Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lexden and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, there are four amendments in this group in my name, Amendments 48, 52, 53 and 57. I will come in a moment to say exactly what they would do, but I shall make some preliminary remarks that arise from something my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering said and which has not been sufficiently discussed. This is the famous metaphysical bit that the Minister has been worried about, although I hope to get through this while skirting Descartes—or anybody difficult or foreign, for that matter.

The difficulty we have is that we are asked to assess to what extent, in a meaningful way, we think that animals can feel pain. That requires us to think a little about what pain and feeling are. My noble friend Lady McIntosh brought up insects as an example of this, but it relates to other creatures as well. Pain itself, of course, is not just an interior experience; it is, to some extent, a social concept. Pain is an abnormality, but we learn from others that it is an abnormality that is expressive of something that requires a response. So, we learn as children, “Don’t put your hands on the coal. If you do put your hands on the coal, that is what we call pain; learn not to do it again.” There is a social element to it, and it is not by any means clear that that can be translated to animal experience. This is the problem of operating on a non-behavioural scientific basis.

We humans also have coping strategies for dealing with pain. When I know I am going to have an injection in my arm, I always make sure that I look the other way; that is a very small example of a coping strategy. That illustrates another thing about the human experience of pain, which is that very often it is worse in anticipation than in the experience itself. All of this is tied up with what we understand by pain: for humans, it is not simply a neurological experience that can be tracked by chemicals and electrons, although it has all those aspects to it.

It is very difficult to know how one can map that across the bulk of animals. It is easiest to do so, of course, in the case of mammals, because there we have a closer link with ourselves in terms of DNA composition and so forth. To map it to fish and birds is extremely difficult. Indeed, it is scientifically quite challenging to understand how the very limited neural capacity, or brain capacity, of fish and birds could accommodate that range of complex experiences of pain characteristic of humans and, perhaps, of primates and other higher mammals.

There is also a similar question about what it is to feel something. In ordinary English, “feel” has two aspects: I can feel a table—that is a physical sensation—but I can also feel love, disdain and other emotions. Nobody doubts at all that the vertebrates we are discussing can feel in the former sense but, simply as a matter of their neural and brain capacity, the notion that they even have the ability to feel love, affection, fear and complex emotions such as those is a very challenging one.

We really need to understand that sort of background before we do what the Bill does, which is to cast an extremely wide net. It includes all vertebrates, but it goes beyond that: it gives the Secretary of State the power, which I think is completely unprecedented, to decide that any invertebrate, including the insects referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, are in fact sentient. That is the power given to him which, as I say, is almost incredible.

I turn to the detail of what my amendments seek to do. They would cut the thing in different ways. First, Amendment 48 suggests we “leave out ‘vertebrate’” and limit the scope of the Bill to mammals. This would make it much easier for the public, and for many members of this Committee and your Lordships’ House, to accept the Bill. It could be regarded as a first stage; there would be nothing to prevent the Government coming back subsequently and saying, “Having won over opinion on the question of mammals, we could now extend it to the broader class of vertebrates.” Amendment 52 explicitly invites the removal of fish—it is playing the same tune—and Amendment 53 proposes the removal of birds. These are all different ways of coming at the same thing.

Amendment 57 is slightly different, because I still cannot get over my outrage that Parliament is proposing to give the Secretary of State the power to designate any invertebrate as sentient. Here, simply for the sake of modesty and respectability, this amendment would limit that power to “cephalopods and decapod crustaceans”, simply because one knows from conversation and debate that that is the category of animals most likely to come within scope of this unprecedented power. It should none the less, in my view, be limited.

That is the purpose of these amendments and it is important that we explore them, because I do not accept that it is easy to map notions of feeling and pain on to these classes. Perhaps I may briefly refer to—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, there is a Division in the Chamber. The Committee stands adjourned for five minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, we shall resume. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, may complete his speech and move his amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I had just finished commenting on my own amendments when we were interrupted, so it was a convenient break, but before I conclude I shall comment on a few other amendments in this group.

Amendment 50, in the name of my noble friend Lord Robathan, would exclude the actions of wild animals upon other animals from the scope of the committee’s activities, and I think that must be sensible.

Amendment 56, from my noble friend Lord Trenchard, to leave out the power to designate invertebrates is in keeping with my amendment, and I support it.

My noble friend Lord Mancroft’s Amendment 59, which would require a scientific report that a being is sentient before it is redesignated as such by the Secretary of State under this very broad power, is an absolute minimum requirement and one that is very much in keeping with my comments on the previous group.

Finally, Amendment 49, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, concerns cephalopods and decapods. As the same words are used in a different order it might easily be confused with my amendment, but on careful examination it has a very different effect. My proposal at least puts some decency on this unprecedented power so that it is confined to the most likely class of animals. I understand—and I am sure I can be corrected—that Amendment 49 effectively takes the decision for the Secretary of State and includes cephalopod and decapod crustaceans as sentient beings on the face of the Bill. That is quite different from what I am proposing, if I have understood the amendment correctly, and I do not think that without proper and rigorous scientific reports, as indicated by my noble friend Lord Mancroft, this august Committee is quite the place in which to make such a radical transformation in our understanding of the natural world. I beg to move.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lexden and Lord Moylan

2nd reading
Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, asks what the purpose of the Bill is. We all know what the purpose of the Bill is: it is to advance the agenda of people who believe in the existence of animal rights and to embed them at the heart of government, bossing everybody about. It is a bad Bill, not simply for that reason, but more importantly, as I will explore in a moment, because it changes the moral basis on which we have habitually treated animals well in this country. I will come back to that in a moment, because I am going to leave to others—some who have already spoken—comments on the practical difficulties of putting this Bill into effect and the problems it is likely to give rise to. I always thought that it was the responsibility of this Parliament to hold Ministers to account, but we are now to have a committee roaming around Whitehall doing the job for us, it seems.

The clause that strikes me as most extravagant, however, is the one that gives the Secretary of State the unfettered power to declare, should he wish, that an earthworm is a sentient being. This is a power greater than that given by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, which, as I recall, was restricted to the power to naming animals. Here, we are giving the Secretary of State the power to reclassify them almost without check.

I come back to my point about the moral basis on which we treat animals well. I have always loved this quotation from Lord Keynes:

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”


Of course, I do not mean to refer in any sense to my noble friend on the Front Bench in that regard, but the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, put his finger on who the academic scribbler is. I well remember, in my first year as an undergraduate, walking past Blackwell’s and seeing prominently displayed in the front window a copy of Professor Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. He had, in 1975, as a young man, undergone a sort of convulsive conversion to vegetarianism, and this was his attempt to work out some rationale for what he was doing.

There were three points, essentially. First, people are not better or superior to animals. Secondly, what we have in common is that we sit on a spectrum of sentience. This puts us on the same level as the animals. The third point, as indicated by my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs, was a sort of crude utilitarianism which makes no distinction between humans and animals. Now, 45 years on, this book has spread throughout the world and become a text for all those who wish to promote the rights of animals. The logical consequence is that we are driven in the direction of veganism and the consumption solely of non-sentient plants.

I could not have asked for a more convenient introduction, in that sense, to what I was about to say, than the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, who, with consummate commercial skill, pointed us entirely in the direction of that veganism—and not only veganism but behaviour which respects and prevents harm to any sentient creature. That goes well beyond what we eat, as other noble Lords have said.

That is all okay: if Members of the House of Lords want to drive the country, without asking, in the direction of veganism, which we are told is hugely popular, although I do not know where the evidence for that comes from, on such a basis, and on the basis of some movie I have not yet seen about an improbable friendship between a scientist and an octopus—I am sure it is a tearjerker—that is absolutely fine. The House of Lords is free to do that, but what worries me is that we have cited here in the House a whole swathe of humanitarian legislation going back 200 years protecting animals. Contrary to what Singer and those people would say about the abolition of the distinction between humans and animals, all that legislation has been based on our moral obligations as human beings, rational and endowed with conscience. It is why it is called humanitarian legislation. It is not based on some assumed rights of animals.

All that—not the legislation but the moral basis for the legislation—is now to be swept away by a Government embedding at the heart of our legislation the notion of sentience as the driver of how we should treat animals. The whole moral basis is being changed and replaced by this calculus of sentience. This is a very bad step. It reduces our obligations as people to something that will be the subject of endless judicial review and footling arguments about rules and laws, whether ganglions are the same as brains, and whatever else might come up in the course of these discussions.

I am really very concerned about the Bill. It does nothing at all good for animals, but it does a great disservice to the moral foundation of our society.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh.