Pet Abduction Bill

Debate between Anna Firth and Edward Leigh

2nd reading
Friday 19th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Anna Firth]

It is unbelievable, isn’t it? Incredibly, two of the cats later reappeared in Leigh-on-Sea.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I support the Bill, especially in memory of my dear friend David Amess. I am a dog owner, but one thing that slightly worries me is that cats are prone to wander, which is why we love them. Kindly old ladies sometimes see a wandering cat, pick them up and take them home, feeling that they are looking after them. Can my hon. Friend assure me that innocent ladies who pick up cats will not be enmeshed in this law?

[Anna Firth]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making an important point. The two offences are slightly different. The offence of dog abduction will be the taking and detaining of a dog, whereas only the taking, and not the detaining, of a cat will be criminalised, because cats roam. The behaviour of the two animals is different. There is also a defence of reasonable excuse. We do not seek to criminalise the good behaviour and good intentions of old ladies and many other people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Firth]

My hon. Friend raises a very important and interesting point, which we could discuss because there are already obligations on the statute book, as he knows. I will come on to deal with some of the points he has raised.

I want to turn next to the purposes of the Bill. The golden thread running through this Bill is that dogs and cats are sentient beings. They are not mere property; animals and humans can and do form emotional bonds and there is a devastating impact when animal abduction takes place, both on people and on pets. That needs to be properly reflected in our criminal law.

Hon. Members will know that the theft of a cat or dog is already a crime under the Theft Act 1968 and the Theft Act (Northern Ireland) 1969, but under those Acts the sentience and intrinsic value of animals is not recognised. So currently, in sentencing, a stolen rescue labrador is treated as no different from a stolen power tool, mobile phone, or computer—indeed, the theft of a labrador is probably treated as lesser since computers and smartphones are often of high value and considerations of financial value run through the Theft Act.

Pets are of course not mere property; we have heard many examples of that already in this debate. This Bill will create two specific offences of cat abduction and dog abduction in England and Northern Ireland. So if a pet is abducted, that will not be treated in the same way as the theft of a watch or a mobile phone or a power tool, all of which can easily be replaced. They might be worth a lot of money and replacing them might be inconvenient, but the item itself is not affected by the crime, whereas a pet is. The Bill recognises that pets are family, not property, and the trauma suffered by both the owner and the pet when the pet is abducted is very significant, and it is the intention of the Bill to allow the courts to consider this impact on both the owner and the welfare of the animal when deciding on the penalty.

The second issue the Bill addresses is that pet theft and abduction do not currently have a unique identifier in crime datasets. That is why it is so difficult to identify the number of pets stolen every year: it is impossible to distinguish in many police records between the theft of an inanimate object and the theft of an animal. Of course, some dogs and cats will be taken as part of a burglary or a robbery, so the fact that an animal has been involved will not be mentioned at all in police records.

In preparing for this Second Reading debate I issued freedom of information requests to all 45 territorial police forces in the UK asking for the number of pets stolen each year since 2019. The responses I received perfectly articulate the problem we face. As of this morning I had received responses from 30 of the police forces, but 12 of those 30 told me that they are unable to provide the information requested as their records do not distinguish theft of pets from general theft of objects. That means that I have only been able to compile for myself information on the covered areas, making up around 29% of the population of the UK. By introducing this unique identifier, we will help the recording of the crime and see the true extent of it.

The offences themselves will cover the taking of a cat or a dog, but also the detaining of a dog. Cats and dogs are the most commonly kept pets in our country. It is now estimated that over a quarter of all adults own one or both of those pets, so dogs and cats seemed the appropriate place to start, but the species are different, and are treated differently in the Bill. The detaining offence, which we have already talked about, does not apply to cats, as they generally have more freedom to roam without their owners. The Bill is not intended to punish incidents where there has been no malice or ill intent in looking after a cat that has voluntarily come to another person’s home. Many of us will have read the children’s book “Six Dinner Sid”, in which Sid the cat has his dinner at six different houses on the same street.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

This is a really important point. I am thinking of my wife’s grandmother, who in our family was known as Granny Meow, because she had 14 cats. None of those cats had arrived in her home—she had gone out and picked them up, because she thought they were strays. She was a completely innocent old lady; there was no question of her stealing anything. I just want to be absolutely sure that Policeman Plod cannot knock on her door and take her to court, or could not have knocked on her door—she is long since dead, of course. I want to be absolutely assured of that, because it is important that people have that reassurance.

[Anna Firth]

I can absolutely assure my right hon. Friend that it is specifically stated in the Bill that it is a defence that a person is picking up stray animals, or is involving themselves with someone else’s animal for good, honourable and noble reasons.