Wildlife crime priority areas

This section provides detailed data on wildlife crime priority areas along with additional information on hunting with dogs and trapping and snaring.

Data in this section are presented up to 2024-25.

The statistics cannot differentiate between changes in the underlying level of occurrence of wildlife crimes, and the level of reporting of these crimes. It should be emphasised that these statistics cover crimes that have been recorded, but the true incidence of wildlife crime will be higher, for example due to crimes that have not been reported or where evidence has not been observed.

Wildlife crime priorities are set at UK level by the Wildlife Crime Tasking and Co-ordinating Group. The group's membership includes the Police, the Partnership for Action against Wildlife Crime (PAW), National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU), and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). Priority groups on poaching and coursing, and freshwater pearl mussel crime, continue to operate in Scotland, as well as the PAW Scotland Raptor Group (formerly the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group).

The wildlife crime priorities (excluding cyber enabled wildlife crime) in 2023-24 and 2024-25 were:

• Badger persecution
• Bat persecution
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
• Freshwater pearl mussels
• Poaching and coursing (including deer poaching, hare coursing, fish poaching)
• Raptor persecution

The priority areas are mutually exclusive in this report, and offences are recorded under the single most relevant priority area or as ‘not aligned to a priority area’. Two additional categories are reported, which may overlap with these priority areas:

• Hunting with dogs (which includes coursing and hunting foxes with dogs)
• Trapping and snaring

Wildlife crime classifications can be quite broad (e.g. “cruelty to wild animals”, “other wildlife offences”) and do not align with the priority areas, above. To allow statistical reporting of offences relating to these priority areas, Police Scotland provide further detailed analysis of recorded crime data (“disaggregated data”).

For various reasons (e.g. timing of data extraction), there can be slight differences between the total numbers of records in this disaggregated data and the aggregated data used in the Recorded Crime section of this report.

It should also be noted that the categories in this section (aligned to wildlife crime priorities) differ from the standard categories in earlier sections of the report. Even for similar categories the numbers may not match if, for example, additional information has been used to allocate crimes from a more general category (e.g. cruelty to wild animals) to one of the specific wildlife crime priorities (e.g. poaching and coursing).

This section of the report excludes offences against Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) which may be classed as ‘other conservation offences’ in the recorded crime section of the report. In addition, the extra detail provided by Police Scotland allows crimes against livestock and domestic animals to be excluded from these figures.

Further detail: in addition to the statistics on priority areas, Annex 2 of the supporting documents includes a 'Health of the Species' appraisal for those priority species that fall within NatureScot’s remit: badger, bats, freshwater pearl mussels, deer, brown hare, Atlantic salmon and key raptor species. NatureScot’s appraisal is intended to give an overview of current population trends, factors affecting the health of the species and the relative impact of wildlife crime on the conservation status and is in response to an Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee request for this contextual information.

Overview of all priority areas

Poaching and coursing is consistently the top wildlife crime priority area in the six-year period 2019-20 to 2024-25.
Figure 15: Police Scotland recorded wildlife offence data from 2019-20 to 2024-25 by priority area classification.

Figure 15 shows the relative levels of recorded crimes for the different wildlife crime priority areas over the last 6 years, and also the number of offences not aligned to a priority area (399 out of 1430 offences; 28%). Poaching and coursing is consistently the most common priority area, forming around half of all offences in this period (734 out of 1430 offences; 51%). This is followed by raptor persecution (117 out of 1430 offences; 8%), then badger persecution (87 out of 1430 offences, 6%). There can occasionally be substantial variation in offences by priority area from year to year. Some notable points include:

• A spike in poaching and coursing offences in 2020-21.
• A spike in CITES offences in 2021-22 in relation to Operational Tantallon – a police operation targeting the illegal taking and trade of wild peregrine falcons.

Focusing on the new data in this report, there were 238 wildlife offences in 2023-24 and 176 offences in 2024-25 recorded by Police Scotland. There was a small spike in CITES offences in 2023-24, with 14 offences recorded. Of these, 11 related to keeping live fish without licence, or introducing them into an inland water course without licence. There were 20 badger persecution offences in 2024-25, the highest in the six-year period 2019-20 to 2024-25. Fourteen of these offences related to digging, damage and obstruction to badger setts.

Further detail: see Tables 37 to 68 of the supporting documents.