Irish badgers are being cruelly, and unnecessarily injured, traumatised, and killed by the use of snares by Irish Government employees, according to a wildlife rescuer based in the Midlands.
Ruairi O’Leochain runs Athlone’s Wildlife Apiaries, and told Gript that the problem was widespread, and the cruelty involved is distressing and unnecessary, especially when cage traps provide a humane alternative and are used in other jurisdictions.
The Department of Agriculture in Ireland has been engaged in a vaccination programme targeted at Irish badgers for various years, in an effort to reduce the risk of Bovine Tuberculosis being transmitted from Badgers to Irish cattle. Although snares are banned across Europe, so-called “live-catch” snares are still used here in Ireland.
A video made recently by Ruairi O’Leochain, showing a badger snare.
These snares are almost identical to a traditional snare, with one difference. A traditional, lethal, snare, is basically piece of wire in a loop, which tightens as the animal pushes forward to try to escape. This kills the animal, usually by strangulation, and the process can take hours. A “live-catch” snare is basically identical, except that the wire used is slightly thicker, to prevent it cutting into the skin. A live-catch snare also has a “catch” on the wire, to prevent it tightening fully. In theory this constrains the animal, rather than killing it.
However, the snares still inflict horrendous injuries when the process goes wrong, according to O’Leochain. “I’ve seen it”, he told Gript, “in my own work around Athlone”. “The animal struggles, and the wire still cuts into the skin. I’ve seen how deep these cuts can be”. “Over a decade, one report showed that 965 badgers received life changing injuries from the use of these snares – cuts to the throat, damaged paws, and so on”.
NOTE: Some of the images of badgers that had been caught in snares set by the Irish Government are too upsetting to show here, without warning. If you want to see what these snares can do, then click here.
O’Leochain is also concerned that in some instances, illegal trappers are following vaccination teams and illegally snaring badgers who have been targeted by the vaccination team. “What happened in one instance was that the vaccination team set snares outside two of the three entrances to a sett”, he says. The very next night, somebody, who obviously had knowledge of what the vaccinators were doing, set a snare at the third entrance, knowing that the badgers would use it instead”. Some of these Badgers are widely believed to be captured for the purpose of Badger Baiting, – a long-banned “sport” in which a badger is deliberately injured, and then set to fight to the death against fighting dogs.
What’s more, O’Leochain notes that the department does not even suspend its programme during the badger breeding season, resulting in pregnant badgers being caught and snared, and often injured.
“There is no reason in the world for the Irish Government to be using a mechanism as crude and as cruel as a snare to capture Irish badgers. In other countries across Europe, the snare has been banned. In some places in Europe, they use oral vaccinations – they actually put the vaccines into chocolate and put them into the badger sett. Most countries use live capture traps, where the animal just falls asleep. But here in Ireland, we’re still catching these animals – a protected species – with wire snares”.
“In some areas, they aren’t even vaccinating. If TB is suspected, there are instances where they’ll just cull the badgers immediately.”
At the last election, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party all pledged to bring Badger culling to an end. As yet they have failed to do so.
O’Leochain tells Gript that the snares, intended for Badgers, regularly capture other, non-target animals.
“I have seen hares, rabbits, and foxes caught and maimed by these things. More distressing again, I have seen family pets – cats and dogs – caught in these snares. When you work with wildlife, like I do, you see these things, and it haunts you. Of course, when you mention that family pets get involved, then people sit up and take notice. But when it’s wildlife, people don’t notice as much”.
Last week, a pet cat in Cavan was reported to have been caught in a snare. The animal suffered serious injuries to its leg, but was thankfully found in time:
The Cat survived, but the Vet suggested the injuries were caused by a snare.
“An animal caught in a snare can take days, in many cases, to die” says O’Leochain, who has launched an online petition calling for snares to be made illegal. “Badgers in particular are very hardy animals, and can survive for days without food or water. When somebody forgets to collect all their snares, which is common enough, animals can be left to suffer for days, experiencing horrible, slow, deaths”.
O’Leochain and other campaigners believe that the state should switch to live traps when the capturing of a wild animal is necessary, as is current practice in the UK. “In Britain, when they want to catch badgers, they put bait in a cage, and the animal goes in, the door closes behind it, and they’re usually found the next morning, asleep”, he says. “Contrast that with the Irish process, where an animal – even if it survives uninjured – spends the whole night, and maybe most of the next day, struggling against a snare, with the wire cutting into its skin”.
O’Leochain has written to Green Minister Malcolm Noonan on the subject, and notes that if the Greens cannot address this issue – on which he believes they would have widespread support, even outside their traditional voter base – then “there’s not much point to them”.
“The bottom line is that there is no need to do this. No other EU country does it. They’ve all banned it. In Ireland, its still legal. Lethal snares are still legal. The public are told the vaccination programme is a humane alternative to culling, but it uses the least humane methods possible. If people knew this was happening, I believe there’d be an overwhelming demand for it to stop”.