Town & Country
Hare today, gone tomorrow?
THE Scottish Parliament has voted to make mountain hares a protected species and ban unlicensed cullings of the animals. A late amendment to the Animals and Wildlife Bill last week was passed by 60 votes to 19. The amendment was tabled by Green MSP Alison Johnstone on the back of a petition that had more than 22,000 signatures. Mountain hare numbers have been in decline since the 1950s, say ecologists, with Scottish Government figures suggesting 26,000 are killed each year.
The ban has been met with harsh criticism from countryside groups, with one landowner telling COUNTRY LIFE that the speed with which the ban was passed was akin to ‘an ambush’. ‘People are more angry about the process than the result,’ says Malcolm Hay from Banffshire. ‘All along, the Scottish government has been saying that they understand the issues around mountain hares, that they “get it”, and then they’ve suddenly turned around, on the back of a populist motion, and
