Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill - use of snares and powers of Scottish SPCA inspectors: consultation analysis

Chapter 2 Responses received, and responses included in analysis

The consultation received a total of 5417 responses. The majority were received via Citizen Space, the Scottish Government’s web-based consultation platform, while 5 were received by email or post.

Responses removed from the analysis database

Multiple responses from a single respondent

It was possible to identify a total of 123 respondents who submitted more than one response to the consultation. Most of these (119 respondents) submitted 2 responses. In addition, 3 respondents submitted 3 responses, and 1 respondent submitted 4 responses.

In these cases, one response was selected at random to be included in the analysis. However, if this random process resulted in the selection of a campaign response, the campaign response was removed and the personalised response was retained.

Multiple responses submitted by organisations were either duplicates, with one response being submitted through Citizen Space and one by email, or the email response contained additional material. In all cases, organisational responses were examined and all of the material in their multiple responses was amalgamated into a single response which was retained for the analysis.

This process resulted in the removal of 128 responses from the analysis database.

Campaign responses

Several organisations encouraged their members and supporters to submit responses to this consultation. Organisations assisted their members and supporters either by providing suggested responses to each question, or by providing a ‘commentary’ on the consultation and / or the consultation questions. Overall, these responses only formed a small proportion of the total responses.

However, in the large majority of such responses, people drew on the material provided by the campaign(s) to draft their own (personalised) responses to the consultation. Therefore, the views expressed in all responses are treated like any other substantive response and are included in the tables shown throughout this report.

Four campaigns have been identified, originating from the British Association of Shooting and Conservation, OneKind, Animal Aid, and the Revive Coalition. Details of those campaigns are included at Annex A.

Number of substantive responses included in the analysis

Thus, 5289 responses are included in the analysis presented in this report. The quantitative analysis, presented in tables throughout the report, is based on these responses.

About the respondents

Substantive responses were received from 5210 individuals and 79 organisations or groups. The 79 organisational respondents to the consultation were categorised as shown in Table 2. A complete list of organisational respondents is provided in Annex B of this report, and their responses will be published separately, where consent to do so has been given.

Response rates for individual questions

Annex C shows the number of responses received at each question. It should be noted that where a question invited comments, the comments made often included general statements that were not directly relevant to the question under consideration.

Most of the closed questions in the consultation were answered by more than 97% of all respondents. The only exception was in relation to Question 3, which concerned licensing the use of snares for research purposes and was addressed to a subset of respondents.