Snares and the Law

The principal law covering snares in England and Wales is the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

This law makes the use of self-locking snares illegal, and prevents people from using any snare to catch various protected mammals, including otters and badgers.                       

The Deer Act 1991 makes it an offence to set a snare to catch a deer - however, these animals are still found caught in snares.

In Scotland, the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act 2004 contains the same ban on self-locking snares, but goes further to make it a crime to sell or possess a self-locking snare. Visit our Scotland section for more information about the law.

In Northern Ireland the Wildlife (Northern Ireland) Order 1985 prevents the use of self-locking snares.

Checking snares

How often a snare must be inspected to check it for animals determines for how long an animal will suffer. The situation is worst in England and Wales, where the law says that snares must be checked every day. Technically, this means an animal can be trapped in a snare for up to 48 hours, as the snare may be checked just after midnight one day, and just before midnight the next.

In Scotland, the law says that snares must be checked every 24 hours.

In Northern Ireland, the Welfare of Animals Act (Northern Ireland) 1972 requires that snares are inspected at least once every day between sunrise and sunset.

The League believes that even these periods are far too long for an animal to be caught in a snare.

Self-regulation

In England and Wales there is now a code of good practice that tells snare users how they should set snares. This has no legal weight, and if snare users do not follow it they cannot be prosecuted. We do not believe that it will be widely followed, as in 2005 League investigators on the UK's most prominent shooting estates found clear and frequent breaches of the industry's own code of conduct for snaring:

• on the estate of the late Earl of Lichfield, former President of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the organisation responsible for the code
• on the estate of Sir Edward Dashwood, Chairman of the Countryside Alliance campaign for shooting, which helps to oversee the industry code, and
• on the estate of Andrew Christie-Miller, former Chairman of the Game Conservancy Trust, which also helps to oversee the industry code.

If these three people cannot enforce the code on their own estates, then how can anyone else be expected to obey such a code?