Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Baroness Deech Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB) [V]]

My Lords, this Bill is unsatisfactory on at least four grounds: it is unnecessary; it duplicates existing protections; it is retrospective; and it is filled with uncertainty.

There is already in existence the Animal Welfare Committee, which is an expert committee of Defra. Its job is:

“To provide independent, authoritative, impartial and timely advice, to Defra … on the welfare of farmed animals, including farmed animals on agricultural land, at market, in transit and at the place of killing … on any other matters that might be considered necessary to improve standards of animal welfare”.


It also gives advice to Defra

“on the welfare of companion animals and wild animals kept by people”,

and

“independent scientific support and advice … on the protection of animals at the time of killing”.

The Animal Welfare Committee had its remit extended to the welfare of all animals in 2019, without the need for a statute. Quite how this committee and the one proposed in the Bill will work together is unclear. We do not know what the composition of the committee will be, or whether it will be independent as well as containing sufficient expertise. It needs to be free of lobbyists. How will it or the Government consult or interact with the public?

It is not proven that a new law would improve animal welfare, but the risks in it are considerable. It was suggested that withdrawal from Europe necessitated new legislation, but let it not be argued that this country will somehow be lagging behind. Farm animal abuses are widespread in the European Union, with pigtail docking, long-distance transport and slaughterhouse practices all areas of immediate concern. Intensive farms in Europe are particularly problematic, as revealed by the European Court of Auditors, with economic interests often trumping welfare rules. The European animal welfare law in the Lisbon treaty, although it now seems pretty ineffective in protecting animals in Europe, was on paper more balanced than the remit of the committee in the Bill. Article 13 of the treaty says that animal welfare should be balanced against customs relating to

“religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage.”

whereas there is no such balance in the Bill.

The public interest in the use of animals is also absent. We need to use animals in medical research. Animal testing was vital in our successful development of vaccines against Covid-19. Studies in mice, ferrets and primates showed that the vaccines were likely to work, and other animal tests showed that the finished products were safe. Animals were also used in the basic biological research that allowed this approach in the first place. It would be tragic if the animal rights lobby got in the way of this vital progress in research, by putting animal welfare ahead of human life. Yet the committee proposed by the Bill might be so hijacked, or there might be an unwarranted attack on country sports. This is because the committee might choose to report on a policy which, in its view, has had an adverse effect on animal welfare in the past.

Despite the requirement in European law on balance, the European Court of Justice upheld last year a Belgian ban on Jewish and Muslim practices of slaughter without stunning. The argument that stunning is less injurious than non-stunning does not hold water. We should not apply double standards. The Food Standards Agency survey of 2017 estimated that hundreds of millions of animals were killed without effective stunning; gassing, in particular, causes great distress to animals killed that way. The European Food Safety Authority reported that 180 million chickens and other poultry were killed in the most recent count using insufficient electric charge. Time does not permit for the recounting of other horrors—the breaking of rabbits’ necks or the fish starved and suffocated. We even mistreat our pets, breeding them to a lifetime of ill health and depriving them of their natural habitats. If the committee were to do any good, it should concern itself with making sure that slaughter methods are carried out as they should be and that existing welfare standards are enforced.

Fish are not included in the Bill, but there is certainly a case for including crustaceans, which have been shown to react to pain and yet are killed by being broken to pieces alive or boiled alive—a fate too horrific for me ever to want to touch one. My point is that we should not see ourselves as a nation uniquely kind to animals. Nor should we apply double standards—on which note I refer to the fact that kosher killing is carried out with the utmost attention to care and science. I follow my noble and learned friend Lord Etherton in noting that, in the past, the Government have committed not to ban traditional Jewish slaughter methods. Will the Minister now repeat that commitment?