Bushcraft and the Law; Legal Traps

Note; this was originally published on the BushcraftUK website as an article titled ''Trapping and the Law' on the 3rd April 2014

The third instalment of Bushcraft and the Law, this article is all about the legal spring and live catch traps that can be used in the UK countryside.

Many of us who practice bushcraft are interested by primitive trapping, but can this mean we fall foul of the law? 

To my mind one of the most telling tests of someone’s bushraft ability is whether they can consistently provide food for themselves in the wilderness. A significant part of that ability is going to be knowledge of effective methods of taking birds, mammals and fish as food. This is where, in practicing bushcraft as a hobby there can be some difficulty. Although our primitive ancestors would not have been restricted in their hunting methods by law and legislation WE ARE. 

Traps have been used for thousands of years to procure food, they are doubly effective when compared to active hunting in that they can be set and left to ‘hunt’ all on their own without your direct supervision or intervention, leaving you to get on with other important things. You can set more than one at a time, maybe even hundreds depending on your needs. In modern terms, at least in the UK, they are used primarily as a means of controlling pests and predators rather than a means of procuring food. Agriculture is the main reason for this as we no longer need to subsist by means of a hunter gatherer lifestyle, but also trapping, especially snares and other live catch traps are stressful for the quarry and catching them by these methods means that due to adrenaline and other chemicals released into the body of a stressed animal the quality of the meat is poorer in trapped animals than ones killed instantly, for example by a high velocity rifle bullet. Despite these limitations traps are a truly effective and efficient method of catching quarry. 

Primitive methods of acquiring food are probably of most interest to those of us who practice bushcraft as we want the challenge of being able to use the minimum of man-made material, and depending on how far we want to test our skills perhaps even resorting to primitive tools to construct the traps or weapons that could be used in gathering food. But please be aware that practicing making primitive hunting and trapping implements is fine but almost all primitive methods of taking mammals and birds are now legislated against on grounds of animal welfare. This means no bows, spears or bolas, for killing anything. No figure four deadfalls or pit traps, build them yes but actually using them to catch or kill something is ILLEGAL! 

Most of you have probably heard of the four basic methods of trapping; mangle, tangle, dangle, strangle, however in modern trapping we have to avoid any of these terms, legal traps now fall into three basic categories. 

Spring Traps
Spring traps are the closest we get to a ‘mangle’ style trap but they are designed to kill instantly by breaking an animal’s spinal column. To be used legally a spring trap must be approved by the ‘Spring Trap Approval Order’ England Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own version of this legislation and these were updated in 2012, in Scotland the last update of the spring trap approval order was 2011. This piece of legislation designates which traps have been approved for use and also designates which species can be targeted with which trap and how non target species should be restricted from access to the trap. 

Fenn Mk IV

For example the traps such as the fen mark IV or the Solway mk 4 are often used for trapping small vermin such as rats, weasels, stoats and grey squirrels the trap must be enclosed in a natural or artificial tunnel which restricts access to non-target species. As well as a tunnel I always place stout sticks or use wire mesh across the front of the tunnel to stop birds, cats and hedgehogs getting caught by mistake (as pictured below)













These traps are all best set along existing linear features such as hedgerows or using naturally occurring cover such as tree roots like in the picture below. 














It is also best to set the traps into a shallow scrape in the ground so they are not as easily visible if you look through the tunnel from ground level, this way they will not put off an animal from entering the trap.
















These traps should all be weathered before use by burying them or leaving them outside for a while so the smell from any grease or lubricant used in their manufacture is diminished and they lose their shiny appearance. These traps are generally not baited although some like the magnum trap (below) can be, the attraction is the cover provided by the tunnel that the trap is set in and when placed in the appropriate location these traps can be very effective. They can be made more attractive by the removal of grass and plant matter from their entrances leaving some bare soil which seems to attract quarry species to enter the tunnels. These types of trap must, by law, be checked at least once every 24 hours.

Live Catch Traps

This is one type of trap where you may be able to use some primitive triggers, live catch traps do what they say on the tin, they catch and hold an animal until it can be identified and either released or dispatched humanely. Common traps which fall into this category are Larsen traps for catching corvids such as crows and magpies. Cage traps for catching foxes, badgers, otters, mink, squirrels etc.. and large ladder traps for catching multiple birds at once. It’s also worth mentioning that when using any trap which requires a decoy bird (such as a Larsen trap) you must provide a food, clean water, a perch and shelter for the captive bird. 


Pheasants and partridges are also caught by game keepers to use for breeding purposes, each year before the end of the shooting season on the 1st of February live catch traps made from steel mesh or from partridge pens are used to catch birds that will later in the year produce the eggs for the next crop of birds. Traditionally a much more primitive method was used and keepers would have used this kind of trap made from willow or hazel sticks and baited with corn or wheat to catch their pheasants and partridge breeding stock. This is where the primitive trapping comes in and these traps would often have been triggered by a split stick trigger and a trip wire. It is still acceptable to use these traps, although obviously with the landowners permission.

I haven’t tried to name every piece of legislation that refers to trapping here, or talk about seasons for catching and/or killing certain species or legislation regarding access to land; all that legislation is available via www.legislation.gov.uk. 


Key things to become familiar with include;

• The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981
• The Spring Trap Approval Order (England, Wales and Northern Ireland 2012) (Scotland (2011)
• The Snare Orders (Scotland) 2010 and 1012
• The Game Act 1831
• The Night Poaching Act 1828
• The Crow Act 2000
• The Hunting Act 2004

These are just some of the legal methods of trapping and some of the legislation which governs how we can take wild animals, make sure you are familiar with what you can and can’t do in the name of bushcraft so you don’t get yourselves in trouble.

In the next instalment I'll be looking at snares. 

Bushcraft and the Law; Trapping Update

Fenn and Magnum trap

As bushcrafters we are often inspired and amazed by the stories of the mountain men of North America and their exploits across barren wilderness regions like the Rocky Mountains and their ability to live with little more than what they carried in their ‘possibles pouches’. What brought the mountain men to the frontier was the availability of beaver. At the time beaver skins, or ‘plews’ as the mountain men called them, were in high demand for the manufacture of hats and thousands of beaver were trapped over the years between the mid seventeen hundreds to the 1830’s when the demand for beaver hats, and the availability of beaver themselves crashed. Gone are the days though of the leg hold traps used by the mountain men and the wholesale, unregulated trapping of the mountain man era, and here in the UK we are expecting some fairly major changes in the laws that relate to trapping in the next few months.

Weasel trapped using fenn trap

In the UK we still use traps in the countryside a lot but almost exclusively for the purpose of pest control, to reduce damage to crops, or prevent the predation of game birds. We already have whole rafts of legislation which controls these activities but we are expecting more to come into force which may drastically change the way trapping is carried out in the UK. I discussed the use of snares and the banning of gin traps in my previous Trapping and the Law article in issue 56 and while I won’t cover gin traps again as they haven’t been legal since 1958 and nothing has, or will, change that now. However there has been a slight change in guidelines regarding snares in Wales and I’ll cover that first.

The breakaway link on a snare approved
 by the new
Welsh Government ‘Code of Best
 practice on the
 use of Snares in Fox Control’

As well as the stops and swivels that a commercially purchased snare would have the guideless for use of fox snares in Wales now demand a ‘break-away’ a weaker link built in to the snare near it’s eye which allows the automatic release of larger, stronger non-target species if they are accidentally caught. This new guidance on snares is specific to Wales and comes from the Welsh Governments Code of Best practice on the use of Snares in Fox Control.  

Moving on to spring traps, there have been developments over the last few years which may have a drastic impact on the types of traps we can use here in the UK in the very near future.

   

In 1991 a proposed EU embargo on furs trapped in countries which allowed ‘inhumane methods’ particularly the use of leg-hold traps,  inspired the development of the ‘Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards’ (AIHTS). It took several years to finalise the conditions of AIHTS which was finished in 1997. It does specifically apply to animas trapped for their fur though: In the UK most recognised fur bearing animals are already protected; marten, beaver, badger and otter and couldn’t be trapped or harmed regardless of the ‘humaneness’ of the method employed. Mink and fox are both regularly used for fur but this fur is normally sourced from farms rather than wild animals and so these animals are not covered by AIHTS. The one animal specifically mentioned that is still regularly trapped in the UK is the stoat. In other countries it is trapped as a fur bearing animal  because of it’s desirable white winter fur, when it’s in it’s white coat it is known as ‘ermin’. Ermin are rarely seen in England or Wales as the climate does not demand their coat change for camouflage. It’s the fact that stoats appear on the list of species covered by AIHTS that spells potential change of trapping in the UK. In 1998 the EU committed to following AIHTS standards and a decade later in 2008 implementation of AIHTS began in all signatory countries after Russia agreed to it’s guidelines. After the 2008 implementation five years were allowed for testing and certification of traps with a further three years allowed for prohibition of traps which did not meet the new standards. That eight years brings us to July 2016 and the UK has been a bit behind in testing and implementing the use of approved traps.

DOC 200 trap approved for use
on grey squirrels, stoats, rats,
 weasel and mink

Several traps were added to the ‘Spring trap approval order’ in 2007 at the request of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) in anticipation of the AIHTS standards being adopted, the DOC (Department of Conservation) range of traps from New Zealand were approved for use based on the fact that they had passed AIHTS standards for stoats in tests carried out in New Zealand.

Since then other traps have also been approved including the koro trap (added to the spring trap approval order in March 2016) which has already passed AIHTS tests in Canada. 

The main change in terms of the function of the traps is that rather than killing by a blow to the body, with the intention of breaking the animals spine causing death within 300 seconds, the trap must kill by a blow to the head and cause death within 45 seconds. These traps must all still be set in a tunnel as dictated by the specific conditions of the spring trap approval order  for example the DOC trap “must be set in an artificial tunnel constructed to the design specified by the Department of Conservation.”

A DOC 200 in it’s Department of Conservation designed tunnel showing how a target species can only enter the trap head first allowing for a clean kill

A KORO ‘Large Rodent Double Coil
Spring Snap Trap

The adoption of AIHTS standards will certainly mean that traps which have been commonly used for the control of stoats will no longer be permitted for that purpose in the UK such as the Fenn traps and Magnum traps which have already been found not to meet AIHTS standards in tests carried out in Canada and New Zealand. While the change may be as simple as prohibiting the use of these traps on stoats specifically it will likely have a greater impact as it will be almost impossible restrict access by a stoat to, for example, a fenn mark IV set for a rabbit. This may well mean that as of July 2016 fenn and magnum traps are no longer legal for use in the UK at all. 

Doubtless trapping legislation will change again in the future and traps will continue to be designed to meet future conditions of ‘humaneness’ as well as to make them more effective and efficient, we have already seen a gas powered trap in New Zealand which can automatically re-set it ‘self 24 times before it needs any attention and we are bound to see more innovation like this in the future. 

For the bushcrafter this is all fascinating, although we may prefer the simplicity of a Paiute deadfall or twitch up snare it is important that we are aware of the legislation that governs something that is a bushcraft skill.

Geoff

Applied Bushcraft; The Gamekeeper

A traditional image of a keeper surveying his 'beat' with his dogs.
By Photographes du National Geographic (http://natgeofound.tumblr.com/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

While 'bushcraft' is a modern word the skills that have been adopted by modern recreational bushcrafters have been practised for centuries. Some bushcrafters are in my opinion preoccupied with a the idea of the ancient or primitive aspects and often forget that the skills and equipment we use as bushcrafters now represent the pinnacle of their respective technologies. Knives with fancy steels, ferocium rods and light weight tarps are not ancient or primitive and while bushcraft might be a refuge for some primitive and traditional skills it's not quite as primitive as some would like to think it is nor does it have a monopoly on traditional skills, with the revival of the Bushcraft Education blog the 'Applied Bushcraft' series is back to look at those professions which still use skills associated with bushcraft on a daily basis. Today we will be looking at Gamekeepers and the 'bushcraft' skills that they use every day.  

My oldest didn't realise just how heavy a goose
was. We clearly don't buy our Christmas goose
as you can see, this one is going to be the outer
layer of a multi bird roast which will also include
duck, pheasant, coot, partridge and pigeon

Game keeping is a very old profession but it hasn't always been called game keeping, back in the day when the only around 5000 people lived in the British Isles and survived in hunter gatherer societies hunting was a daily part of life carried out as a vital part of survival. It is likely that successful hunters were celebrated and honoured and it is also likely that hunts were considered enjoyable and exhilarating but they would not have been a recreational activity just as going to the super market today is not considered recreational (in fact it's closer to a cruel and unusual punishment, I'd rather hunt my food). As time went by and agriculture became the mainstay of subsistence hunting still played a part to supplement the regular diet provided by agriculture but as agriculture became more and more efficient so hunting became less and less necessary for survival and became a recreation. While hunting and gathering is often a 24/7 job farming doesn't have to be which allowed societies to develop. Hunting for food never died out but the recreational element of it gradually became the most important part. In the British Isles we do not even have any cultural traditions that relate to the eating of game at certain times of year, compare the Icelandic tradition of  eating ptarmigan at Christmas (although hunting ptarmigan is now banned in Iceland due to declining populations), or the Rajput tradition of game curries. But in the UK now the closest we come to a game eating tradition is the vague idea that goose is an alternative to turkey at Christmas and those who do choose goose will invariably buy one. 

As hunting became a recreational pastime providing that recreation became a profession for others.  As far back as 3,500 BC the ancient Egyptians enjoyed hunting as a pastime and professional hunters would have tended the hunting equipment, horses, dogs and chariots that would have been used in the pursuit of leopards, lions, barbary sheep, antelope and other game pursued for the table or purely for sport. Much later in medieval Britain the foresters would have served the crown and maintained the royal hunting estates know as forests and chases. The word game keeper was not yet in common usage but the foresters did similar work, largely they were responsible for the protection of game from those not allowed to hunt, the collection of fines and the preservation of game. It is strange that while game would once have been pursued by all as an integral part of their daily lives and ultimately their survival that as people became more 'civilised' that right was reserved for at least the rich or royal and in the case of some parts of the medieval period solely the King. During the medieval period particularly under the rule of the Plantagenet kings the 'beasts of the chase' (deer, boar etc..) were reserved for the King or those with his specific licence and permission, nobles hunting without permission would be fined and peasants often brutally punished and sometimes executed depending on the perceived severity of their crime. For example the taking of a roe deer carried the punishment of blinding until they were reclassified as a 'beast of the warren' in 1338 and became fair game to all who wanted to hunt them (this ultimately led to their extinction in most of England and Wales until concerted efforts were made to re-introduce them in the 1800's). Medieval sport always revolved around the deer and boar and although pheasants, partridges and grouse were found in the British Isles they were not valued as a sporting quarry until much more recently and it is with game bird hunting that we associate the 'game keeper'. With a decline in the vast space required for hunting in the medieval fashion and the invention of effective breach loading firearms driven shooting started becoming popular in the 1800's and now forms the mainstay of organised shooting and 'hunting' in the UK.  The word hunting needs some discussion at this point, in the UK the word hunting would normally be used to reference the hunting of an animal with dogs and possibly also horses whereas all other forms of hunting are normally described as 'shooting' often with the appropriate quarry name attached or 'stalking' (see a post from a few years ago for more info). 

With the growth of game bird shooting the game keeper became an integral part of the rural landscape and even today uses a whole raft of skills which we associate with bushcraft as part of their daily routine. 

Tracking; 

Weather it's determining the cause of death of a pheasant from it's remains, working out where a fox earth is, tracking a wounded deer or tracking poachers a game keeper is constantly interpreting the sign he sees in the countryside. Being able to tell the difference between a nest of hatched eggs and one which has been raided by a crow or badger is vital as is being able to tell the difference between a fox print and a jack russell print or mink and otter prints or between the trail left by a badger and a fox. All these skills relate  directly to the work of a gamekeeper. Perhaps we need to make sure we are setting a legal snare on a fox run rather than a badger run or identifying the right spot to set a snare on a rabbit run based on it's foot falls. Maybe we need to determine whether there are otters in an area so we can decide whether it is safe to set lethal traps for mink or live catch traps in case we accidentally catch an otter. Keepers and pest controllers use a specific piece of equipment to catch the signs of these animals; 

These 'Mink rafts' catch the footprints of animals that use them which can then be used to determine the appropriate course of action, if mink are present and there is no risk of catching non target species such as otters or water voles lethal traps can be used, replacing the clay/sand mix with something like a mark 6 fen trap or if other species are present a live catch trap could be used instead to ensure that non target species are not harmed and can be humanely released in case of accidental capture.

A mink raft set and ready for action. 

Trapping;

I'll refer you to our bushcraft and the law series for this particular topic because although trapping may interest the bushcraft fraternity there is rarely justification for the use of traps in recreational buschraft and it is particularly important to remember that the primitive traps that we as bushcrafters are most interested in are actually illegal. Gamekeepers however do often use traps as part of their regular routine and have to abide by certain laws and guidelines regarding the types of traps that they use and how often they are checked and what species you can use them on. There is already a lot on this blog about trapping and you can view the relevant posts HERE. Mostly game keepers will be trapping pest and predators which if uncontrolled would devastate wildlife populations things such as corvids (Crows, magpies etc..) using larsen and ladder traps. 

Foxes will primarily be controlled by shooting but snares and live capture traps also play a significant part in their control. Historically gin traps would also have been used but these have been illegal in the UK since 1957. 

A gin trap; these were designed to hold the captured animal by the foot or leg and often led to severe injury and escape, animals were even recorded to have bitten off their own legs to escape. They have been illegal since the late 50's in the UK. 

Spring traps come in various shapes and sizes and licence for use against specific quarry depending on their size, power and design. This specification can not be deviated from and if a trap of the wrong design is used on quarry that it is not licensed for the law has been broken. For example a fen mark 6 can be used to trap mink but a mark 4 can't as it is too small and not powerful enough. Much of this trapping legislation is in the process of significant change at the moment and the fen traps and magnum traps that have been the mainstay of a keepers pest control equipment for the best part of half a century are about to be outlawed and replaced with new traps which are even more human and which satisfy the condition of the International Humane Trapping Standards. For more information check out some previous posts on trapping HERE and HERE.

Providing Food;

Ultimately the work of a game keeper culminates with the shooting season when pheasants, partridges and grouse are shot. While many participate in this shooting as sport ultimately what is produced is food and a lot of bushcraft revolves around the finding, production and cooking of food. A keeper needs to be able to bring down game, or more often vermin,  it's the paying guests that should be shooting the game, which can enter the human food chain. The pheasants and partridges shot on the shoot are a sought after luxury product, although sadly many retailers no longer accept wild game that has been shot preferring to import for example venison from farms in New Zealand. Much of what the keeper shoots can be eaten too; pigeons, rabbits, jackdaws and squirrels are all delicious and even the less sought after game species which are rarely shot on shoots but when they are generally just get fed to dogs and ferrets like coots and moorhens for example all make a good meal. There are other vermin I would not recommend eating; fox for example in my experience tastes like bitter spam. Whether the animals and birds are shot as game by paying guests or by the keeper as vermin they are food though and the getting of food is an important part of bushcraft as well as one of the outcomes of the keepers work. 

Fur and Feather;

Bushcrafters often pride themselves in not wasting anything and keepers are much the same, I have often paid a significant percentage of my annual shotgun ammunition bill by selling squirrel tails, pheasant tails, jay wings and other resources harvested from game or vermin to people who use them to make fishing flys. Game yields far more than just meat and while the average keeper or deer stalker may not make hide glue or use animal bones to make needles and other tools as would have been done prehistorically they do make a lot of use can be made of the skins and other products of a shot animal. Rabbit skins become dummy's for dog training, non trophy deer antlers become dog chews, whistles, key rings and walking stick handles, hare's are carefully skinned so the short hair from their faces can be used for fishing flies, deer hooves become traditional walking stick handles and very little is wasted.  

Environmental Awareness;

As bushcrafters we pride ourselves in being able to identify plants, trees and other wildlife, in understanding what the changing seasons means for the countryside and in recognising the subtle signs of the wildlife that lives there. We know the best places to look for certain plants and wildlife and the best time of year to find them. Keepers have been the guardians of this information for many years and before bushcraft became a popular recreational activity they along with farmers, foresters, thatchers, terrier men and other 'country folk' would have been the ones who had a monopoly on this information, in fact I would hazard a guess that there isn't a single half competent bushcrafter who hasn't learned at least a few things from an old keeper, farmer or 'country person' over the course of their careers. Keepers need to know where to go to find the fox that's been bothering the pheasants, or the best place to set a trap for a stoat or a snare for a rabbit or the best time of year to shoot crows and the right time of year to catch pheasants for breeding and a whole host of other things and this knowledge only comes through regular time spent outdoors in all weathers and seasons and spending that time outdoors is part of a keepers job.  

So that's a little insight into the bushcraft skills used by game keepers, there will be more coming soon as we expand out applied bushcraft series. The other once regular series of the Bushcraft Education blog will all be back soon as well with a Bushscience post all about why common ink caps are poisonous when combined with alcohol but absolutely fine to eat at other times due out next week. 

I hope you are enjoying the new content and we will keep it coming, you can expect at least one post a week. 

Geoff 

Hunter Gatherer Ethics pt 4 (Non-target species)

Trapping can be an excellent part of an overall strategy for controlling pests and predators or gathering wild food. However there is an added complication with traps of the increased danger of catching things which your didn't mean to. 

This isn't normally such a problem when using firearms because you can see the animal you are aiming at, although there are cases of very irresponsible people shooting at silhouettes or just the glare of eyes in a lamp without properly identifying the target and shooting the wrong animal.

Just as the light from the camera flash is making these sika deer's eyes glow the light of a lamp can be used to illuminate the eyes of a range of targets, from rabbits to foxes, it is very irresponsible to shoot at eyes without positively identifying your target.

The problem with catching non-target species is that you may put yourself in a difficult legal position, for example by catching species which are protected, and there is the danger that you will compromise the population of species which you shouldn't be killing. 

This is a kania trap which we can use in the UK for trapping squirrels, mink and other small vermin, It can be baited to attract certain species and the trigger mechanism is designed in such a way as to prevent birds from setting it off easily.

The 'stops' on these snares prevent the snares from tightening up so tightly that they cut into a target species but they also used to be known as 'deer stops' as they prevent the snare tightening up on a deer's leg. 

The tunnel over this trap and the sticks in front of it are required to prevent non-target species being caught by the trap. In the UK the spring trap approval order requires that these spring traps be set in a tunnel.

In the picture below I have taken advantage of a hole at the bottom of a tree to set a trap in but have still used sticks to block off access to non-target species.

These are some common traps, all legal for use in the UK, which might be used for controlling pests and predators, from Back to Front; Kania 2000, Fenn Mk 6, Fen Mk 4, Magnum 110.

All those involved in trapping or hunting should be very careful to make sure they only catch the species they intended, accidents can happen with traps but if things are prepared and arranged properly these can be minimised.

Setting snares the correct height above the ground, four fingers high for a rabbit or a span and a half for foxes will ensure that you don't accidentally catch a badger which you all know walk with their heads fairly close to the ground so will just go under a fox snare. Or even better not using snares where you know badgers or other protected species are present.

Only using killing traps around water when you are sure you won't accidentally catch a water vole or otter instead of your targeted mink. These measures are not only important to keep you out of trouble but also to ensure the safety of protected species.

Geoff

Practical Bushcraft Projects for Countryside Management Students

My students have recently been able to carry out some bushcraft tasks related to their studies of practical estate skills, game bird production and green woodwork.

Over the last couple of weeks they have made several functioning pheasant traps of the sort that would have been used by game keepers to catch pheasants for breeding purposes, nowadays keepers normally use large catchers made of steel mesh or adapted partridge pens with which they can catch dozens of birds at a time. The traps the students produced are much more rustic (despite the blue baler twine) but would still be functional.

The students had coppiced the willow used in the construction of these traps themselves and after some experimentation with trigger mechanisms (they didn't think my suggestion was good enough apparently) they settled on using a split stick trigger and a trip wire with bait being spread underneath the trap.
They will get a chance to test the effectiveness of these traps as well as more modern alternatives in January when they begin to catch up the estates pheasants ready for egg production in the Spring. 

Another recent project was this small basket made from willow and nettles and seen here full of shaggy ink cap fungi;

Hunter Gatherer Ethics; Environmental Miss-Education

The difference between moorland managed for shooting on the right of the fence and grazed and denuded of heather and anything but grass on the left. (Image by Richard Guy)

Misunderstanding about the environment and about the work that goes on in the countryside abounds, often championed by well meaning individuals with the welfare of animals and the conservation of the natural world at heart but without the practical experience or appreciation of the relevance of wildlife management to accept that sometimes humans need to manage the environment rather than just let nature do it's own thing.

Mark Avery, former director of research for the RSPB published Inglorious in 2015 criticising grouse shooting and supporting his call for a ban on driven grouse shooting. While he does cite some very credible literature and does make some very good arguments against large scale driven grouse shooting he completely overlooks the benefits of land managed by game keepers. 

I take a dim-view of 'celebrity environmentalists' like Chris Packham and Bill Oddie who should know better than to make some of the claims they do about grouse shooting and game keepers, although there are some in that industry who certainly do break laws and persecute wildlife the work of gamekeepers is still very important to the character of the British countryside. I do though have a little more sympathy with the kind of environmental 'miss-education' that can occur in schools.

'Environmental Education' is part of the curriculum in the form of topics such as climate change and sustainability and in a 2003 paper about environmental education in Australian National Parks *1 highlights the issue of teachers without the necessary understanding of the environment to deliver effective environmental education. The authors comment specifically that although teachers may have understood environmental issues from a social or cultural perspective they lacked a sound understanding of the ecological and management issues. 

I have a similar concern having experienced first-hand the effects of misguided people who were concerned about the environment, they had certainly taken a position about the environment and were attempting to influence society which are two of the highest goals of environmental education but their position and action were informed, not by sound fact and local ecological knowledge, but by media and schools where the preoccupation seems to be to presenting global ecological and conservation issues without the context of local issues and badly informed teachers who will preach, rather than teach, about a specific, possibly emotional interest they have in the environment. To put this in context over my years of working in the countryside I have had traps and snares stolen or vandalised, valuable livestock released and been yelled at and verbally abused for cutting down trees and have been reported to the police for carrying out perfectly legal, necessary and beneficial environmental management activities. 

Contrary to popular belief it is still legal to trap and snare many species of vermin and predatory mammals as well as some birds under the conditions of the General Licences as well as use snares which meet certain design criteria under the UK's laws. These traps fill a vital role in controlling species such as grey squirrel and mink but many dismiss them as illegal and cruel without any proper understanding of their role, function or the lengths which have been gone to to ensure modern traps are humane. 

I do not believe that it is the role of teachers and environmental educators to address the issues or specific difficulties I have faced due to ‘environmental mis-education’ but there should be a responsibility to provide local context for peoples experiences in the environment rather than them forming perceptions of nature and the environment from TV documentaries of exotic animals, deforestation, global warming and other, very important, but very distant and intangible environmental issues. 

Deforestation to make way for agriculture in Mexico By Jami Dwyer - https://www.flickr.com/photos/74281168@N00/173937750/, Public Domain, Link

If instead of using the easily accessible, celebrity endorsed, well marketed, neatly packaged but flawed examples of the negatives of wildlife and environmental management teachers were a bit more critical of the material they delivered and were willing and comfortable to step out of the school building onto a local farm, nature reserve, shooting estate, beach or hillside their students would see the day to day activities that go on out there and be able to relate to the climate and sustainability issues in their own community rather than form the opinion the cutting down trees is bad because deforestation in the Amazon is bad and that's all they have learned about at school. 

Coppice management in a UK ancient woodland, a whole different kettle of fish to deforestation although tarred with the same brush in many peoples minds because they simply don't understand the difference.

While I don't expect everyone to suddenly start hunting and foraging their own food after a brush with the environment of their local area I do think that it will be much easier to have those conversations about where food comes from and why shooting and fishing are a legitimate and beneficial way of putting food on the table once people understand how the environment of their local area is maintained and managed.

My son mackerel fishing off the Dorset Coast

It's not only about food though or the rights and wrongs of killing something to eat but about respect for the people who make a living out of agriculture and countryside management and an understanding of the UK's unique landscape and countryside. 

As bushcrafters you, and I say you because I am a deer stalker by trade and I train game keepers so to many I am one of the enemy when it comes to their opinions about wildlife and the environment. YOU have a unique opportunity to teach people about those things without being a direct part of an industry that many distrust and find distasteful and can do a great deal to educate people about their countryside. 

References

*1 Lugg, A. & Slattery, D., (2003). Use of National Parks for Outdoor Environmental Education: An       Australian Case Study. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 3(1), pp. 77-92.

Bushcraft Show 2016

This time last week I was on my way back from the Bushcraft Show and had a really great time. We were lucky enough to share a stand with Reaseheath College where you will soon be able to study a course in Environmental Archaeology and Primitive Skills which combines Bushcraft and Academia in prefect harmony to prepare you for a career in archaeology, outdoor education or countryside and land management.

This year on the Bushcraft Education stand we offered opportunities for children to do a little bit of fungi ID and paint their own wooden mushroom to take away with them.

Fly agaric was by far the most popular subject for painted mushrooms at this years show. 

This activity proved really popular and by half way through Sunday all our mushrooms had been used up, we really hope that the children who got a change to paint a mushroom of their own learned a bit about fungi ID even if it's just not to touch them until they learn more about them. 

We also did some owl pellet dissections and were able to tell just from the contents of the pellets what small mammals were living almost 100 miles away, in the hedges and ditches of the Cambridgeshire fens where the barn owl which produced these particular pellets lives on the edge of Riddy Wood.  

Owl pellets don't look like much at first glance but if you look closer at just some of the things we found inside this one;

Here we have two field vole skulls and a shrew skull, the red teeth on the skull and jaw at the bottom of the picture distinguished it without any doubt as one of our three shrew species; common, pygmy or water. This one happens to be a common shrew although over the course of the weekend we did find some tiny pygmy shrew remains as well.

We also ran a workshop on trapping and looked at some of the changes in legislation that may soon affect those who use traps in the UK countryside as well as the knowledge we need to effectively and legally use traps.

 For those of you who want to learn more about trapping in the UK book a place on one of our upcoming courses; HERE.

We also did work on the camp fire over the weekend and despite many people commenting that they thought "the char cloth was done" what we were actually making was charcoal pencils; 

It will take some time to use up all the golden syrup we bought so we could use these tins for charcoal making. 

 

  

We were also able to show off some of the products made from the wood harvested from our ancient woodland site; Riddy Wood which you will be able to order via our online craft shop, whistles like these will be available to order soon;

Geoffs children normally accompany him to the bushcraft show but this year Michael was unable to attend as he had the chicken pox, but he has enjoyed playing with this whistle and he and the other #bushcraftbabies had great fun at their own private Bushcraft Show in the garden  last week which you will get to read about in tomorrows post on the Bushcraft Education blog. 

It was a great show this year with Ray Mears headlining the event, even if we were too busy to go and listen to his talk on the main stage, combined with perfect weather and a great venue at Beehive Farm Lakes.   

We're already looking forward to next years show.

Hunter Gatherer Ethics Pt 1 (ethical hunting and gathering)

I have been promising an article on the ethics of hunting and gathering ever since my article on "why I don't have time for archery" where I shared my thoughts on why the use of bows and arrows might be banned for use on deer in the UK. This generated some interesting comments and some disagreement over the efficiency of rifles compared to bows and even handguns for use on deer.

This article will be the first in a three part series on the ethics of hunting and gathering and as the person who has had the single biggest influence on my attitude towards hunting and gathering I have asked Martin to share some of his thoughts on the topic which you will see throughout this series. 

What I wont discuss here is whether or not hunting and gathering, particularly hunting, is ethical in the first place. While I respect the decision of vegetarians and vegans to not eat meat it is a fact that eating meat and fish has always been an essential survival mechanism of the human species, and if a lion is allowed to eat meat as far as I'm concerned so am I. However if you are happy to eat meat but still criticise the practice of hunting and shooting I would have to question your logic and point out some inconsistencies in your belief system and ask why it is OK for animals to die to feed you but not OK for me to kill a wild animal to achieve that same outcome?

By I, Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5, 

Humans fit into the animal kingdom just as lions, tigers and bears do; we may have the technology to make our hunting more efficient using tools and the development of agriculture to sustain our consumption of meat and while many people nowadays consider humans and our society and technology to be separate from 'nature' ultimately we are still part of it. We may be omnivorous and have the choice to not eat meat whereas a lion does not have that choice but if we do choose to harvest meat ourselves we should be ethical about it's collection, and do it for the right reasons.

"Never shoot something just to see it fall. If a bird or animal falls to your shot, it's falling needs to have served a purpose, to have reached a table, to have saved a crop and never, never to have been wasted." MG

In pursuit of my aim to never waste my quarry I have eaten every single species of wildlife that I have ever shot or trapped with the exception of rat, magpie and crow.

Yes that means I have tried fox, I regularly run snare lines for foxes and while I always keep the skins I don't normally eat them but on one occasion about ten years ago I thought it was about time I tried so when I retrieved a fox cub from one of my snares one morning it's haunches went into a curry that night. That one occasion was plenty though and I can't really recommend it unless you fancy a meat with the consistency of spam but with a distinct bitter taste. To make the most of those foxes I have shot or trapped since then I always take the skins but in all honesty I haven't eaten one since and don't plan to again unless I'm really desperate.

A fox skin stretched out and ready for curing

Even animals and birds that I kill as pests regularly make it into my cook pot, I ran a trap line for possums in New Zealand and while the primary reason was to reduce the impact of an invasive species the skins of the possums proved very useful and the meat was very tasty.

A younger and rather shabby looking me with the first possum I ever caught, over the following weeks this one became over sixty.

I primarily used Timms Traps for my possum trapping in New Zealand, at the time they, along with poisons, were the main tool for possum control although they have since been superseded by more effective traps, Hedgehogs are also an invasive species in New Zealand and can cause damage to ground nesting bird populations.
 By Tony Wills [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The stages of preparation that go into curing a possum skin, the drugs dog in LA airport on the way home was rather suspicious of them. 

I suppose after making the point that ethics demand we make the best use of anything we kill, whether that be meat for food, skins for clothing, sinew for cordage and bones for tools (check out Dr. Peter Grooms guest post a few months ago on experimental archaeology which includes some examples of fish hooks made from bone) we should address the very controversial topic of hunting for sport.

The quality of a Chinese Water Deer trophy is largely determined by the size and perfection of it's larger, canine tusks.  

I suppose the popular image of the typical bloodthirsty hunter is of the heads of animals, stuffed to the neck eerily looking at you from the walls of their study. Well if you came to my house you wouldn't see any of that, most of the skulls, antlers and teeth from the deer I have shot have become teaching aids for the courses I teach on deer management and game keeping. Those of you coming on our deer field to fork course will have a chance to look at them and learn to tell the approximate age of a deer based on it's teeth. 

So is it ethical to hunt a deer, or any other animal, for sport? Well I'm not really sure myself, while I don't personally hunt for sport, and by that I mean I don't pay to go hunting/shooting recreationaly, take trophy's or shoot 600 bird days on intensive driven pheasant shoots I certainly do condone shooting for sport. After all I trained as a game keeper, I now train game keepers myself and I take paying clients out to shoot deer. So how do I justify that to myself? 

Well ultimately as long as the animals being killed are treated humanely and there is a good case for the death of that animal, either it is a pest/causing damage and/or is going to be used as food I don't have a problem with it as long as the conditions the animal is reared in (if relevant) are humane and it is killed in the most humane, not the most 'sporting', way available to you. In most cases the question of rearing is irrelevant as the word hunting is synonymous with wild rather than domestic animals but pheasants and partridges, for example, are often reared and released into the wild specifically for shooting. 

Captive bred pheasants soon after release into the wild for a few more months of growing before the start of the shooting season. 

What I can't agree with is the killing of animals specifically for sport with no other use for the animal in mind than as a trophy and an ego trip for the 'sportsman'. With pests it's different I have no problem with rats being left uneaten and I'm certainly not volunteering to skin any, but they still need to be controlled. On the other hand I honestly can't understand the appeal of taking 'trophy' animals out of an otherwise fully functioning ecosystem unless it's for food. In the UK we have a broken ecosystem, one that does not function without our input, yes it's because of our heavy handed input that it needs our help in the first place but just stopping wouldn't do any good. Deer are the easiest example to use to illustrate this point, all the top predators in the British Isles have been extinct for years leaving nothing big enough to predate deer, additionally we have introduced four non native deer species leading to a booming deer population and the only control being starvation, unless we cull. 

No starvation isn't humane, yes it is a fact of nature that there will be lean years and animals will starve but when the only thing limiting a deer's lifespan is starvation we need to do something. This is when I'm sure cries of 're-widling' will go up but I'm afraid I have an opinion on that too, check out my past article from this blog in response to George Monbiot's TED talk here, and my more recent article on the NAEE UK's blog here.   

An example of a fully functioning ecosystem would be one where prey and predators still coexist together in some sort of balance, there are few if any of those places left on our planet but in those places I would consider it unethical to attempt to 'manage' wildlife through culling but I still wound't have a problem with hunting for food. 

Just as I can't agree with attempts to 'manage' ecosystems that are intact and do not need our input I also would warn against over harvesting. Whether a managed deer population, a grouse moor or a patch of edible fungi over harvesting can be devastating. If I over harvest on my deer cull one year that equals less venison next year, An overshot grouse moor might, when the losses due to shooting are combined with winter losses and predation not produce enough birds for any shooting to take place the next year, and a mushroom patch harvested before the fruiting bodies have spored may dwindle and diminish over time.   

Never harvest everything you see, one of these puff balls was more than enough. 

So in summary my rules for ethical hunting, gathering and foraging;

1. Do not kill or pick anything you're not going to;
• eat
• wear
• use for tools
• use for medicine
• use for material 
• UNLESS it's destroying what you need to eat, wear, use for tools, use for medicine, or material.
2. Do not kill anything just to see it fall. 
3. By all means take the trophy, whether it's antlers, teeth, tail or tusks as long as you are still applying RULE 1.
4. Never assume "there is more just around the corner" never deplete an entire berry patch, flock, herd or fairy ring, leave some for others, wildlife and the continuation of the species.
5. Always use the most humane method to kill or catch live quarry that is available to you and ensure to the best of your ability that an animals suffering is ended quickly.
6. Never take marginal shots, if your not sure you can kill it don't pull the trigger.
7. Abide by the appropriate open/close seasons, they are there for a reason; to protect fawns and other newborn animals from being orphaned and to give the animals respite.
8. Abide by other wildlife laws to ensure you do not pick protected species or engage in illegal hunting, fishing or foraging practices.  

With those rules in mind I'll leave the parting words to Martin;

Treat the countryside with reverence and respect, also, treat those with whom we share the countryside with the same respect, irrespective of our differing views on how it is to be enjoyed. MG

More tomorrow on the responsibility to teach the next generation(s) about hunting, gathering and foraging.

Geoff