Badger found snared by side of road at Newark

On Saturday 28th August, cyclist Martin Laing from Newark got a shock when he passed a badger with a horrific neck injury and stopped to find a wire around around its neck. Police have been informed on 29th August.

Simon Wild of the National Anti Snaring Campaign said: We have identified this steel wire as a fox snare which are mainly set by gamekeepers to trap foxes. They are legal if free running, but are completely indiscriminate and cruel. We have informed the police because it is an offence to set them where they are “calculated to cause bodily injury to a Schedule 6 mammal such as a badger”. In our experience gamekeepers rearing pheasants set snares most often around release pens in August, and we have found up to five badgers snared on some estates at the same time.

DEFRA conducted a major enquiry into snaring that reported four years ago that legal free running snares were causing life threatening injuries to badgers, but all the government has done is develop a code of practice with the shooting lobby designed to reduce capture of non target animals, and this is never going to work as badgers do not read warning signs!

Only a total ban on snares will prevent this sort of outrage.