Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and Chris Loder for bringing this Bill so speedily and efficiently to this House. This is an important, short piece of legislation which we must try to get through. I agree wholeheartedly with everything that has been said, so I will try not to repeat it.

I think we have a very weird attitude to animals in this country. When I was editor of the Daily Express, we ran a piece about a man who had no job, and because he had no job, he could not feed his dog. Within about 24 hours, more than £32,000 was raised to feed the dog but, unfortunately, the man was not offered a job. It seemed to tell us a lot about our rather skewed attitude to animals. In fact, Battersea states that 27 public consultations have found that 70% of people support these proposals, together with tougher prison sentences, so it seems to be very late in the day not to be clamping down on people who treat animals cruelly.

As a couple of Peers have already mentioned, animal cruelty offenders are much more likely to be people offenders. In fact, they are five more likely to have a violent crime record. Currently, an act of fly tipping or theft is actually sentenced with greater severity than being cruel to animals. I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 the other day about theft on country farms. I heard about a sheepdog in Norfolk who had been crucified on a barn wall and left as a message for the owner, whose tractor was also taken. I do not know about other noble Lords, but it seems to me that the act against the sheepdog was a great deal worse than the theft of the tractor, yet, under the law at the moment, this would be reversed.

The current maximum sentence does not in any way fit the violence of the crime. I have talked to people who work and in animal shelters such as Battersea—I have had a Battersea dog who lived to be almost 20 and was one of my greatest companions. They put together animals such as Chester, a one year-old Saluki found by the side of the road with appalling injuries. It took 44 days for him to recover.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, during Covid we have become very fond of our pets, and our pets have been very valuable to us. It is well worth recording that pet owners make 15% fewer visits to their doctor every year: pet ownership therefore saves the NHS an astonishing £2.45 billion a year. We should respect our animals, and children should be taught that teasing animals in any way is quite incompatible with being a decent and upright human being. I welcome the Bill and look forward to its speedy passage.