Pull the plug on stag hunt

This month, the Minister for the Environment John Gormley will decide whether or not to grant a license to the country's only stag hunt.

The “sport” involves the pursuit with hounds of a farmed or domesticated stag that is released from a horse cart for the chase. Mounted hunters and sightseers follow the horses and hounds in land rovers. The hunt chases the animal across country for an hour or two until it collapses from exhaustion.

In the course of being chased, the stag is severely injured, getting tangled up in barbed wire, thorn bushes and brambles along the way. Some hunted stags have dropped dead from heart attacks. Others have drowned in rivers into which they were hounded.

The deer used are bred in captivity and therefore cannot be classified as wild creatures. The Protection of Animals Acts 1911 and 1965 prohibit the hunting or baiting of domestic animals or farm livestock, and there is a widespread belief in legal, environmental, and animal welfare circles that the activity is in breach of this legislation.

The only other similar hunt on this island, in County Down, was banned for using farmed or domesticated deer contrary to Northern Ireland's animal protection law, which is very similar to the Republic's.

In 2004, an RTE Primetime programme featured an interview with a Trinity law professor who offered his professional legal opinion that stag hunting was flouting the law because the deer being used were indeed domestic animals and not wild deer. He stressed that there was “no ambiguity whatsoever” about this legal situation.

The same RTE programme exposed the cruelties of stag hunting. It included footage showing an exhausted and injured stag at the end of a typical hunt. The animal, panting for breath and its head bleeding, is being wrestled to the ground by a number of hunters.

More significantly, a Department of Agriculture report that was severely critical of stag hunting remained published for seven years, coming to light only in autumn 2003 as a result of a Dáil Question tabled by Deputy Tony Gregory. The Department of Agriculture's then veterinary inspector prepared this report, which found that the stag hunt's chasing and transportation of the deer was inhumane, as was the capture of the animals. It highlighted the appalling injuries suffered by the hunted stags and drew attention to fact that domesticated animals outside the ambit of the Wildlife Act were being cruelly hunted.

In 2004, the Government ignored a plea from the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) not to issue a stag hunt license. The NPWS had advised that the license should not be issued because the deer to be hunted could not be viewed as wildlife as defined by the Wildlife Act.

An animal welfare group obtained a copy of a memo relating to that advice under the Freedom of Information Act.

This blood sport has also proven itself a major public nuisance. A few months ago, RTE's Liveline radio show was inundated with calls about a stag hunt that rampaged through a schoolyard, scattering terrified children in all directions. Pupils who saw the helpless stag, bloodied and with its tongue hanging out, were traumatised by the spectacle.

Other similar incidents have been brought to the attention of the Department of the Environment.

But will the minister and his department heed the explicit, well-documented and compelling evidence against carted stag hunting? There is simply no need or justification for the practise. It has no conservation or pest control value whatsoever.

We appeal to the Minister, John Gormley, to pull the plug on this vile abuse of our wildlife heritage.