Animal rights groups attempt to manipulate Welsh Assembly

The Countryside Alliance has responded robustly to recent anti-shooting petitions at the National Assembly for Wales. Countryside Alliance Director for Wales Rachel Evans, the leading voice for shooting at the National Assembly, has been working to great effect to quash the accusations that are driving these petitions.

One of the two petitions currently under discussion, and to which the Alliance has responded, concerns the banning of Larsen traps. The petition has been found on a West of England hunt saboteurs Facebook page, seeking the support of animal rights activists from outside of Wales and linking the cause to their own balaclava-clad "direct action" campaigns. The wording is disingenuous, possibly libellous, and has encouraged 1904 people from as far afield as California, France, Switzerland and Israel to call on the Welsh Assembly Members to ban something about which they know very little. The Alliance has scrutinised the petition and out of the 1904 signatures only 38.7% of them reside in Wales. The majority of signatures come from the urban constituencies of Cardiff and Newport.

At the first scrutiny session Assembly Members openly stated that they know nothing of Larsen traps and a very sensible suggestion was put forward by Anglesey's Plaid Cymru AM Rhun Ap Iorwerth and supported by the chair David Rowlands AM, UKIP, asking for the Countryside Alliance and gamekeepers to be asked to provide evidence.

The Alliance has ensured that the petition has reached the ears of fellow rural organisations and is seeking a united front to expose the misleading statements the petition is presenting to the Assembly.

Papers provided to the committee by their internal research service have stated that the RSPB is "not opposed to legal, site-specific control of magpies by the legal use of Larsen or other cage traps as long as the general licence conditions are strictly adhered to".

Meanwhile, a second petition headed up by a non-membership and non-charitable campaign group "Animal Aid", with over 12,000 signatures, has been handed in to the petitions committee at the National Assembly for Wales. This petition calls on Natural Resources Wales (NRW) to ban shooting on land it owns or manages in a lastminute attempt to defeat evidence and fact.

The petition was started in August 2016 with an online campaign to pressurise NRW to put an end to the leases they manage for third party activities such as pheasant shooting. The vendetta against NRW has spurred animal rights activists from all over the world to sign a petition that calls for an outright ban on shooting on NRW land, something that cannot actually be put in to practice as dozens of shooting rights owned by members of the public that NRW have no power to end.

The petition has been left to run for two years, in which time animal rights activists have managed to drum up their 12,000 signatures. The petition has now been dusted off and presented to the petitions committee as a response to an NRW call for evidence which scrutinised the available research and found that shooting provides tremendous benefits to Wales economically, socially and environmentally. Having been so soundly defeated by the evidence, the activists turned to the one tool with which they are most adept, and presented this anti-shooting petition that had already been presented to NRW last year.

Because the petition was not presented to the Assembly via their standard online process, it cannot be scrutinised by the Alliance for authenticity or origin of the signatures. There is no way for us to know how many of these petitioners actually reside in Wales.

We will be asking the fundamental question of why these petitions are allowed to hold such influence over Welsh policy makers, when no one is being held accountable for the information these petitions present, the credibility of the signatures or where the signatories come from. As both anti-shooting petitions are discussed by the committee over the coming weeks, the Countryside Alliance will continue to lead in presenting the facts to AM's and the Minister under whose portfolio this sits, to dispel the myths presented by the animal rights activists – from all over the world.