DEFRA approves A24 trap to kill hedgehogs

Marigold

Marigold

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The A24 trap, which kills vermin and also catches and kills hedgehogs, has been approved by DEFRA for use in the British Isles. The A24 originated in New Zealand, where hedgehogs are an introduced species which have bred out of control. In the U.K, hedgehogs are a legally protected species and it is illegal to trap or kill them deliberately. Hedgehogs are in decline as it is, with a dramatic fall in numbers in recent years. Yet another sample of DEFRA incompetence?
PLEASE SIGN AND SHARE THIS PETITION to attempt to change the DEFRA ruling. Write to your M.P and to Andrea Leesom, and help to reverse this harmful and nonsensical mistake.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/183526
 
Of all the things that have happened recently, this gets me worried. Someone ordered someone with more sense to approve this or went over their head - will kill any animal small enough put its head in the device, resets, next, gas powered for six months. Screw it to a tree and forget about it as many an idiot already has.
I can only assume that DEFRA has been cut to half a dozen newbies caught in the headlights.
 
Yes, if you look at the link in the petition which shows a diagram of how it works, the last picture suggests that you don't even need to check the trap,or pick up any bodies - predators will do it for you. It looks as if it promises a clean kill, but I think it would often be like a mousetrap and catch an animal across the nose rather than the neck, and cause great pain and injury.
I've spent a lot of time this week making a 'hedge' out of the year's collection of brushwood prunings from our garden, as an alternative to a bonfire. It incorporates a splendid hedgehog breeding box/ hibernaculum, hidden and insulated under thick layers of woven brushwood. I've been putting out food for hedgehogs in their special box now they've emerged from hibernation, but so far this year, no takers - in an area adjoining open countryside where previously they were common. It makes me so angry, that stupid people could license this trap and contradict their own legislation. At least the petition has now reached more than 100,000, so Govt will have to take some notice and respond.
Please keep sharing it, everybody!
 
It had just passed 10,000 this morning Marigold but runs till September. Hopefully it will pass 1M in a couple of months and start ringing serious alarm bells sooner.
I can see that it would be very 'practical' in a cellar or store where only those that shouldn’t be in there will get killed (I doubt it ever fails in that regard) but this actually comes with a bracket for fixing it out in the wild.
 
Can't see anything, apart from the wording of the petition, that says these A24 traps will kill hedgehogs. Either I am missing something, or someone has made an assumption? Hedgehogs eat snails and the like, so I can't see really them stretching up into that trap to sniff rat bait?
 
Hedgehogs only eat snails and slugs where food is scarce, and if they do, they risk contracting lungworm from the host mollusc. Hedgehogs are omnivorous and prefer beetles, insects and crustaceans as well as quite a lot of vegetarian food such as fruits. Or crunchy hedgehog biscuits, cat or dog food, when humans cooperate! I think they would go for anything rats found attractive. They would certainly be at risk from a trap like this one, being very inquisitive and poking their noses in wherever they can smell food. Obviously it has worked at catching them in NZ, even if the advertising material in the link doesn't risk reducing sale by pointing this out.
 
I've just found this booklet from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, which gives interesting info about assessing and treating hedgehogs suspected of illness or injury.
http://www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk/leaflets/L8-Care-and-Treatment.pdf
 
About 1000 a day then. The petition map is very interesting - it is totally off the radar in London, Manchester. Birmingham a bit better.
 
Over 17,000 today.
Today I installed a second breeding box/hibernaculum in a wild corner of our garden, near to where the hedgehogs are now coming to feed overnight. Yesterday evening I went out at half hour intervals all evening, to try to discover what was happening and when the food was being taken. Some of the chicken and all of the hedgehog biscuits disappeared between 8.15 and 8.45, so I put out more biscuits. Nothing happened by 10.00, but by this morning it was all licked clean. So maybe there is more than one coming to feed, or perhaps the first one had a snack and then came back a few hours later for second helpings.
 
If the budget allows Marigold, a trail camera is a great tool for knowing what is happening out there (and maybe actually seeing the emerging youngsters if you have residents!) I got one of these:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Acorn-Wildlife-Camera-Infrared-Recording/dp/B00873DB3K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490135910&sr=8-1&keywords=ltl+acorn+5210a
and it works really well for seeing what is mooching around the garden at night, who is laying the eggs (or isnt) - or is responsible for eating them! (or is the ringleader of devious goings on - Big brother is watching you Teabag!) etc.
It has a built in viewer but is easier to view the pictures/video it captures on a laptop/desktop with an SD card port. Some TVs have an SD slot these days and that would be a good way to view as well.
The only annoying thing I’ve noticed with these cameras is at dawn/dusk when they flip somewhat erratically between day and night mode. They will even do it in the day if it is heavily overcast (and under the cover of the roof) but it is a only occasionally a bother.

Oh, it says it has audio - it doesn’t, or at least I have never found any audio or settings for it on mine.
 
That one certainly looks good, Rick, thanks for that. I might well get one. We're about to renew the roof on our 28-year-old summer house, which is next to the feeding area, so although the outside of the summerhouse would be a good place to fix the camera, it might be best to wait until the job is done.

Yesterday evening I kept on going down to inspect the feeder, and when I lifted the box off at 8.50 I was delighted to find a large adult hedgehog munching away. Makes it all worth while! Our garden backs on to fields with a good 'hedgehog street' down a large and overgrown hedge, so within range of a good foraging area. There's a hole in our fence behind the new nesting box, at one end of the 100ft dry hedge I've made out of prunings, and a slatted metal gate at the other end of the hedge, where the other nestbox is concealed, so plenty of room for them to come and go, plus little 4" holes cut in the mesh fences either side of the garden to let them in to those gardens. Apparently, one garden isn't nearly enough to sustain a hedgehog, they can range up to a couple of miles in area.
I now have to get on to our Borough Councillor, yet again, in my annual attempt to prevent the quite unnecessary Spring spraying of the field behind our house, which is just grass, council owned, mowed voluntarily by a local resident, and used by all for running and dog walking, and which has no ragwort, but is annually sprayed at vast cost from a shrunken budget nonetheless. Can't bear to think of our hedgehogs getting contaminated by the spray and having their insect food killed off as well.
 
Petition hit 18,000 tonight. Interesting that the constituency on the map with the highest proportion of signatures is Ludlow - which has the headquarters of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society.
 
There has been a gov response posted on the petition page:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/183526?reveal_response=yes

So, basically, the only criteria in the assessment for licensing was that it is humane and its class is 'spring trap.' I'm assuming a lot here but there doesn’t seem to be any distinction between the A24 and a mousetrap - no recognition of the potential for unmonitored, continuous misuse. It should be used in such a way (a tube is suggested) to exclude non-target animals. If the makeshift 'tube' (doesn’t come fitted to the licensed device - you’ve got to improvise that yourself) falls away after a week in the wild then it will run for the next 25 weeks indiscriminately bumping off anything that shows an interest.
Doesn’t matter how you look at it - life just got a lot riskier for small 'non-target' species as a whole! Has anyone ever got prosecuted for killing a hedgehog I wonder?
"No spring trap is approved for use against hedgehogs as under section 11 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 it is an offence, unless under and in accordance with the terms of a licence, to use any trap or snare for the purpose of killing or taking a hedgehog or to set in position any trap or snare in such a way so as to be calculated to cause bodily injury to a hedgehog."
Well that just sounds like "wilful" damage - quite difficult to prove that a thing was "calculated" or was "wilful"

Reminds me of the joke
'...but y'honour, the knife just slipped.'
'20 times?!'

Yep, 20 times - maybe more, who knows.

Sorry folks, no point ranting here - will repeat this to my MP.
Sorry, again, to go on about this but - a main selling point is that the kills are removed by predators. So why would you have the prey crawl up a tube and block it when they die? Anyone who uses this device will be tempted to buy the add on 'hit' counter and wont dilute its success rate by adding a extra puzzle to the trap or mess up its repeat performance. Its designed and marketed to be very effective without any species selection and that is the way it will be used.
 
Hedgehogs can get into narrow tunnels, but because their spines act like barbed fishhooks they can have difficulty getting out again. They have been known to get their heads stuck in polystyrene cups discarded as litter around McDonalds takeaways - they burrow in to the cone to get to the sweet cola drops at the bottom, which smell strongly, and then when they try reverse, their spines erect as they panic and get fixed into the soft plastic.
 
Well, we've had lots of hedgehogs visiting our garden the past few weeks. I've been putting masses of food in their feeding box, which has all vanished and the plate licked clean every night. I can usually tell when somebody will be in the box, tucking in. Plus a big shallow dish of water, in addition to our pond, which a lot of the garden birds have been using, too. However, yesterday morning and today there's been about 20% of the food left on the plate, which I take to be a hopeful sign that more of their natural food has become available after the rain. Not that we've had much here in Whitchurch, Hants - by some geographical freak of shelter it usually seems to miss us, passing around the town, which is very sheltered - a mere 1/2" in the rain gauge over the last 2 days. I met someone yesterday down town who was moaning about the rain, saying 'Why can't 'they' just send it at night?'
Judging by Poppy's excited sniffing through the floor of the summerhouse, I'm hopeful that we might have a female with a nest under there. I don't know if either of the nesting boxes I built into the 'dry hedge' have been used.
 
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