Banning Hare Shooting for Part of the Year Is Progress, Not Justice.

England is finally moving to ban the shooting of hares for most of the year. After decades of avoidance, the government has conceded a basic truth: killing animals during their breeding season is indefensible. That matters. It will spare pregnant hares from being shot and left to bleed out in fields, and it will prevent countless leverets from starving to death after their mothers are killed for sport.

This is a step forward. It is also a very small one.

The case for a close season was never complex. Hares breed from February to October. Shooting during that period guarantees orphaned young and population decline. Most European countries recognised this decades ago. Scotland acted years ago. England did not. Instead, it relied on voluntary codes and the fiction that those who shoot animals for recreation would restrain themselves. That fiction has now collapsed under the weight of evidence.

Brown hare populations in England and Wales have fallen by around 80 percent over the past century. Estimates suggest that 200,000 to 300,000 hares are still shot each year, overwhelmingly for non-essential reasons. A 2017 academic study made the consequences explicit: shooting in late winter causes population shrinkage and mass orphaning, while a close season allows recovery. None of this information is new. It was simply inconvenient.

So yes, banning shooting for most of the year is good. It should have happened long ago. But stopping there exposes a deeper failure in how harm is still justified.

The problem is not only when hares are shot. It is why shooting them is still defended at all.

Farmers and landowners routinely claim that hares must be shot to protect crops. This argument fails on three levels: evidence, effectiveness, and proportionality.

First, the evidence. There is no credible data showing that hares pose a serious, widespread threat to crop yields in England. Hare densities today are a fraction of historic levels, yet claims of “overpopulation” persist. Where crop damage does occur, it is typically localised, seasonal, and minor relative to losses caused by weather, soil degradation, pests, and farming practices themselves. The narrative of hares as a major agricultural threat is anecdotal, not substantiated.

Second, effectiveness. Shooting hares does not solve the problem it claims to address. Removing animals from an area does not prevent others from moving in, particularly in fragmented landscapes created by intensive farming. It also does nothing to address the underlying drivers of conflict: the elimination of field margins, hedgerows, and alternative forage, which forces wildlife into cropped fields in the first place. In other words, habitat destruction creates the conditions for crop interaction, and killing animals treats the symptom while reinforcing the cause.

Third, proportionality. Even if some crop damage occurs, lethal control is not a justified first response. Non-lethal measures exist and are widely used elsewhere: habitat buffers, altered planting regimes, fencing, and landscape management that reduces conflict altogether. Choosing shooting instead is not about necessity. It is about convenience and cultural habit.

This matters because the same farming systems used to justify shooting hares are the systems that have driven their decline. Agricultural intensification has stripped the countryside of cover, diversity, and resilience. Hares are blamed for encroaching on crops after being pushed out of almost everything else.

Shooting them under the banner of “crop protection” is not land management. It is displacement of responsibility.

A close season does not confront this. It accepts the premise that killing hares is legitimate, provided it is better timed. It says that it is wrong to orphan young animals, but acceptable to kill their parents once the breeding window closes. It reduces injustice to a scheduling problem.

That is the moral ceiling of this reform.

This logic runs through the wider animal welfare framework. Harm is not challenged. It is managed. Killing is not questioned. It is regulated. Progress arrives only where it does not threaten entrenched interests, and only after decades of pressure.

A close season will save lives. It will reduce suffering. Those outcomes matter. But they should not be mistaken for resolution.

If the government accepts that killing hares during breeding season is wrong because of the predictable harm it causes, it has already conceded the central point. Shooting hares is not a neutral act. It is not necessary. It is a choice, defended by claims that collapse under scrutiny.

The logical next step is clear. End the shooting of hares altogether.

Anything less repeats a familiar pattern: celebrate limited reform, declare the issue addressed, and leave the underlying injustice intact. England can do better than that. Hares deserve more than a partial reprieve. They deserve to be left alone.