uk craziest animal laws

All I could picture was a shifty-looking man standing by the sea holding a salmon. “Handling salmon in suspicious circumstances” is an excellent way to get my attention. Once I looked beyond the wording, though, the subject was much more serious than somebody looking awkward with a fish.

My animal-laws video, published in May 2024, started with a conversation in our Discord community about dogs and cats being treated differently. I ended up reading about pets, wildlife and livestock, with several rules I hadn’t heard of after eight years in the UK. The wording sometimes made me laugh. Other parts made the whole thing much darker than I’d intended.

The suspicious fish has a less funny explanation

The salmon wording made sense once I thought about poaching, but the initial picture in my head was very much a man looking fishy while holding a fish. That was the joke for me. It wasn’t that preventing illegal fishing seemed ridiculous.

The actual provision in the Salmon Act concerns receiving or helping retain, remove or dispose of fish when someone believes, or reasonably should suspect, that a relevant offence has been committed in relation to it. It covers several kinds of fish, not only salmon. The suspicion concerns where the fish came from and what happened to it, rather than whether its holder happens to look nervous.

That is quite different from the quick version, “don’t be suspicious while handling salmon”, that I reacted to. I still found the wording funny, but there was a reason behind it. The explanation about poachers took the subject out of my imagined scene beside the ocean.

Worried livestock is a serious subject too

“Worrying livestock” was another phrase that stood out. I thought the choice of word was almost cute, even while talking about dogs harassing animals and causing chaos around sheep or cows. I didn’t think letting a dog do that was acceptable. It was the wording that surprised me.

The legislation’s definition includes chasing livestock in a way that may cause injury or suffering, and dogs being loose in a field or enclosure containing sheep. There are qualifications and exceptions in the Act. The word “worrying” carries much more weight here than an animal having a mildly stressful afternoon.

Cattle on roads gave me a different sort of picture. I read the old Metropolitan Streets Act provision restricting cattle being driven through streets within its area between ten in the morning and seven in the evening without the police commissioner’s permission. This was a metropolitan traffic rule, not a rule for every road in Britain.

I could see the logic for its time: you wouldn’t want a big herd in the street during a busy day. The old wording also refers to a penalty in shillings for each animal. I wasn’t sure what that amounted to in modern money, and imagining the penalty growing with the herd made it stand out. I wasn’t about to calculate a present-day fine from it.

I still wanted the hedgehog

Reading about hedgehogs brought back something much more personal. As a child in Canada, I wanted one as a pet. My mum said no, and I cried. By this video, I still hadn’t seen a wild hedgehog and really wanted to. The subject wasn’t an abstract list of animals to me.

Badgers were another gap. I’d never seen one in real life, and they hadn’t been part of my daily conversations in Canada. Here, people talked about them. I hadn’t even heard the word “sett” before looking into the subject. The discussions of harming animals made the video increasingly grim, which was a long way from laughing at suspicious salmon.

Dogs remained my preference, although I love animals generally. If I visit someone with a pet, I’ll spend the time trying to make it love me. I wanted a fairly large dog, but our property had no garden, so that had to wait until we moved. Those were my actual pet plans at the time.

Watch my full reaction to British rules about pets, wildlife and livestock.