Wildlife licence holders

The Wildlife Regulations 2024 create twelve kinds of wildlife licence — basic, advanced, specimen, dingo, controller, dealer, demonstrator, displayer, game bird farmer, processor, farmer and taxidermist. Each kind lets its holder do some things with wildlife (buy it, keep it, sell it, breed it, and so on) but not others, and attaches ongoing paperwork duties.

This ruleset takes the details of a licence — its type, the wildlife it covers, the purpose, the source of the animals — and works out, automatically:

• What the holder may and may not do — every handling activity is marked Permitted or Forbidden.
• What the holder must do — record-keeping and notification duties are marked Obligated, individual form fields become Required, and the rules even check whether a record was filed on time.

Everything below is worked out by the same rules, evaluated top-to-bottom: when two rules touch the same activity, the later one wins. That single idea explains the whole permission system.

You provide a fact that is entered about the licence. Rules work out a conclusion the rules calculate. The ruleset draws on a large shared data model; the entities that actually drive these rules are below.

Before any licence-specific rule runs, an initialisation step sets every wildlife handling activity to Forbidden — buying, selling, acquiring, receiving, disposing, keeping, possessing, breeding, displaying, destroying, importing, exporting, and the rest. Nothing is allowed yet.

The same step switches on a handful of Obligated duties that apply to every holder regardless of licence type — chiefly the duties to notify a change of name, address or telephone number (for the holder, an employee, or an authorised person), to notify employee details, and to notify police of a wildlife theft.

Each licence type has its own rule. It first checks that the chosen licence type matches, then checks a gate — the right Schedule for the species, the right purpose, sometimes the right source — and only then flips its activities to Permitted. The general shape is the same for all twelve:

The matrix shows which activities each licence can unlock. A ✓ means the licence permits that activity once its gate is met; the gate is spelled out in the notes beneath. Some licences (processor, taxidermist) unlock different activities on different branches — the ✓ marks any activity the licence can reach.

The gate for each licence — the extra conditions beyond selecting the type:

• Basic — not commercial and the animal is in Schedule 2 or 7.
• Advanced — not commercial and the animal is in Schedule 2, 3A, 3B or 7.
• Specimen — not commercial, the animal is not alive, and it is a prepared or mounted specimen.
• Dingo — non-commercial, or for a canine-association show, or educational, or the animal is a dingo. (A deliberately broad “any of these” gate.)
• Controller — the animal is taken from the wild, is not being sold, is damaging or a danger to property, and is in Schedule 6. Unlocks only destroy and dispose.
• Dealer — commercial and the animal is in Schedule 2, 3A, 4B or 7. A second branch also permits dispose for dead animals in those Schedules.
• Demonstrator — either “promote understanding of ecology and promote conservation”, or “display in commercial films”, and the animal is in Schedule 2, 3A, 3B, 4A or 4B (any one). (An earlier version joined those Schedules with “and”, so no animal could satisfy the gate; it now uses “or” and unlocks correctly.)
• Displayer — for commercial films, or to promote conservation, or educational. (Opening and closing displays are unlocked separately in §5.)
• Game bird farmer — the animal is a bird, bred in captivity, and the purpose is hunting. A second branch permits possess and display of prepared/mounted dead birds.
• Processor — “to provide products for sale”, with the source either approved by the Secretary (Schedule 5A) or from a licensed farmer (Schedule 7), the animal not alive; a further branch permits sell / dispose / keep / possess / process for stock the holder itself bought, acquired or received.
• Farmer — “for farming wildlife” and the animal is in Schedule 7 (unlocks the widest set, including process and destroy); a second branch permits disposing of infertile eggs.
• Taxidermist — to preserve / prepare / mount / restore dead wildlife, with the animal in the right Schedule or from an approved source; different branches unlock buy/acquire/receive, then sell/keep/possess/process/display. One branch deliberately switches sell back to Forbidden.

Three licences also unlock a special “request approval to acquire wildlife from a specified source” permission (processor, taxidermist, and the farmer's egg branch).

Holding a licence isn't only about what you may do — it's about proving you did it properly. Four rule groups turn activities into record-keeping duties and then check the timing.

Transaction log (reg 27)

If the holder buys, acquires, disposes of or receives wildlife, they are Obligated to record transaction details in the log book. For each transaction, the species, quantity and transaction type become Required; a free-text description is required when the type is “other”. The rules then compute whether the entry was recorded on time:

• Most licences — the transaction must be recorded by close of business on the day of the transaction.
• Game bird farmer — a longer window of 48 hours after the transaction applies.

Theft, loss or damage (reg 33)

When a holder becomes aware of a wildlife loss, recording it is Required. For each loss, type, species and quantity are required; if the animal is a dog (Canis familiaris) each microchip number is required too. A theft triggers extra duties, and the loss must be recorded within two days:

Displays & demonstrations (reg 34–35)

A displayer licence unlocks opening a wildlife display; once a display is open the holder may close it. Each opening and closing must be recorded, and recorded within two days of the event. A demonstrator licence unlocks conducting a demonstration and obliges recording each one's date and venue.

Change of name, address or telephone (reg 36)

When the holder flags a change — to a name, address or telephone number, for the holder, an employee or an authorised person — the rules record who the change is for and which detail changed, then make the relevant new detail Required. The change must be reported within 10 business days (modelled as 12 calendar days); the rules compute the elapsed time and mark the “report within 10 business days” duty Obligated.

Employees of commercial holders (reg 37)

If the purpose is commercial and the holder employs a person with delegated authority, notifying the employee's details is Obligated. For each employee, name, date of birth, telephone, full address, capacity and start date are Required. The rules check the start date was reported within the 10-business-day window; while the employee has no end date, terminating them is Permitted; once an end date is entered, that too must be reported in time.

With 124 rules, twelve licence types and a web of record-keeping and timeliness logic, the absence of any test scenario is the most significant gap in the encoding: nothing pins the behaviour down, so a future edit could silently change which activities a licence permits and no check would notice. A useful first suite would assert, at minimum:

• One “happy path” per licence type — the right type + a qualifying Schedule/purpose/source, asserting that the intended activities come out Permitted and the others stay Forbidden.
• Negative gates — the same licence with the wrong Schedule, or commercial-vs-non-commercial flipped, asserting the activities stay Forbidden. This is the kind of test that would have caught the demonstrator gate while it was still mis-written (see the fixed-issues note in the Observations).
• Timeliness both ways — a transaction / loss / change recorded inside the window (expect on-time = yes) and one outside it (expect no), including the game bird farmer's 48-hour variant and the 12-day change window.
• Obligation triggers — a theft (expect police-notification obligated), a dog loss (expect microchip numbers required), a commercial holder with an employee (expect employee details required).
• The “switch back” case — the taxidermist branch that re-forbids selling, to lock in that last-rule-wins behaviour.

Points a reviewer or the rule author may want to check; these describe the encoding as published and are not legal advice. Encouragingly, three issues noted against an earlier version have since been fixed: the demonstrator gate now joins its Schedules with “or” (so it can open), the demonstrator and taxidermist blocks now carry their section headings, and a change of address now asks for the new address rather than a new name. What remains is below.