Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, animal sentience is a fact, not a principle, let alone a policy. We have recognised this in law for a very long time. The entirety of animal welfare legislation assumes animal sentience and, rightly, that it is a thing of degree rather than kind. One of the effects of doing research in evolutionary biology is that you come to realise that there are no real differences of kind in the animal kingdom, only differences of degree.

One after another, the fortresses of assumption about what makes human beings special have fallen to the forces of science. Copernicus told us we were not at the centre of the solar system. Darwin told us we were just another animal. Crick told us we use the same genetic code as an amoeba. Ryan Gregory pointed out that an onion cell has six times as much DNA as a human’s. Even as recently as 1999, serious scientists were still saying that human beings would prove to have a bunch of unique genes to build the special human brain. It turns out that we have not only the same number of genes as a mouse but the same genes as a mouse; it is just that we turn them on and off in a different order. Dogs dream, parrots use language, octopuses reason, dolphins have a theory of mind and chimpanzees use tools. You cannot draw a line through the animal kingdom and say that on one side lies consciousness, let alone sentience, and on the other nothing. There is a gradation.

The Government’s 2018 consultation defined an animal as follows:

“an organism endowed with life, sensation and voluntary motion”.

That includes bacteria, incidentally, so it is not a very good definition of an animal. As it includes the word “sensation”, by definition it means that all animals, including parasitic roundworms and jellyfish, are sentient to some degree. In practice, we do draw lines and do not find slopes to be slippery. We swat mosquitoes and poison rats. I presume that, as a result of this Bill, we will not all eventually be ordered by a committee on animal sentience to become orthodox Jains, who sweep the pavement as they walk the street lest they step on an ant.

The sentient animals that concern me in relation to the Bill are the living, sensing, voluntarily moving creatures called bureaucrats. The Bill does little or nothing to change the way we treat animals, but it does create a wonderful feeding opportunity for Homo bureaucratius to do what it is best at: to build a nest and raise a lot of workers.

Over recent centuries, human society has increasingly improved its concern for animal welfare, in parallel with its growing concern for human welfare. We have stopped badger baiting, cockfighting, fox tossing and the popular medieval pastime of nailing a cat to a tree and competing to try and kill it with your head while not getting badly scratched on the face. We did not have a committee telling us to stop these things; we do not need a committee to do that. My late sister, Rose Paterson, did not need a government committee to tell her to improve horse welfare in the Grand National as chairman of Aintree Racecourse; she did it anyway. As my noble friend Lord Hannan said, we will continue to add to the list of things we disapprove of, but we do not need a committee to tell us to do so.

What this committee will inevitably do, because that is what this species of sentient being always does, is try to grow its budget by giving itself enough work to ensure that it can complain that it is underfunded. I predict that the committee will not stick to its task of commenting only on the process by which government has reached a decision. Indeed, in a helpful briefing note the Countryside Alliance says that this process of demanding a bigger budget has effectively already begun. It says:

“Given that the Committee’s remit covers the entirety of government policy, from formulation to implementation, the Committee will need huge resources. It should be looking, not just at wildlife management and farming practices and the Defra brief, but also policy areas such as planning, trade, and even procurement of medicines for the NHS. There is seemingly no limit.”


I predict that it will be a nearly impossible task to prevent this budget-maximising, empire-building, remit-expanding, mission-creeping process—which is in the nature of all committees, in the same way that it is in the nature of all wasps to build nests—and to avoid the committee ruling on whether, say, the building of a housing estate should be stopped to prevent avoidable suffering by a newt. My question to my noble friend the Minister is simple: how does he propose to achieve this nearly impossible task?