Published on the 18 February 2015
12:50
A national figure in the field sports industry has been fined £4,000 for allowing a pole trap to be used to protect his partridges and pheasants from birds of prey.
Michael Wood had denied allowing traps “big enough to kill a mink” to be set by employees at his Yorkshire farm to break the legs of predators such as raptors.
Wood, Chairman of the Game Farmers’ Association, believed he was “targeted” by the RSPB who viewed him as “public enemy number one,” his lawyers told Scarborough Magistrates Court.
But Wood, 69, who lives in a Grade Two listed manor house near York, passed two of the traps on his farm near Pickering and must have known they were there, the court ruled.
He was also ordered to pay £750 court costs and a £120 victim surcharge, giving a total legal bill of £4,870, following the undercover surveillance by RSPB investigators.
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