Police step up crackdown on hare coursing gangs

Police are warning organised criminal gangs that farms will be heavily patrolled as the annual hare coursing season gathers pace across the countryside.

Lincolnshire Police’s message to would-be poachers is blunt: “Don’t even think about it!”

Its Operation Galileo will use drones, marked and unmarked cars and off-road vehicles, backed by National Wildlife Crime Unit intelligence.

See also: Westward spread of hare coursing alarms CLA

In Hampshire, meanwhile, officers patrolling hotspots around Winchester in recent days saw several vehicles of interest leave on spotting police.

What is illegal hare coursing?

Hare coursing involves using dogs, typically lurchers or sighthounds, to chase, catch and kill hares, usually after trespassing on farmland.

The events are often filmed and shared on social media, with large sums of money sometimes wagered on the outcome.

Detective Constable (DC) Aaron Flint of Lincolnshire’s Rural Crime Action Team called it “barbaric”, adding that the damage and “intimidation of communities, often by members of organised criminal gangs is abhorrent”.

New powers and penalties

Laws introduced in 2022 gave police greater powers to arrest people going equipped for hare coursing. Officers can also seize vehicles, dogs and equipment.

Offenders face “significant court fines, costs, banning orders and the forfeiture of property”, DC Flint warned.

Courts are also issuing Criminal Behaviour Orders. At Burnley Magistrates’ Court last week, John Doran, 32, of Queen Eleanor Road, Northampton, admitted four poaching offences.

He was fined £1,160 and given a five-year order banning him from owning any lurcher or sighthound in England and Wales.

John Doran (left) and Joel Miller were sentenced for hare coursing in West Lancashire and Chorley © Lancashire Police

Joel Miller, 29, of Bryn Crescent, Rhyl, was fined £1,205 for similar offences. He already had a seven-year order, issued in January over hare coursing in Humberside.

PC Sean Dalby, from Lancashire Police’s South Rural Task Force, said: “Farmers and landowners should not have to live with the fear and frustration that this criminality brings.”