WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. EXCLUSIVE: The Mirror has seen drone footage from a deer hunt in Somerset earlier this year, which was being monitored by animal rights group the League Against Cruel Sports
Campaigners have renewed calls for a crackdown on hunting after drone footage showed children – including a baby – being encouraged to look at a stag’s bloody corpse.
The clip shows a group examining the body of a young stag in the back of a vehicle after a hunt in Somerset earlier this year. The League Against Cruel Sports and North Dorset Hunt Saboteurs monitored the hunt.
The League is now calling on Andy Burnham to strengthen laws on hunting – League chief executive Emma Slawinski explained: “It’s shocking to see adults trying to normalise this cruel and sickening activity with kids, showing them the victims of a hunt.
“This harrowing footage shows why we are calling on the Prime Minister to strengthen hunting laws to prevent this barbaric blood sport from still taking place. We are calling for the removal of the exemptions in the Hunting Act.
“[They] are being exploited by the deer hunts to chase stags and hinds for many miles before shooting them.
“The ‘research and observation’ and ‘rescue of a wild mammal’ exemptions are enabling deer hunts in Somerset and Devon to kill wildlife and get away with barbaric behaviour.”
There is no suggestion the hunters in the video acted illegally. Deer hunting is legal within seasonal rules, i.e mature stags may be hunted from early August to October’s end, young stags in March and April and hinds November to early March.
A Countryside Alliance spokesman said: “The Devon and Somerset staghounds are integral to the management of the deer on Exmoor. Hundreds of thousands of deer are culled in the UK every year and go into the food chain to provide healthy wild meat.”
Defra said: “Causing unnecessary suffering to an animal is an offence, and we are committed to upholding the UK’s high standards of animal welfare.”
But it added that sustainable shooting had an important role in rural communities, and that it would work with them to preserve the countryside, wildlife and rural ways of life.
Earlier this year, the government ran a consultation on banning trail hunting, amid fears it was used as a cover to genuinely chase and kill foxes. Defra is still analysing the responses.