MOST wildlife crime in Scotland is going undetected, it has been claimed.
Ian Thomson, the head of investigations for RSPB Scotland, suggested it is easy for those responsible to cover up evidence of wrongdoing.
Holyrood’s Environment Committee heard evidence yesterday, calling for increased use of animal population surveys to help detect where crimes may have taken place.
“One of the biggest issues we’ve got with regard to wildlife crime and trying to establish trends is that it’s actually most crime is going on unseen, undetected,” he said.
“If we’re just looking at this annual body count, for example, we really have no idea how that represents what’s actually going on.
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“What we’re actually dealing with is a sample of unknown size. So when it comes to measuring the impact of criminality, it’s actually much better to use things like population surveys for example.”
Thomson pointed to the decline in number of hen harriers and golden eagles in Scotland as indicating that suspicious activity has taken place.
“For species like hen harrier, for example, the hen harrier population in Scotland has declined by something like 27% between 2004 and 2016,” he said. “There was the satellite tagging review commissioned by the Scottish Government a few years ago that showed a third of young tagged golden eagles were disappearing in suspicious fashion in areas being managed for grouse shooting.
“But that’s just tagged birds. I mean, if you extrapolate that into the actual number that are likely to be being illegally killed, you come to quite a staggering figure.
“But we have to accept that wildlife crime usually happens in places where it’s not witnessed and it’s very easy for the individuals undertaking it to cover up the evidence and they’re obviously not going to leave a poisoned bird or a shot bird or whatever lying around for hill walkers or the police or whoever is to stumble across.”
Karen Ramoo, a policy adviser for Scottish Land and Estates, called for the provision of more up to date statistics to assess wildlife crime.
“I think it’s really important that we have present statistics to go off when we’re assessing wildlife crime,” she said. “It’s been quite unhelpful that we’ve not had an annual wildlife report on crime from the Government in the last three years.”
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