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11
Sept 2023
North Yorkshire trail hunting ban ‘unenforceable, but the right thing to do’
Councillors behind a push to prevent trail hunting activities on North Yorkshire Council’s vast estate say a ban is “the right thing to do” even though it may be unenforceable.
Councillors Rich Maw and Arnold Warneken said local politicians across the largely rural county had a moral duty to ban trail hunting, exempt hunting, hound exercise and hunt meets outright across all council land, where legally possible, including any new tenancies.
The Labour and Green councillors issued the call ahead of a meeting of the local authority’s corporate scrutiny committee today (Monday), which will seek to agree a response to a notice of motion for the ban to be put before all the council’s elected members.
The motion has been condemned by the Countryside Alliance as “anti-rural” and by some Conservative councillors as “a waste of time”.
An officer’s report to the meeting states trail hunting is “a legal, although controversial, alternative to hunting animals with hounds” in which a scent trail is laid “ostensibly to recreate the experience of chasing a real animal”.
It has been claimed that trail hunting is designed to replicate hunting as closely as possible, but without the deliberate involvement of live prey, however campaigners in North Yorkshire say they have ample evidence of animals becoming targets.
The land owned by the council mostly affected by a ban would be its farm estate portfolio, which is thought to be about 3,500 acres.
Read more:
- Call for ban on trail hunting on North Yorkshire Council land
- Call to ban trail hunting on North Yorkshire Council land ‘waste of time’, says former animal welfare campaigner
The report highlights how recent years have seen several major landowners, such as the National Trust and the Church of England, suspend or ban trail hunting on their land.
It states while some local authorities such as Nottinghamshire County Council had banned trail hunting, Cornwall Council had agreed banning a lawful activity would be a direct attack on rural people.
The report states:
In response to the report, Weaponness and Ramshill division Cllr Maw said trail hunting was “a smokescreen” for the act of actually hunting wild animals.
He added:
Cllr Warneken said was also not possible to enforce every 30mph limit, and bans on people dropping cigarette butts or not wearing seatbelts, but that had not stopped those rules being approved.
He said:
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