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: In one part of the world, in East Anglia, and our own report picked that up. There is also something similar in parts of eastern Scotland. Overall, it is a very small area and the total contribution in terms of numbers is pretty small. In other areas, numbers are going down.
MR OPIK: At least we have established that there seems to be a variation even in the foot and mouth crisis to the relative performance of the population.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Our report says the changes occurred irrespective of foot and mouth.
MR OPIK: Let us just focus on the activities in Bristol. In the document, The Red Fox, which you will be familiar with, it says that collectively, if you include road deaths, shooting, snaring, trapping, digging out and killing with lurchers, 72.8 per cent of the foxes in the Bristol area died by effectively manmade causes. That is over seven out of ten. Why do you feel confident to draw any conclusions about the countryside from a report which clearly shows an enormous impact of human beings on the fox population?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: What we are saying is that we cannot see that whatever impact there is having an effect on fox numbers. That is what we said for Bristol as well. We have published over 40 years and we can see that whatever is done in the way of human activity is not affecting fox numbers.
As another example, we also compared what was done in London with Bristol when fox numbers were being culled in London. The impact of culling had no overall effect on the fox numbers in terms of social groups. There was some slight evidence that social group sizes were slightly smaller in number, but it was very small.
MR OPIK: You are comfortable in drawing conclusions for rural areas from a report where 72.8 per cent of the foxes died as a result of manmade causes?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Absolutely. Whatever pressure you can put on the fox population, we cannot find much evidence that it has an overall impact on numbers.
MR OPIK: Correct me if I am wrong but the biggest outbreak of mange recorded was in the Bristol area. I may be wrong about that.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: I think you are wrong. The mange in Bristol is nothing new. There was a major epidemic in Bristol about 100 years ago that wiped out the foxes in south-west England and that was long before there were any foxes in urban areas. The current mange epidemic in that part of the world started in south-west Britain. We watched it come up to the edge of Bristol. It was introduced in Bristol by a fox going out to the countryside, attracting mange in the countryside and coming back into the town with it.
Because the fox population was so well known and so obvious, people were more aware of it happening. There is nothing unusual there. It was not related to being an urban population or anything else.
MR OPIK: What would be your response to vets who say that the incidence of mange in Bristol was as a consequence of the density of the fox population?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: No. If you look at events around the world, the last mange event in south-west Britain wiped the fox population out in rural areas.
MR OPIK: You say that there had not been an increase in the use of other methods of fox control in the foot and mouth crisis. What objective consultation did you do with the farming community to establish that?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Quite a lot. A lot of the data were collected by rural people one way and another, including farmers, gamekeepers, members of the farming community. Many people said they felt that the level of fox control had decreased partly because many in the rural community were involved in various measures for containing foot and mouth disease and also restrictions on the land, because a lot of the activity is people moving between farms, which they were requested not to do. At least 42 per cent of the farms in the survey we did on another project were not doing any form of fox control whatsoever.
MR OPIK: I am right in assuming that the evidence you cite about the absence of change in hunting methods is anecdotal rather than objective, before and after the survey? You are not making a quantified statement?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: No.
THE CHAIRMAN: There are occasions when a series of questions is focusing on one particular thing and I took this to be the case here. If any of the other experts wish to comment, we would be happy. Otherwise, I will go to the next set of questions.
MR BATCHELOR: I would like to come back to the question of deer. Hugh Thomas said something that I found quite interesting. As I understood it, the basis of his paper was that 90 per cent of population management was by shooting and that ten per cent was by hunting with dogs, but the reason that there was a consent for hunting with dogs was because there was a comity of interest amongst the local community.
I have two questions about that. First of all, given that there are large areas of Exmoor where hunting is not allowed and the deer population has increased and has shown no sign of decline, why is it that hunting with dogs is proving necessary?
My second question is: in relation to that, he stated that there were a lot of small land holders in the area but those of us who are familiar with that area will be aware of the Badgeworth Land Company which owns very large chunks of hunting rights, tens of thousands of acres, so to that extent the hunts, through the Badgeworth Land Company, are able to hunt where they like without the permission of the local population. Therefore, I do not quite understand the point that is being made about the comity of interest when people have no choice.
MR THOMAS: Taking your first point first, there are several areas where the hunt cannot go and some of those areas include towns; some include major roads and the introduction of the North Devon link road was one such example. It was out of that sort of problem that the Exmoor & District Deer Management Society was formed. It is a society that accepts the need for all forms of control and management and it works very closely with the hunting interests because that is how deer management happens in our area, but there are places where the hunt cannot go. Therefore, there has to be management and control by stalking in those areas -- in other words, around those areas where the hunt cannot go, the deer have to be shot- the overall management is done by the hunting interest.
You asked about the other side of the coin, which is about the Badgworthy Land Company which has about 12,000 acres of land. We are talking of a very large area and the Badgworthy Land Company was a little earlier than the League Against Cruel Sports in buying land and having land given to it in order to conserve the red deer on Exmoor.
The majority of the land holdings in our area -- we are talking not only about Exmoor, (the National Park), but about the Tiverton area (running into the Quantocks, though our society does not deal with that area) -- range from 70 acres, 120 acres being the average, and that is a small block of land.
You cannot get a unity of interest over those small blocks of land. It is like that map on the wall over there where you have lots of little blocks of land. If all those blocks are held by different people, how are you going to get an agreement about how you are going to manage the land and the deer?
I have heard it said in Wales that if you want to get agreement between three farmers you have to put two of them into a room and shoot them. The only way to get agreement is to have some other interest.
THE CHAIRMAN: From your name, I take it that you have Welsh antecedents to allow you to make that statement!
MR BATCHELOR: As you might imagine, I am not into management by elimination but I would be interested in Stephen Harris's comments in relation to the very small area of hunted land where only ten per cent of the control is through hunting and we have very large areas of non-hunted land where 100 per cent of the control, where there is any, is from shooting. I still have not understood why it is that the hunting of deer with dogs is necessary other than to satisfy a particular interest of a group of people who wish to indulge in the sport. From a scientific point of view, I have not heard a case that says this is required.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: I agree with that statement. I do not understand the argument being made.
MR BATCHELOR: I think Mr Thomas mentioned the role of the harbourer who, because of his local knowledge, is able to identify the deer that needs to be culled and where it can be found at the start of the hunt. From a purely humane point of view, why not shoot the deer at that stage instead of chasing it for ten miles before you bring it to bay and then shoot it?
MR THOMAS: That is the way hunting works. You need to have that sort of level of interest in the deer. The question you are asking is about control. You seem to be talking about control all the time and not enough about management. If all we are talking about is killing a deer, you can kill the deer very easily by shooting them but one in seven of those that are shot are not killed cleanly, about 15 per cent of them, it appears.
The hunts do not kill very many deer. That is true. They only kill about 15 per cent of the total cull. You probably get something like 160 deer being killed out of 4,000 in the area. That is one in 25. We are talking of proportionality here rather than root and branch fundamentalism.
Quite honestly, in a practical world, this is how it works and the management of the deer comes from the hunt. If you do not have an over-arching system which can go across land boundaries, many people are there, on their own, able to despatch those deer and shoot them. We are not in the business of talking about killing them; we are talking about managing the herd and I think it works very well at the moment.
MR BATCHELOR: On the point of wounding rates, the British Deer Society published information is along the lines that shooting deer is of the order of 98 point something per cent killed with a single shot and dying nearly instantaneously. Where is the evidence for the assertion that 20 per cent are wounded, if they are shot, in the area of the local hunt as opposed to if they are hunted?
MR THOMAS: Perhaps the British Deer Society is talking about expert stalkers. I am talking about the figures in the public domain of about 15 per cent being the sort of level being wounded. You must remember that we are talking about people who also shoot with shotguns. Farmers are fully entitled to shoot the deer with shotguns and the sort of wounding rates that you are talking about are people who are trained to a high level by the British Deer Society. Not all deer shot are shot by BDS stalkers.
THE CHAIRMAN: I am keen that we focus on precise figures where they are available. If you are not able to quantify or provide the figures immediately, it would be very helpful if you could let me have the figures afterwards that you are referring to. I understand that there will be points where people will want to pursue one particular argument with one particular witness but I would like to give an opportunity for others to say something before moving on.
DR REYNOLDS: Can I make the observation that it is extremely difficult to imagine how you would obtain objective figures on wounding rates given that if you simply go and ask the people who do the stalking they have a vested interest in telling you one story and other interested groups have a vested interest in telling you a completely different story. Planning a scientific and objective study is something that really taxes the mind.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: There is going to be a session tomorrow about the effectiveness of controls. If you read updates and studies, you come up with some objective figures based on looking at data from a variety of different sources, including approaches like asking people their views, recording wounding rates where animals were hit to try and assess whether the animal is wounded or killed outright and so on. Those data are there.
MR JACKSON: We would like to turn something of a spotlight on Professor Harris's assertion that we already know is controversial that the best way to control and manage the population of many animals is to manage habitat. We would like to hear the whole panel comment on that in the context of the following: what is it that regulates the population of wild mammals? Is it only external factors -- e.g. food, predation and disease -- or is there some self-regulatory mechanism which individuals combine to control their populations and what will be the effect on populations of wild mammals in areas of high food mobility because of farming in the area?
DR WHITE: What regulates populations of mammals will primarily be food supply in terms of the absolute numbers that occur in a particular place. You distinguish external factors such as food, predation and disease against self-regulatory factors and I think that is not particularly useful because self-regulation occurs through responses of populations to factors such as food resources. External and intrinsic factors are often interlinked.
What was the last question?
MR JACKSON: Given that food and predation are factors which affect populations, what in your judgment is the effect on populations of mammals if, because of farming, you get food availability to an extent far greater than you would occurring in, say, natural or wilderness circumstances?
DR WHITE: In the context of Britain, there are not any natural wilderness situations so we are talking about mammals in an essentially managed landscape. If there is lots of food, mammal populations will increase but the extent to which that is possible depends on things like territoriality and so on that might put a limit on increase. For a species like foxes, for example, social regulation and territoriality are going to be quite important.
If you look at mice and rats, they do not have such a high degree of social regulation and they respond much quicker to things like excess food because of their breeding capacity.
In some species which compensate too greatly the population will crash; in others, the population will tend to reach equilibrium.
The other point is not related to the four species of immediate concern, but is relevant in terms of the general, perceived increased importance of habitat management. Rodent control has seen a continuous race to develop more and more rodenticides that are more effective against rodents, but these only effectively control the population in the short term. Now there is much greater emphasis on the importance of habitat management to decrease rodent populations on farms, rather than simply killing more rodents. If you had habitats to keep rodent populations low in the first place, you would not get exploding populations.
MR THOMAS: There is no problem with food and predation as far as deer are concerned. The issue is how are we going to prevent people from taking the other route, which is, if you are not going to hunt them you have to shoot them; if you are going to shoot them, there is no reason why there should be any corporate ownership. They can be shot by individuals as and when they cause any damage.
It does not matter how many deer there are on Exmoor, or anywhere else for that matter. What matters to you if you are a farmer or a forrester is how many deer are at your gate: in your corn, in your woodland. At that point, we have choices to make. At the moment, we have choices because hunting can manage that situation. It can either break them up because it is hunting in that area or, if it is not able to hunt in that area, it can produce people to make a disturbance and it will get the herd broken up, moved away, dispersed, made into smaller groups.
For example last year, while there was no hunting – (there obviously was a certain amount of shooting going on) we found that there was a build up in herd size and so you got incredible rumours (which reached the press) that there had been a massive slaughter and that that was why nobody was seeing any deer while in other places, you got tales of tremendous increase in the number of deer bred suddenly. There was not any question of there being a vast swing in population; it was a question about them building into big groups and they were not being broken up and dispersed. That was very noticeable last year.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: If I heard you correctly, the statement implied that population could be managed by habitat. I do not think I said that. I said it is an integral part of it.
In relation to what regulates animal populations, if you are a herbivore, you tend to be regulated much more by factors such as food availability. The general pattern is that herbivore populations tend to undergo much greater variation year by year than do carnivore populations. For instance, if you look at rabbit populations in Britain, work Defra staff have done shows that the rabbit population has changed between minus ten per cent and plus ten per cent a year.
The assessment for carnivores is that they are much more regulated by social factors. A good example would be the long term study on wolves and deer in North America where you get a big boom and bust in the deer population but throughout the period they have been studying the wolves they have been much more constant, largely because of social factors.
There is a myth in what controls foxes in the absence of a natural predator in Britain. I do not know that there has ever been much of a natural predator in Britain. There is a myth that wolves used to control them. In most of lowland Britain, wolves were exterminated centuries ago.
If you look at the data for North America when they had wolves and foxes side by side, there are no wolves and there is no relationship. When they introduced wolves to Yellowstone Park, fox numbers went up, not down, and that is because wolves had an impact on the whole ecosystem. There is no evidence that we have had a major predator regulating fox numbers in Britain.
As far as we can see, fox numbers are regulated by food supply. We publish good data on this with Bristol where we quantified it year by year. We have shown that where there is an excess of food social group size went up but that was short term. As far as we can see, there is not good evidence that fox numbers will vary dramatically in the absence of culling.
If you look at the examples we have, there have been a number of changes in the way fox populations have been affected in Britain. For instance, I quote studies done in Scotland looking at the effect of food supply there on fox populations. Lord Levine also pointed out that a ban on gin trapping in Scotland had no impact on the fox population whatsoever. Back in the eighties, there was a very large amount of snaring and killing of extra foxes in Britain for pelts when pelts were highly valued. There was no evidence that that increased level of culling had any impact on fox numbers.
The data we have are all piecemeal but combined they all point in the same direction.
DR REYNOLDS: Stephen Harris has carefully avoided mentioning the one major study which looked at this specific question which is the one we called our 3 regions study.
It seems clear to me that most of the major, stable food items for foxes are things that have been introduced to Britain, things like rabbits, hares, and in upland regions we provide some food in the form of sheep carrion.
The question is not so much a disagreement about whether ultimately food limits the population of animals but how close we are at the present time to that resource ceiling. We looked in our three regions study specifically at mid-Wales, the Midlands and west Norfolk. What we found there was that there was a large variation in the density of foxes. All the evidence surrounding that indicated that this variation in density was not related to food supply and was more likely related to culling. The main criterion for distinguishing these different situations was that where foxes were at high density their rate of reproduction was relatively low. Where they were at low density, their rate of reproduction was very high.
That difference in the rate of reproduction is an example of what we have been discussing as self-regulatory tendencies in foxes. Nobody denies that these mechanisms exist. The question is are they responsible for the fox density that you observe?. Clearly they are not because in mid-Wales and west Norfolk the fox population was trying to reproduce just as fast as it could. It did not want to be where it was; it was held there by something else.
If man does not get involved in culling foxes, are the numbers of foxes going to be at the level we want? There you have to turn to the landowners and ask them what level of fox density they want and if that really dictates the amount of culling that goes on in a region.
MR JACKSON: I think it is fair to say from what has been said that there is disagreement and a singular lack of evidence but does not one thing come out from everything the members of the panel have said, which brings us straight back to what Lord Burns said this morning? Our habitat is also occupied by human beings and human beings will react more to what they perceive to be their needs in their local circumstances, which in turn comes back to the question: who is it who judges best? The local people, with knowledge of the local circumstances, or others?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: It is wrong to say that culling pressure holds fox numbers at the level they are in west Norfolk. The numbers are increasing in Norfolk. Our own study showed it and the data show it. The same goes for Wales. There is a high level of reproductive output there and in lowland Britain but there has been no evidence that that is holding the population below the level where you can stop culling. You can still be producing that number of culls to maintain the number of the population in the absence of culling and that is again what the data tend to show.
The problem is that the Game Conservancy Trust looks at food supply in relation to one species of carnivore. There are two main species of prey that may aid the predators and those are rabbits and field voles. Work has been done there and the data generated suggest that the number of predators we have in Britain and the predation pressure on that species is equivalent to the productivity of the species, so we are looking at the suite of animals and trying to take one in isolation and look at it is not the appropriate way to do it. There is a community of species out there.
I do not agree with the data from the three studies. I have a number of methodological problems with it as well.
Going back to the issue of decisions being made on the ground, it comes back to the second question we were asked. The decisions being made on the ground need to be properly informed. At the moment, the two published studies that try and look at assessing the quality of information available for farmers and landowners show that they are over-estimating grossly the number of foxes on their land, the number of foxes being killed on their land, and whatever decisions they are making do not seem to be based on sound data.
Half the problem here seems to be informing people and helping them understand the problems they face, but also the most cost-effective strategy. Coombes looked at this and produced this modelling work that you have heard about, and was trying to help farmers understand what is the most cost-effective way to minimise economic losses and maximise their income from their farms. So far, that is the only piece of work that has been done that I know of that has tried to look in a structured way at the economics of fox management. I should say, Minister, that there is a major flaw in that piece of work - and I can say that because I co-authored it - and that is that it assumes that if you kill a fox you have got rid of that fox, and that is the end of it. All the data we have got shows that if you kill a fox, you are just as likely to get another one back in there pretty damn fast. That is almost certainly what happens on the ground, and that makes the economics of fox control even less realistic.
THE CHAIRMAN: I will give Dr Reynolds an opportunity to come back on that. I am conscious of the need to draw us back to the topic, which is really utility, in terms of what works in managing and controlling quarry species. There is the other interesting topic about who decides what is the right population, which John touched on. I am conscious that we have focused for a period on deer and the fox population. I will see if Dr Reynolds wants to come back on Stephen Harris's last point, and then perhaps we could have a comment from the panel in terms of what works, specifically on hare and mink, which are the two that are constantly re-established. I will then come back to the panel.
DR REYNOLDS: I would certainly like to clear up one thing about West Norfolk. We have not argued that the level of culling that goes on at the moment is suppressing the population in West Norfolk; we argued that the fox population there currently is the result of a history of culling, and that has limited fox numbers to a very low level historically. It may be creeping up at the moment. There is not any clear evidence that it is. The data we have from Game Conservancy's national game bank census is the number of foxes killed, not the number on the ground, which is quite a different thing. I say that it may be creeping up at the moment because game keepers are only managing 40 per cent, even of West Norfolk, so the majority of land is relatively uncontrolled in terms of fox hunting.
THE CHAIRMAN: On hare and mink? We have focused on what works in relation to fox and deer without entering into the argument about what is the right population. Is there anything you would like to add in terms of hare and mink?
DR REYNOLDS: I said in my written submission to this session that as far as hare population control goes, i.e., the control of hares as a pest, hunting with dogs has really no part to play. Of course, if we are talking about the management of hares - and those who hunt and course have argued that there is a level of management.
For mink, again I have argued that control by mink hunts has had a big part to play in controlling the populations. I may have second thoughts on that, because you asked us to think solely in terms of populations, and I think there is a fair point to be made that if you are troubled with a single individual that is causing a pest problem, then any method that will get rid of that individual is a good one. It has been put to me that mink hunts currently operate alongside trapping and that their cull is therefore additional to those that can be caught in traps. I think that that is a reasonable point; but if there is a case to be made here for mink hunts, it has not yet been convincingly made.
BARONESS GOLDING: I would like to carry on where I was stopped in my tracks this morning. This morning there was mention of the mink trapping project in Western Isles, which involved ten full-time trappers, 2,000 traps, an EU grant in excess of one million; and it hunted less than seventy mink. Over the same period, the mink huntsmen who operate closest to me, hunting two days a week caught 97 mink. Dr Harris said this morning that mink hunting made no contribution to mink control, and was very positive about that, given that this expensive experiment in the Western Isles obviously made even less contribution to mink control; so where do we go from there?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: I think you are not comparing like with like. Firstly, it is not a million pounds a year; it is a long project and over several years it has cost œ1.25 million - just over a million in a number of years. You are right that there are a number of trappers involved, but obviously at the moment you are looking at areas of trapping at quite low densities. At the moment they are trying to establish a zone in which they can stop the mink spreading any further. They have not yet said they would eradicate them. At the moment it is very hard to equate the two. As you rightly say, they are taking seventy mink, operating in a small area. That is the way it is; it is a low density population on an island. Going out into a much bigger area, trapping and taking mink - yes, of course you take more mink. I do not think you can compare the two figures. I go back to what I have said in this session, and I will quote it. The best time to carry out trapping of mink is between January and April. One of the problems with mink hounds is that you can only do it in the summer, which is not the most effective time to do it. Trapping can be from January to April and will remove the breeding stock, which is unlikely to be replaced that season. That is the advice given by R. Strachan, published by the Environment Agency, in a book on the conservation of water voles.
I cannot remember how many mink it was, but many thousands a year disappeared in the last ten years through conflicts with otters, and that was an actual population decline, compared to the very low numbers being taken out by other factors. So I make the point again that the numbers of mink are much more affected by competition with otters than any other factor.
BARONESS GOLDING: Can we have some information on that, please, because we have some figures on that and my people say the mink just moved on when there is competition, and go somewhere else.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: The danger of that is the information given - that was a national survey, so where they moved to - they must have moved out of Britain, if they moved on.
BARONESS GOLDING: Well, they could, because they can swim.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: They can swim a couple of miles to sea; they cannot swim out of Britain.
BARONESS GOLDING: They can swim from island to island.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Two miles is the limit. They cannot swim more than two miles offshore.
BARONESS GOLDING: The Icelandics are acknowledged world experts in the field of mink management, and the chief scientist in charge for the government is Dr Hersteinsson, Professor of Mammal Ecology and former Head of Wildlife Management in the Institute of
THE CHAIRMAN: He is not one of our witnesses though.
BARONESS GOLDING: No, but in correspondence and dealing with the mink eradication scheme, he said: "I feel it is essential that dogs, shotguns and deathtraps be used if there is to be any hope of successfully eradicating mink." Why do you think that his expertise is less favourable than somebody else's?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: I can simply quote you that he is looking at a smaller problem than we have in mainland Britain. I do not think that anyone thinks that we can eradicate mink in mainland Britain. One of the other papers I have quoted is MAFF, when their policy was to eradicate or prevent the spread of mink in Britain, and they published their own data through the sixties, when mink were much rarer in Britain and at much lower densities - there were a lot of trappers out trying to stop them spreading, and they failed. They published their own data, which I quoted in my submission, Minister. If they could not do it at very low densities, they have not got a cat in hell's chance of doing it now.
DR REYNOLDS: I would like to clear something up, if I am right about it anyway. I believe the evidence that mink are being displaced by otters is geographical distribution. Is that correct, Stephen?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: It is more than that; it is local, so it is river system by river system, side by side. The data is analysed side by side, so it is not just the crude geographical distribution.
DR REYNOLDS: I think my point holds. We are not talking about population numbers here; we are talking about displacement. We do not know whether the same individuals are involved or not.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: We do, do we not, because the person who supplied the data is Don Jeffries. His data is based on a national survey, and as part of that national survey he calculated mink numbers using exactly the same system he did when calculating mink numbers ten years earlier - and they are the numbers I quoted in the review of 1995; and he based his information using exactly the same technique. He looked at the population of the kind of mink across Britain as a whole.
DR REYNOLDS: Excuse me, because that is not really quite satisfactory. The evidence is that mink were once in locations where they are now absent, and they have now been replaced with otters. That does not necessarily imply the mink population has gone down.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: He surveyed the areas where there are not the otters as well; he surveyed all across Britain. If the numbers have not gone down, I do not know where those mink are hiding.
THE CHAIRMAN: It is always as well to have an air of mystery on some of the topics on which one is questioning. I am keen that we do not get bogged down. Some very interesting information has come out, but I do not want to lose the relevance of the session.
MR BATCHELOR: We would like to return to a question in relation to major sport quarry species and I will pass it to my colleague, Arthur Lindley, to ask that.
DR LINDLEY: It comes back to the three hunt districts that have been studied, which have been referred to several times. It is important particularly in relation to the point made about wounding rates, in terms of anecdotal information. The evidence you had in that study in relation to the numbers of foxes killed in any area came from information supplied by farmers, gamekeepers and the hunts.
DR REYNOLDS: Yes, indeed.
DR LINDLEY: It is not independently verified information, but your paper has published - or at least your own data exaggerates between seven and twelve times the real figure. Having made the point that this kind of information is unreliable, and your own evidence suggests it is, are we talking about genuine evidence here, or is this
DR REYNOLDS: We made the point that culling records gathered from farmers or gamekeepers or anybody else, are not a very good indication of the number of foxes killed. That was our point. It was for that reason that we decided not to pursue that study as a comparison of culls against population density, which would have been a pretty obvious way to do it; but instead to look less directly at the status of the population by looking at its breeding performance. In our conclusions we put no weight at all on the cull, except in as much as the relationship between the culls in the three different regions supported the hypothesis that it was culling that was suppressing the population.
DR LINDLEY: Is that not a basic scientific error? If you are saying, "this piece of evidence correlates with that piece of evidence, and therefore it is cause and effect", that is a fundamental scientific error, surely?
DR REYNOLDS: I do not think it is an error at all. We have the observation that two out of three populations were at very low density, and they were reproducing relatively fast. Whatever had put them at low density is what you and I are discussing. What we are not discussing is whether they were at low density, so let us take that as basic fact.
Of the various things that could have put them at low density, what do you expect might have done it? The major causes of fox mortality in this country are culling, road mortality and epidemic disease, of which mange is probably the main contender. If you look at the three regions - and we did this in the paper, so it is all out in the public domain - road mortality is unlikely to be an explanation because the two areas with the lower populations had the lowest road traffic, and there has been no indication from the Department of Transport that traffic had increased in those regions anyway.
Epidemic mange: we had contemporaneous data from questionnaires and surveys to both gamekeepers and vets, which indicated that mange was not a problem in any of our three regions. So by good fortune we happen to be working in three areas where it was not a problem.
If there are any other hypotheses, I would be willing to consider them, but the primary hypothesis, the one that you must surely think is the most reasonable is that it was culling, because culling is the one that was reported as being the heaviest mortality.
DR LINDLEY: The point, surely, is that the whole range of hypotheses - and you picked a couple there, but as Professor Harris mentioned, there are social factors - starvation, poor food supply and so on - the point to clarify is that there is no proof of cause and effect; it is a supposition that you have made, is it not? There is no proven cause and effect.
DR REYNOLDS: Was that a question or a statement?
DR LINDLEY: The other point I wanted to clarify was in relation to hunting and hunting with dogs and culling: you made the statement that in the Welsh uplands hunting with dogs, you felt, was a major component. Am I right that that did not separate out different forms of the use of dogs?
DR REYNOLDS: The first point, I believe, is that we have not proved cause and effect. I have to accept that as a criticism; but, on the other hand, we were all trying to understand an extremely complex situation. We did it using all the evidence we could possibly gather together. The case that has been put together is pretty compelling. It has certainly been accepted, not only by the referees who reviewed the paper before publication, but by the Macdonald team, which worked under contract to Lord Burns, and by a large number of other biologists that I have been in correspondence with since. In the scientific community it is a pretty convincing case, and I will leave it at that.
MR JACKSON: Minister, I will invade Professor Harris's habitat, if I may. The topic this session is managing and controlling the quarry species. Would you please comment on the last bit of Mr Thomas's evidence in relation to red deer, where he says: "Support from local people is the biggest determining factor in the sustainability of the herd, and the role of the hunt in weaving together the delicate web of social, economic and environmental strands that have evolved over many generations should not be under-estimated because it cannot be replicated."
PROFESSOR HARRIS: I think I agree: it cannot be replicated and it has not been replicated anywhere else in Britain. I have made the point already, Minister: I do not understand these assertions. We are talking about a very small number of deer and we are told that their survival depends upon the presence of a hunt, where the other one and a quarter million throughout Britain are doing remarkably well in the absence of a hunt. All I can comment on is much what I have said already: I do not understand the assertion and I do not see the basis for the assertion. It is just an assertion.
MR OPIK: Dr White, you said in one of your pieces of evidence that you did a survey of land managers and general public about perceived opinions. How many land managers were involved in that and how many members of the general public? It sounds like an opinion poll really.
DR WHITE: It was rather more than a simple opinion poll. We had 198 practitioners. The data from the general public are not relevant to this session because it is about utility, but I think it was 112 general public1.
MR LUFF: No-one claims that hunting is the most efficient way of killing foxes - that is not in dispute, in terms of the resource that goes into the exercise - but what seems to be in dispute is that if hunting does not happen, what else happens instead. Professor Harris said his evidence in his study is that there were no alternative culling methods used, and he said that his local anecdotal information seemed to contradict that very strongly. Indeed, Piran White's own paper says that a ban on hunting dogs would have no effect on the management of foxes, and that approximately one third of practitioners said they would increase levels of shooting of foxes. That statement from Dr White makes a lot of sense to me. It would have a very significant impact on fox populations. There again, I still do not understand whether there is a consensus on that side of the room; and, if there is, about whether any human intervention in fox populations affects overall numbers. I am finding this session very frustrating. Does human intervention affect fox population numbers?
DR REYNOLDS: We have already discussed our evidence, and my answer has to be "yes".
MR THOMAS: I cannot answer for foxes, but I can answer for deer: it is human intervention that preserves the level of deer as they are.
DR WHITE: The answer is "yes", but it is a qualified "yes" because with any population, if you impart a huge effort in control, have an unlimited budget and the correct incentive structure in place, then ultimately you will reduce the population. However, the current measures of controlling foxes, especially hunting with dogs, I do not think have any effect.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: I think that is right. If you have unlimited resources and do whatever you like to control fox numbers in Britain, you could possibly bring their numbers down, but at the moment I see no evidence that what we are doing today is keeping it below the level they would be otherwise.
MR LUFF: In your report to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee 1996, you said that hare numbers were higher in an area of shooting hunting than where hares were hunted with packs of hounds. It does suggest that human intervention can have an effect on population levels.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: No, it just suggests you are shooting where there are not any.
MR BATCHELOR: There has been a recent peer-reviewed article in Nature. Can you comment on the methodology and data that you have used to produce that article?
PROFESSOR HARRIS: We tried - because there is always a problem with trying to do anything based on limited areas and also trying to assess - to count foxes in a variety of ways - we took the technique within the published literature of taking the most reliable estimate of numbers. It is a technique that is robust. You do not have to worry too much about the problems of different visibility of foxes in different habitats, and you can apply it across a variety of terrain. We just fortuitously for a project happened to go out two weeks before foot and mouth disease to do large numbers of surveys across Britain to work out how many foxes there were in different parts of Britain.
Foot and mouth came, so the moment foot and mouth epidemic was over and the ban was lifted, we went out and re-surveyed what we surveyed before, in exactly the same way as before, using identical methodologies, so that we could compare the difference. We used that to estimate the change in fox numbers during that year when there had been certainly no hunting with dogs, or certainly no hunting with hounds; and we would argue a reduction in overall hunting and culling pressure on foxes. We think that is the most robust way to estimate fox numbers, and also to estimate change in the fox numbers. We showed in the results how we tested the data between different classes of people doing the work. The bulk of the survey was done blind, so people had no preconceived idea of what they were looking for; and we used a wide variety of people from different backgrounds to do the work with different interest groups. We think it is as robust a technique as you can get to estimate changes in fox numbers.
THE CHAIRMAN: Does anybody want to come back on that?
DR REYNOLDS: I would like to comment, but I do so reluctantly because obviously I do not want to appear to be critical of a fellow scientist's work. Before I say anything, therefore, I would like to say that I do applaud the application of science to what is obviously a contentious issue, and I am not either unwilling to believe the result that Harris and his co-authors have put forward. However, I do have serious doubts that their analysis leads correctly to the conclusion they have drawn.
Stephen Harris tells us that the method that they chose to use is robust, but it does not give us an indication of this. There is no analysis of statistical power in the paper. This seems pretty fundamental because if you go out and look for something but you look for it badly, then your conclusion should really be "no evidence"; it should not be "evidence of no effect". It is a pretty fundamental issue in papers of this kind, when the main funding is "no change" that you should demonstrate that you were able to detect a change.
THE CHAIRMAN: There was a piece of research published last week which presumably we will have an opportunity of looking at in full. We have heard Stephen Harris's description of the research, and a query, and I am happy to take both of those away to read, with interest, the research that is now available to us.
PROFESSOR HARRIS: Can I make one comment? It is disingenuous to say that we could not detect change: we did detect change. We analysed the data by nine regions and seven showed no change. Two did show a change - one up and one down. Those were exactly the regions where we anticipated those changes would occur. We detected change in line with the perceptions of current fox population trends, so we did detect change. To say that we did not detect change is not correct. We detected exactly what people said we would detect.
THE CHAIRMAN: Can I draw this session to a close and remind people that each session in itself is not intended to draw a conclusion to the major issue; each session is a contribution to thinking and examining the evidence available.
Can I ask people to be back for a prompt start at 3.45 please. Thank you.
1 The actual figure was 83
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