Rat Burial is Back!
22 March 2007
A determined campaign by the National Gamekeepers' Organisation has been rewarded by Ministerial intervention.
Ben Bradshaw MP, the Minister for the Local Environment, has clarified in writing that a rat found dead as a result of using rodenticide can, in appropriate circumstances, be buried. This overturns a 2005 ruling that all such burying was illegal and that poisoned rats had either to be incinerated or rendered in approved waste management plants.
Ever since the 2005 ruling, the NGO has been lobbying Defra, the Environment Agency and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides, arguing that the new rules were inappropriate and counter-productive. The keepers said the rules could increase secondary poisoning of wildlife because people might just leave dead rats on the surface rather than meet the costly and disproportionate new requirements.
Now Ben Bradshaw has agreed, and in a letter sent to the Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides has set out an official Environemt Agency 'hierarchy' for rodent disposal. This allows burial by a gamekeeper or a farmer disposing of rat bodies resulting from routine rodent control.
"This is a very welcome clarification which will help wildlife as well as gamekeepers," said an NGO spokesman. "We would like to thank the Minister, the Environment Agency and the other organisations and individuals concerned for this encouraging outbreak of common sense."