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Under its definition of rough shooting, the BASC says:

“Virtually all the quarry species listed can be walked-up (i.e. where the shooters flush out the quarry as they walk through the cover)”.

As Police Scotland will be responsible for enforcing the legislation, would you have a concern about your ability to interpret the following scenario? Five guys are out on a shoot, and each has a dog or a couple of dogs. They are well spaced out as they walk; in fact, they have enough space between them not to form a pack but it still allows them to enjoy the rough shoot. If somebody came to you and said, “These people were walking through a wood; they had a certain number of dogs; and a rabbit or a hare was shot,” would Police Scotland be able to interpret that scenario?

Briefly—Jake Swindells has just touched on this—from the police’s point of view, if you arrived on a shoot and there were eight dogs, but they were all Labradors and spaniels, would you be able to make a judgment?

Would you base your consideration on what you found when you were asked to go out to an event?

To complicate that even more, if six people were out shooting who were 50m or 60m apart and they had two dogs each, would you have the capacity to differentiate them? If so, how would you do that?

I understand that you feel that you might be open to vexatious allegations, but could your shoot still function with two dogs?

So, you would need more than two dogs—

Hold on a wee second. This is really important. If the—

What would you use to interpret that scenario? Would it be the kind of dogs or the environment?

This is purely off the top of my head, but what if you were having to investigate what Ross Ewing has called a “vexatious allegation” and you got there and found, say, Alex Hogg and Ross and you said to them, “Right, gather up your dogs”? If you could clearly see Alex calling two dogs and Ross calling two dogs, and the dogs going back to them, would that be part of your determination?

I have one comment to make—and it is purely a comment—in response to Robbie Marsland and Mike Flynn. Last week, the bill team stated quite categorically that the purpose of the bill is not to curtail hunting. The bill has to be about what the bill is about, but the bill team said that the purpose of the bill is not to stop people legitimately hunting. We need to make it clear that that is outwith the scope of this conversation.