Debate contribution: Hunting with Dogs Bill: Second Stage
Debate contribution by Mr Tom Buchanan on .
- MLA
- Mr Tom Buchanan
- Party at the time
- Democratic Unionist Party
- Date
- 26 May 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Private Members' Business
- Heading
- Hunting with Dogs Bill: Second Stage
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5582909
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I rise to oppose the Bill. The reasons for opposing it are threefold: it is legislatively weak, practically unworkable and fundamentally damaging to the rural people of Northern Ireland. The House has a duty to pass laws that are clear, proportionate, enforceable and grounded in evidence. This Bill fails to meet each of those tests. The former Attorney General, John Larkin KC, has highlighted what many of us have long suspected, namely that the Bill is poorly drafted, legally ambitious and constitutionally problematic. It creates offences that are vague, ill-defined and open to arbitrary interpretation. It risks criminalising people, not for intent but for circumstances that are entirely outside their control. When a Bill is so unclear that senior legal figures warn that it will collapse under scrutiny, the Assembly should sit up and take notice. The Bill would place law-abiding farmers, dog handlers, pest controllers and rural workers at risk of prosecution for carrying out essential everyday tasks. It would criminalise legitimate fox control and expose our farming community to prosecution. It would make routine pest management legally hazardous and create offences that depend on hindsight rather than on intent. The Bill is not about tackling cruelty. Rather, it is about criminalising rural life. The people who would be targeted are the very people who maintain the countryside, protect livestock and uphold high standards of animal welfare. Clause 1 presents a real risk to farmers. For example, a farmer whose dog flushes a fox while protecting livestock would fall foul of the law and receive a criminal conviction. As was mentioned, if someone is walking their pet dog and the dog follows the scent of a rabbit or another animal, that person could receive a criminal conviction. That is clear in the Bill. The Bill is not supported by scientific evidence, welfare data, economic analysis or a credible assessment of its rural impact. In fact, support for the Bill in the consultation survey amounted to only 0·44% of the Northern Ireland population, yet the Bill ignores the Burns inquiry, DEFRA research, and multiple independent studies of effective and humane wildlife management.
The Bill is in breach of the Rural Needs Act (Northern Ireland) 2016, which requires public authorities, including the Assembly, to consider the impact of legislation on rural communities. There is no rural impact assessment, no economic modelling and no recognition of the consequences of the Bill for farmers, land managers, rural businesses, conservation groups or working dog handlers. That is why the Bill is fundamentally flawed: its removal of effective control methods of fox management would have greater consequences for animal welfare. The Bill seeks to ban trail hunting, but it is drafted in such a way as to mean that the proposed ban on trail hunting would also render unlawful the use of dogs to find and flush out rats or mice. The definition of "trail hunt" is:
"inducing or permitting one or more dogs to follow an animal-based scent (whether the trail of scent has been laid naturally or by human intervention)."
What does the former Attorney General say about that? He says:
"a farmer could not, without exposing himself to liability"
under that provision:
"encourage his dog or dogs to follow the scent of rats who were devouring his grain with a view to a dog finding the rats and destroying them."
A farmer who has a problem with vermin in barns or outhouses would be "seriously impeded" in protecting his or her property. Again, there we have an attack on the farming community who seek to protect their livestock, their grain and all that goes with being in that community. There are also detrimental consequences for those who are involved in country sport. Mr Blair has said that someone who is out shooting and has their dogs with them would be exempt from that provision, but that is not in the Bill. They are not protected because it is not in the Bill; if it is not in the Bill, those people are not protected. In the Committee, when I questioned Mr Blair about what constituted a "group" or a "pack" of dogs, he said that that meant anything over two dogs. Many people in the rural community have more than two dogs and go out walking with them; they are therefore —
— open to a criminal conviction.
Maybe the Member would accept that many people in rural areas have two, three or four springer spaniel dogs that they take out?
Many more than one. When they go out with them for a walk or whatever, they would therefore be open to criminal conviction under the provisions of the Bill.
Thank you for that. Due to the lack of clarity in the Bill, there is also an issue for PSNI officers. How can they be expected to determine in real time whether a dog's behaviour constitutes "hunting" under the Bill's ill-defined terms? I wonder what consultation there has been with the PSNI on the resource implications of enforcing the legislation. We have before us a Bill that is not only not balanced but that, I would go so far as to say, discriminates against the rural community and those who love their dogs.
871 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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