Farmers Weekly on our new legal challenge

As we wrote yesterday, Farmers Weekly has now published a news story about our new legal challenge on their website – here it is. It’s a fair enough account of things.

Just to be a little picky, Wild Justice has not challenged the crow shooting laws – we like the laws that protect wild birds. We are challenging Natural England’s licensing of lethal control of crows and other species because, specifically because, we do not believe that they implement the laws that have existed for decades.

That’s a technical but massive difference. Our success in our first legal challenge showed that the statutory agency, Natural England (and its predecessor bodies) had for decades, failed to implement the existing laws through a lawful licensing system. We haven’t changed the law, and we aren’t calling for the law to be changed. We want Defra and Natural England (and devolved adminstrations elsewhere in the UK) to give effect to the existing laws properly.

If the licensing authority, the statutory regulator, isn’t implementing the law correctly then questions need to be asked of it. These questions have not yet been asked of Natural England and Defra.

And another day has passed without Defra announcing its plans for lethal control of the species formerly listed on the General Licences GL04, GL05 and GL06. They are more than three weeks overdue and they have been ‘imminent’ for over a week.