Wildlife crime priority areas

This section provides detailed data on wildlife crime Priority Areas along with additional information on Hunting with Dogs and Trapping and Snaring.

Wildlife crime priorities are set at UK level by the Wildlife Crime Tasking and Co-ordinating Group. The group's membership includes the Police, the Partnership for Action against Wildlife Crime (PAW), National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU), and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). Priority groups on poaching and coursing, and freshwater pearl mussel crime, continue to operate in Scotland, as well as the PAW Scotland Raptor Group (formerly the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group).

The priorities remained unchanged in 2021-22:

• Badger persecution;
• Bat persecution;
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES);
• Freshwater pearl mussels;
• Poaching (including deer poaching, hare coursing, fish poaching);
• Raptor persecution.

Wildlife crime classifications can be quite broad (e.g. “cruelty to wild animals”, “other wildlife offences”) and do not align with the priority areas, above. To allow statistical reporting of offences relating to these priority areas, Police Scotland provide further detailed analysis of recorded crime data (“disaggregated data”). There is a slight difference between the total numbers of records in this disaggregated data (295) and the aggregated data used in the Recorded Crime section of this report (286). In addition to slight differences due to the data being extracted at different times, the disaggregated data contains 11 records where the classification of the crime was not one of the wildlife crime classifications used in the Recorded Crime figures, but Police Scotland had identified a wildlife crime element from additional detailed information about the crime.

It should also be noted that the categories in this section (aligned to wildlife crime priorities) differ from the standard categories in Figure 1. Even for similar categories the numbers may not match if, for example, additional information has been used to allocate crimes from a more general category (e.g. cruelty to wild animals) to one of the specific wildlife crime priorities (e.g. poaching and coursing).

Further detail: in addition to the statistics on priority areas, Annex 4 of the supporting documents includes a 'Health of Species' appraisal for those priority species that fall within NatureScot’s remit: badger, bats, freshwater pearl mussels, deer, brown hare and key raptor species. NatureScot’s appraisal is intended to give an overview of current population trends, factors affecting the health of the species and the relative impact of wildlife crime on the conservation status and is in response to an Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee request for this contextual information.

Overview of all priority areas

Figure 14: Poaching and coursing (typically the most common offence) dropped sharply in 2021-22 and there was a spike in CITES offences.

Police Scotland offence data from 2017-18 to 2021-22

Figure 14 shows the relative levels of recorded crimes for different wildlife priority categories, and trends over the last 5 years.  After a sharp increase to 212 offences in 2020-21 in poaching and coursing, the level dropped down a more typical level (101) in 2021-22. Offences not related to a priority area had the highest number of offences in 2021-22 (109) and these were spread over a number of crime types, with around half relating to birds (excluding raptors) including gulls and pigeons.