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 wildlife crime priorities (excluding cyber enabled wildlife crime) in 2022-23:

• 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

Two additional categories are reported, which may overlap with these priority areas:

• Hunting with dogs (which includes coursing and hunting foxes with dogs)
• Trapping and snaring

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”).

For various reasons (e.g. timing of data extraction), there can be slight differences between the total numbers of records in this disaggregated data and the aggregated data used in the Recorded Crime section of this report. For 2022-23, the totals match (220), however there may still be slight differences in the specific recorded crimes included in the two sets of data.

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 2 of the supporting documents includes a 'Health of the Species' appraisal for those priority species that fall within NatureScot’s remit: badger, bats, freshwater pearl mussels, deer, brown hare, atlantic salmon 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

The distribution of offences by priority area was similar in 2022-23 compared to the previous year except for a sharp drop in CITES offences.
Figure 14: Police Scotland recorded offence data from 2018-19 to 2022-23 by priority area classification.

Figure 14 shows the relative levels of recorded crimes for the different wildlife priority categories over the last 5 years, and also the number of offences not aligned to a priority area (roughly a third of the total).  There can occasionally be substantial variation in offences by priority area from year to year. Notably, CITES offences dropped back to more normal levels in 2022-23 (3) following a spike in recorded crimes in 2021-22 (46), largely due to Operation Tantallon – a police operation targetting the illegal theft and sale of wild peregrine falcons.

Poaching and coursing was the most common offence type in 2022-23 (108), with fish poaching related to around half of these offences. For the other priority areas, there were 22 offences relating to raptor persecution; 16 offences for badger persecution, 2 offences for bat persecution and 1 offence relating to freshwater pearl mussels.

Further detail: regarding offences by wildlife crime priorities is provided in tables 33 to 50 of the Tables supporting document. A description of Operation Tantallon is also included in the Police Scotland update in the supporting document on Activities, projects and legislation related to wildlife crime policy and enforcement.