SOME OF Berkshire’s most famous residents are backing a bill to ban the import of hunting trophies as it passes through the report stage.
Sally’s Law, a bill which aims to end British hunters bringing home to bodies of endangered animals which have been hunted for ‘sport,’ is currently scheduled for a third reading and a vote by MPs on Friday, March 17.
Set up in 2018, the bill is the result of a campaign to ban trophy hunting created by Eduardo Goncalves, Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE, and Peter Egan, and is named after a tiger cub safely rescued from South Africa.
Now the bill has seen public support from a number of celebrities, including Reading’s Ricky Gervais and Chris Tarrant.
They join the likes of Dame Joanna Lumley and Dame Judi Dench in showing support for the bill, and figures recently released by Survation showed more than 80% of members of the public surveyed felt MPs should attend the vote and enact the ban.
The Private Members Bill, tabled by Henry Smith, Conservative MP for Crawley, has the support of a number of MPs from across the house, including Reading East MP, Matt Rodda, who was selected to sit on the committee which oversees it during the committee phase.
Reading-born Ricky Gervais said: “British trophy hunters are among the most ruthless of the lot – they joke about having a few beers and shooting monkeys.
“They laugh about shooting cats out of trees, they brag about luring leopards with bait so they can shoot them at point-blank range.
“They celebrate blasting big holes out of zebras, and killing some of the world’s biggest lions, elephants, and rhinos.
He explained: “All trophy hunting needs to stop. It’s just as wrong to kill a reindeer for kicks as it is to kill a rhino.
“We don’t have the right to murder living creatures for entertainment.”
Mr Rodda said of his selection to the committee: “I’m pleased to be involved in a bill to introduce the world’s toughest trophy hunting ban.
“The Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill proposes to ban British trophy hunters from bringing back body parts of threatened species from Africa and other parts of the world.
“Animal populations have plummeted in the last 100 years with trophy hunting partly to blame. Support for the world’s toughest ban comes from scientists, conservation groups and politicians.”
The Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species lists elephants, hippos, leopards, zebra, and lions as among the most popular African animals killed by British hunters.
Around 5,000 of these “trophies” from CITES-listed endangered species are thought to have been brought back to the UK since 1980.
