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‘It’s not yet perfect, but the work of wildlife crime police officers is beginning to make a difference.’
Priority species
The WLEWG is made up of the police – including the National Wildlife Crime Unit – and a number of relevant organisations. Every year the group looks again at the conservation priorities for policing. The current ones are crimes against bats, freshwater pearl mussels and rarer birds of prey (golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, hen harrier, goshawk, red kite), as well as the illegal international trade in certain species.
So, in a practical sense, how does all this actually help prevent wildlife crime and enforce the law? If we look at prevention first, then awareness raising is critically important. We have to give advice to people to make sure they remain within the law. It’s also important that others who may see an offence taking place can recognise it as being illegal and know how to report it. Much of this is put across in presentations by wildlife crime police officers, with around 150 talks and roadshows every
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year throughout Scotland. There are also a number of targeted training courses. Recent examples include an awareness training day, organised by the police and hosted by SNH, and a similar training day in Strathclyde for countryside rangers. In addition, SNH and the Scottish Government have produced a number of leaflets, including a detailed leaflet on freshwater pearl mussels and crimes linked with them. Scotland has probably half of the world’s population of freshwater pearl mussels. As examples of the risk to these stocks, in 2008 hundreds of opened shells were found on the bank of an Angus river. This meant that a third of the population of that stretch of water had been killed, and in Glencoe in the same year an identical situation was reported. Thankfully, some of the crime prevention effort is paying off: 2009 saw fewer offences committed against mussels and also bats.
The Nature of Scotland
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