Microchipping of Cats and Dogs (England) Regulations 2023

Debate between Baroness Doocey and Earl of Caithness

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this long-overdue statutory instrument. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Benyon for introducing it. I have one specific question for him, to which I really do not know the answer. Why has he chosen 20 weeks for a cat under Regulation 3(2)(a)? A cat must be older than 20 weeks, whereas a dog must be older than eight weeks. Why is there a difference?

We do not often talk about cats—it is a long time since we have had a debate on them. I am a great admirer of those lovely animals, because there is no better animal for putting a human being back in their place than a cat. However, as I have spoken about before, I am concerned by the damage they can do to wildlife in gardens, particularly birds. That problem has been exacerbated by avian flu and by humans in the way we feed birds. Research has shown that a lot of small garden birds are catching disease because, through our very best intentions, we put out a feeder and fill it up weekly but do not clean the feeder, which is what is spreading the disease to birds. Therefore, birds will be weaker and easier for cats to catch. A responsible owner will of course put a bell on their cat; excellent research has been done on this by SongBird Survival and the University of Exeter. Can my noble friend comment on whether the department is taking any more action on this or encouraging us humans to behave better? It is quite easy with domesticated cats; feral cats are a different problem. Is my noble friend taking a different attitude towards them?

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I too very much welcome this instrument, which is long overdue. I was quite shocked when I looked up the figures for how pet theft has rocketed: in my part of the world, south-west London, Metropolitan Police figures show that between 2016 and 2021 dog theft went up by 81% while cat theft went up by 325%, which I found extraordinary. Someone must be making quite a lot of money out of this.

I welcome most of the recommendations, which are very good, but I am concerned that the Government’s review of dog microchipping found quite a few areas that needed to be addressed, which I wonder if the Minister will respond to. One is the fact that the database system is so complicated, particularly for vets. When they have a life-or-death situation where an injured animal is brought in, sometimes it is very difficult for them to contact the owner and they have to go to multiple places to find this out.

Owners also need to be made much more aware that it is not a question of just microchipping their cat or dog; they then have to update the information. The number of owners who think that, once they have microchipped the animal, they do not need to do anything else is amazing. There are huge numbers of cats and dogs and other animals that have been microchipped whose owners’ information is about 10 years out of date, because they have moved house or changed their telephone number, and there is no way of getting hold of them.

In the USA, they have an annual Check the Chip Day, which sounds like a good idea. An even better idea, in Australia, is that you have your cat or dog chipped and then get an email reminder. It is very simple for one of the microchip companies just to email everyone on their database once a year just to remind them to update their details; I would have thought that that would be a good idea.