Last year DEFRA carried out a consultation on general licences in England – this was forced by the successful Wild Justice legal challenge of the Natural England general licences. Over 4,000 responses were received , which is quite a lot, but not so many as to justify such a long wait for any decisions from DEFRA.
As stakeholders, we (Wild Justice) were told in September that we and others would be shown the newly drafted general licences in October and that they would be published in November.
Just saying…
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Defra just beggars belief and are clearly not fit for purpose. If one reads the Overview above it says,
“ The Governments wildlife management policy is that people should be free to mange wildlife but before carrying out lethal control they should first consider taking less harmful action to resolve the issue”.
What a load of tosh. This effectively gives the killers of our wildlife a free hand to do what they like and to do as much killing as they like. Surely it should say, “if there is a specific real problem, all alternative methods of alleviating the problem must have been tried and tested and shown as such, before any form of lethal control is permitted and resorted to. “
As it the wording currently stands it is an open charter for killing our wildlife regardless. However I suppose the wording is consistent with Tory policy on our wildlife and nature , and that is, if it gets in the way either kill it or bulldoze it. (See this Saturday’s cartoon).