IF ALL the cruelties humans have inflicted on animals over the centuries, the wire snare is one of the worst and most enduring.

Simple in design, devastating in effect, and the tool of poachers through the ages, the snare is now commonly used for another purpose.

Around 260,000 snares are in use at any one time, catching 1.7 million animals each year. However, snares are only used on 5 per cent of landholdings in England and Wales — primarily for use by gamekeepers to protect shooting interests.

The grouse and pheasant-shooting industry is big business, so the snares are used to keep the birds safe from predators (which would sound worthy, if the birds weren’t being protected just so they can be shot).

A poll last year found that 77 per cent of the public think that snares should be illegal, and 68 per cent of MPs support a ban on snares. Yet they are still legal, and that is something that we at the League Against Cruel Sports believe must be changed.

Snares are legal for use on rabbits and foxes, however a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) report has shown that on average, seven out of 10 of the animals caught by snares were neither foxes nor rabbits. Hares and badgers are often caught, while many others caught include pet cats and dogs. Snares are indiscriminate.

Focusing on foxes as the prime target, some will argue — as they do with hunting — that livestock needs to be protected. There are two points here that should be raised.

First, empirical evidence shows that fox predation accounts for only a very small proportion of lamb losses, with 95 per cent of lamb deaths due to farm husbandry. Second, killing foxes is pointless — another fox will fill the space within three to four days.

Back to snares. The so-called “free-running neck snares” that are legal are intended to hold a trapped animal alive until the snare operator returns and kills it. “Free-running” means that the wire tightens as the animal struggles and is meant to relax when it stays still. The reality though is that many animals die in the snares. This will be a slow, painful death from strangulation, evisceration, exposure to the elements, predation, starvation or dehydration.

Defra avoids claims that snares should be banned by saying that their use is controlled by a code of practice. The department’s snare report in 2012 found that 95 per cent of gamekeepers were aware of the code of practice, yet not a single fox snare operator they visited during the production of the report was fully compliant with it.

To check this for ourselves, our investigators took some secret footage to see if snare operators were following the code of practice. Within just a couple of minutes we recorded several violations to the code.

These included setting snares along a fence line where the animal can become tangled, setting snares near to a hole into which they can fall and strangle themselves, setting them in bad weather as they could die of cold or exposure, and not removing a snare from a location at which an animal had been killed by a snare. A snare was also deliberately used to catch a pheasant, which is illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981).

I think this shows that is it simply impossible to enforce regulations for a practice that occurs mainly on private land in remote locations.

This is the argument we have been putting to Defra, most recently just a few months ago when it consulted on the code of practice, but again no major changes were made.

Last week we called on MPs from all parties to ban snares outright. Britain is one of only five countries left in the EU where snares are completely legal, and frankly this is shameful. Snares are indiscriminate, inhumane, and unnecessary. Their time is over.

•  The secret footage can be viewed at http://bit.ly/1Cgr8gT. The video features distressing scenes and therefore viewer discretion is advised.
•  Joe Duckworth is chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports. To find out more about snaring, visit www.league.org.uk.