Last chance to tell Citizens Assembly you want blood sports banned in Ireland!

The Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss will shortly be making its recommendations to Ireland’s government on how best to safeguard the country’s biodiversity.

Campaigners against cruel practices like hare coursing, fox hunting, and the snaring of badgers (the pictures show HOW cruel) can make their voices heard...but time is running out: The closing date for receipt of submissions is midnight on November 11th...that’s Friday.

If wish to see these cruel practices outlawed in Ireland, please ask the Assembly to recommend their abolition.

Send your submission to: submissions@citizensassembly.ie

You can draft your own submission/letter or, if you wish, use the text below:

Dear Sir/Madam,

When you make your final recommendations to the Irish government on protecting Ireland’s biodiversity, please heed the voices of the vast majority of the Irish people and press for a ban on practices such as hare coursing, fox hunting, and the snaring of badgers.

Hare coursing stands condemned on both animal welfare and conservationist grounds. The Irish Hare has been in decline for the past half century due to habitat loss. Despite this, the law currently permits hare coursing.

Thousands of hares are snatched from the countryside each year for use as live bait. Having endured weeks of unnatural captivity, they have dogs set on them. They twist, turn and doge in an effort to avoid death or severe injury, as coursing fans laugh or place bets. Many are mauled or have their bones crushed by the dogs.

Coursing also spreads a deadly disease, the RHD2 virus, which is highly contagious and fatal to hares. It is rampant in the Irish countryside.

A Red C opinion poll recently found that 77% of Irish people favour a ban on hare coursing. Please respond to that overwhelming consensus, rather than to the whims of the heartless pro-coursing minority.

Fox hunting involves an organized attack on a cherished part of our wildlife heritage: The Red Fox. Hunts chase the fox for hours until its lungs give out and exhaustion delivers it to the pack to be eviscerated.

Foxes that seek refuge underground are dug out with the aid of spades and terriers. Poles wrapped with barbed wired are also used to drag the doomed fox to the surface, causing injury to fox and terrier alike. When foxes run to ground in “protected” badger setts, the setts are destroyed in the process of unearthing them

Please think of the persecuted fox when you advise the government on safeguarding biodiversity.

Despite repeated assurances by successive Irish governments that the snaring of badgers as part of the Bovine TB Eradiation scheme would cease, it continues. Thousands of badgers, a supposedly “protected” species under Irish law, are snared and shot under the guise of clamping down on the spread of TB. The culling has made no appreciable difference to the prevalence of the disease, but the unfortunate animals continue to serve as scapegoats for poor farm management, human error and bureaucracy.

We urge the Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss to recommend an end to these abhorrent practices...so that future generations of Irish people will not have to live side by side with acts of calculated cruelty to wildlife. Let these wild creatures live out their short humble lives in peace, free from Man’s inhumanity.

Blood sports are products of the same recklessness that has brought our planet to the brink of Climate Catastrophe.

While we cannot change the world overnight, we can certainly remove these blots from the landscape, and make Ireland a blood sport-free zone.

Thanking you