Watching a bird of prey swoop down to seize bait on a falconer’s glove is a thrill enjoyed at almost 100 zoos and wildlife parks around the country.
However, falconry displays may cease at most of them under proposed welfare rules which place restrictions on “tethering” — the practice of attaching a leash to leather straps on a bird’s legs to stop it flying away.
Falconers fear the rules will subsequently be extended to all birds of prey in captivity, not just in zoos, threatening the future of their 4,000-year-old sport.
They say the new rules will make it impossible to train some species and very difficult to put on flying displays.
A government consultation on zoo standards in England, Wales and Scotland says that “tethering of birds of prey as a routine management practice must be phased out of all zoological collections by 31 December 2027”.
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It adds that after that date, birds must not be tethered for public display and must be kept untethered in aviaries.
The consultation also asks for views on whether there should be a complete ban on tethering, except during veterinary treatment or aviary repairs.
The proposals follow an investigation in 2019 by the charity Freedom for Animals, which found that some zoos were tethering birds for most of the day and night. It saw birds chewing at their leg straps and repeatedly trying to take off, only to be pulled back to the ground by the leash.
The charity is calling for tethering to be banned, saying it prevents birds from performing their natural behaviour.
But Charlie Heap, the director of the National Centre for Birds of Prey in Helmsley, North Yorkshire, denied that tethering was harmful to birds and said it was done “for their own welfare, not for convenience”.
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He said banning or restricting tethering “will result in fewer and fewer birds being flown.”
“It will stop us operating quite possibly completely. It will be a disaster for us and it will be similarly a disaster for other places.
“Displays will become a rarity and they won’t be as good because the number of species available will be massively reduced.
“It will be impossible to train most birds. There’s no way you would ever train a peregrine falcon without being able to get hold of it.”
He said attempting to train a falcon or larger eagles in an aviary without tethering would result in them injuring themselves trying to escape.
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Heap, 52, who has been training birds of prey since he was 13, said some species, such as owls and vultures, could be trained without tethering but this would require hand-rearing them from a few days old, meaning they would relate to humans rather than other birds.
They could not be kept in an aviary with other birds because “they would fight and probably kill each other”. Each hand-reared bird “would have to live its life by itself”.
He likened tethering to placing a lead on a dog: “You do it for its own safety so it doesn’t run across the road. It’s the same with birds of prey.”
Heap said there were probably about 25,000 tethered birds in the UK, 500 of which were in zoos.
“There’s a real feeling among falconers that this is an attack on falconry,” he said. “If it’s being sold as a welfare thing, why should only the welfare of zoo birds be of concern? Surely it should be everything.”
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David Rampling, 58, who runs North Devon Bird of Prey Centre, said he let his birds fly every day and they did not mind being tethered because birds of prey were “incredibly lazy . . . even in the wild they might spend 20 hours of the day sat on a rock not moving at all until hungry [enough] to go off and hunt”.
Karl Jennings, 44, a vet from Telford who keeps birds of prey as a hobby, said there was no scientific evidence that tethering harmed birds.
Dr Andrew Kelly, the director of Freedom for Animals, said: “If [zoos and falconers] need to tether them then we need to question whether they should be kept in captivity at all”.
