This weekend Sky News ran a number of items about raptor persecution and the way the wildlife killers are getting with these crimes, with a prosecution fee of lower than 4%.
They produced a written piece (here) that includes quotes from the RSPB’s Investigations Team and so they additionally performed a number of interviews, one with Howard Jones, RSPB Senior Investigations Officer, one with Mark Thomas, Head of RSPB Investigations and one with Chris Packham.
The interview with Mark Thomas confirmed some covert video footage by the RSPB exhibiting two gamekeepers eradicating dwell buzzards from a crow cage entice, placing them inside fertiliser sacks, tying the highest and placing the luggage inside a car. It doesn’t present what occurred to them subsequent however you possibly can most likely think about; there have been sufficient earlier circumstances the place gamekeepers have been caught on digicam bludgeoning trapped birds of prey to demise (e.g. see right here, right here, right here) to make an informed guess. These earlier convictions most likely clarify why lately its widespread to see the trapped birds being faraway from the entice and brought away, presumably to be killed away from potential covert cameras. It’s additionally telling that the gamekeepers concerned usually put on face masks in an try to cover their identities.
As Mark discusses in the course of the interview, it’s not an offence to catch birds of prey in crow cage traps – they usually get in and may’t then discover a manner out. If the entice operator releases them, unhurt, instantly after discovering them, then no offence has been dedicated. Putting them inside a sack and taking them away is a transparent offence and is indicative of additional offences (i.e. killing the birds elsewhere).
This explicit footage hasn’t beforehand been printed, and there’s a cause for that. I’ll return to this case in a separate weblog.
I can’t discover the total interviews in a single place however there are numerous clips that may be watched through Twitter, which I’ve linked under.
