Why Conservation Cannot Afford to lose Humane Cable Restraints
- C4PMC
- 15 hours ago
- 5 min read
Nobody enjoys snaring. Even those who do it for a living take no pleasure in it. Effective snaring demands considerable skill, good equipment, real commitment, and hard physical work. It is also a sitting duck for critics: if anything goes wrong, it will be front-page news; if nothing goes wrong, it is disturbingly easy to stage a shock-horror photograph with a roadkill badger or cat.
Yet snaring, in its modern form, remains one of the most important tools available to conservationists and researchers working to protect some of Britain's most vulnerable wildlife. Before that case can be made, however, it is important to distinguish clearly between the crude snares of the past and the precision instrument that has replaced them.
From Locking Snare to Humane Cable Restraint
The old-fashioned locking snares — the sort that Chris Packham writes about using in his autobiography — could inflict considerable suffering. Even in the hands of operators far more competent than Mr Packham, whose own account of attempting to beat a snared fox to death remains a chilling testament to incompetence, the old locking snares were both lethal and prone to malfunction.
Recognising that snaring remained essential for both conservation and scientific research, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) set out to develop a modern alternative that could meet international standards of humaneness and selectivity. They succeeded. The result is the Humane Cable Restraint (HCR) — a device that is effective, humane, and exceeds the selectivity standards set by the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards.
The HCR is engineered with precision. It is designed to allow smaller mammals to extricate themselves unharmed, while larger animals such as deer and badgers trigger a breakaway mechanism that causes the restraint to release. For this to work as intended, the operator must be well trained and skilled — in the wrong hands, any tool can be misused. But in competent hands, the HCR is a world away from the old locking snare.
Why Fox Research Depends on HCRs
Without Humane Cable Restraints, fox research would be seriously compromised. The most common alternative method of catching foxes alive and unharmed is the cage trap. Unfortunately, cage traps only catch naïve or very inexperienced foxes. HCRs, being effectively invisible, capture a genuinely random cross-section of the fox population. This distinction is not academic: if researchers can only study the least wary foxes, the behavioural data from tagged animals is skewed and unreliable.
The organisations campaigning loudest for a ban know this perfectly well. Some years ago, the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) commissioned Professor Hewson of Aberdeen University to conduct research into fox behaviour on the Eriboll Estate in Scotland. For six months, Professor Hewson attempted to catch foxes using cage traps in order to fit tracking collars. In that entire period, he caught not a single fox.
Desperate for results, Hewson sought permission from the LACS to use 'stopped snares' — a crude precursor of the modern HCR, and one still prone to malfunction. The LACS agreed, on one condition: it had to be kept quiet. With the help of a local fox hunter, Hewson quickly caught enough foxes for the research to begin.
The secret did not last. The local community took the view that honesty was preferable to the discretion the LACS had proposed, and word leaked out. The episode is instructive: if even the League Against Cruel Sports had to resort to a primitive prototype of the HCR to conduct basic fox research, the case for the device's necessity is effectively conceded.
A Double Standard on Snares
It is worth noting that another form of snare is in routine use by organisations including the RSPCA and council dog wardens. These consist of a stout wire cable attached to the end of a rigid metal pole, forming a loop that is passed over the head of a dog or cat and tightened around its neck. The animal is effectively choked and, because of the rigid handle, cannot get close enough to bite or scratch its captor. It can then be dragged to a vehicle or, in some cases, directly to a mobile euthanasia unit.
This method causes far more visible distress than the HCR. We know from eyewitness testimony gathered during the LACS's own fox research that foxes caught in stopped snares were found curled up, resting, or asleep — reacting only when disturbed by the approach of the operative. Compare that with the distress of a dog or cat being choked and dragged by a stranger with a catchpole. The contrast could hardly be starker, yet it is the HCR, not the catchpole, that faces a ban.
The Conservation Case: Protecting Rare Ground-Nesting Birds
The most compelling argument for retaining the HCR lies in its role protecting some of Britain's most threatened wildlife. Rare ground-nesting birds — curlew, lapwing, and other species in serious decline — are acutely vulnerable to fox predation during the breeding season. Organisations including the National Trust and the RSPB routinely have foxes shot at night with rifles, using lamps or thermal imaging equipment. This is effective while the fields are open.
However, once crops and vegetation grow above fox height, lamping and thermal shooting become impractical. This is precisely the period when eggs and chicks are at their most vulnerable. Without HCRs, there is simply no effective, humane method of managing fox predation during the critical weeks of the breeding season. For species like the curlew, already hovering on the brink of local extinction in many lowland areas, this gap in predator management could prove catastrophic.
The HCR is not a blunt instrument. It is a carefully engineered tool that, in trained hands, enables targeted and humane fox management at the exact moment when rare species need it most. Removing it from the conservationist's toolkit would not be a victory for animal welfare — it would be a defeat for biodiversity.
Nobody will mourn the demise of the old locking snare. But the Government must not allow justified concerns about an obsolete device to sweep away the modern, humane alternative that has replaced it. The Humane Cable Restraint meets and exceeds international standards for both humaneness and selectivity. It is indispensable to serious fox research and irreplaceable in the effort to protect ground-nesting birds during the breeding season.
A ban on HCRs would not be a proportionate response to the problems of the past. It would be a gift to those who prioritise ideology over evidence, and a blow to the scientists and conservationists who depend on this tool to protect some of our rarest and most imperilled wildlife. The Government should regulate, train, and enforce — but it should not ban the one device that has made humane, selective snaring a reality.
