This October, a group of “professional” Trophy Hunters on a package hunting tour spent a month stalking wildlife on the Scottish island Islay. Photos of the tourists smiling and posing with the corpses of beautiful Wild Goats, Black Tams and Stags were then advertised on Twitter, sparking outrage up and down the country. Killing animals for trophies is brutal, inhumane, and flagrantly unnecessary. It should be banned in Scotland immediately.

These people boasted of hunting a wild goat for two days and shooting it dead from 200 yards. Slaughtering defenceless wild animals with high tech weapons for the sake of a few likes on social media is entirely at odds with the values of Scottish people. It disturbs an ecosystem, and enforces human dominance on species that have coexisted symbiotically with locals for centuries.

Scotland is internationally renowned for its untouched nature and progressive social climate - it is not an amusement park for out of touch, trophy-hunting tourists. Reading glorifying descriptions of this “fun hunt” I, like many others, was outraged. Whenever I’ve seen trophy hunting happening in other parts of the world I have always felt powerless to act.  Seeing this happening in my own country,  I recognised the opportunity at last to democratically put an end to some of this gruesome “sport”.

These hunters have since been attacked online by many others who felt the same sense of outrage, but this issue is not about one specific event or person. I want to gather this collective outrage and direct it towards making a tangible, legal difference.

For me, and many others, this incident highlighted an ugly flaw in our own laws. The most honourable response is to formally act, so that any of these people who don’t care about our wildlife never even get the chance to threaten them. Unless we ban trophy hunting immediately, more trophy hunters will keep coming and killing our beautiful wildlife for fun.

Nicola Sturgeon has already said that she is reviewing the current situation around trophy hunting and considering whether changes to the law are required. While this matter has momentum, we need to gather as many signatures as possible to show how urgent and important it must be in Parliament.

Please sign my petition to tell the Scottish government to ban trophy hunting immediately.