Animal Welfare (Responsibility for Dog Attacks) Bill

Caroline Johnson Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

It is a huge privilege, having already had the pleasure of guiding my Pet Abduction Bill through the Commons this Session, to have the opportunity to debate my other private Member’s Bill, which I first introduced in the previous Session. This Bill, as the Minister knows, would amend the Animal Welfare Act 2006 to require a person in charge of a dog to take all reasonable steps to ensure that that dog does not fatally injure another dog, and would impose criminal liability if they fail to take reasonable steps and their dog fatally injures another dog. That is to plug a gap in the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 that was painfully brought to my attention, which I will come on to. Before I go any further though, I thank the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, so ably led by Lorraine and Chris Platt, for all its help in getting the Bill as far as we have today.

We all know that we are a nation of dog lovers. There are now some 12 million dogs in the UK; that is more than the populations of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire combined, and then doubled. That works out to nearly half of all households in the UK having a dog. And we all know how loved our dogs are; we only have to look at the excitements of the Westminster dog of the year competition to see that. Indeed, as the House well knows, my cavapoochon, Lottie, is a much-loved member of our family. Companionship is the most common reason for having a dog and that was absolutely the case for my constituent Michael.

Michael was one of the first constituents who ever came to see me—in fact, he came to see me even before I became a Member of this House—and he was so distressed and in such anguish that it was a pleasure to take up his cause. Michael had a friend called Emily, who sadly died, and he adopted her beautiful white fluffy bichon frisé bitch, Millie, both to keep him company and to help him to grieve his friend, Emily. However, around two and a half years ago, Millie was savagely attacked by an off-lead, out-of-control dog while Michael was walking her through the rose garden in Chalkwell Park in Leigh-on-Sea.

Michael remembers the attack as if it were yesterday. It was like watching a horror movie. He described how the dog came at Millie like a missile, even though Millie was on the lead, and

“shook her like a rag-doll.”

Poor Michael watched, helpless, as Millie was literally torn apart. After the attack, the best he could do was carry her to the nearest vet’s, all the while bleeding and with serious open wounds to her abdomen. To add insult to injury, the owner of the dog that attacked Millie refused to take any responsibility for the attack, refusing to pay the vet’s bills for euthanasia.

No owner or dog should have to go through what Michael and Millie went through, and Michael is devastated and scarred by that experience even to this day. Obviously, he reported the matter to the police, but he was told there was nothing they could do because the incident was dog on dog and no human had been injured. You will know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that dog-on-dog attacks are becoming more commonplace; I am sure you have seen the extensive reports in the media and we only have to google “dog-on-dog attacks” to see a long list of news reports. Just this month, on 9 May, a couple was featured after their dog was so savagely attacked that they were hit with a staggering £23,000 vet’s bill for its treatment.

The loophole in the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 is unacceptable and that is why I chose to reintroduce the Bill this Session. I am aware that most presentation Bills never make it on to the statute book, so I am pleased to report to the House that, as a result of the Bill and of my lobbying the Government, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs officials have been working with the Crown Prosecution Service to update its prosecution guidance on dog attacks and attacks on other animals. That guidance now makes it explicit that a dog-on-dog attack can be prosecuted under section 3 of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the offence of a dog being dangerously out of control.

That is a good step forward, but the keyword is “can” —a lot of things can be prosecuted, but simply are not. I remain concerned primarily because there is no exhaustive definition of what a dog’s being dangerously out of control actually means. For example, those same sentencing guidelines state that

“it does not follow that if the dog causes injury, the dog was dangerously out of control.”

We could therefore have the ludicrous situation where a dog kills another dog and it is not deemed to be dangerously out of control—if, for example, the owner of a dangerous dog deliberately sets it on a neighbour’s dog. Although the updated guidance is a step forward, it does not deal with the problem I seek to address.

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech and giving some very upsetting and tragic examples of how dogs attack dogs. Does she see similarities between this Bill and the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) (Amendment) Bill, which we discussed earlier, where the dogs have attacked livestock, and does she agree that more must be done to ensure that dog owners behave responsibly?

[Anna Firth]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, which is absolutely right. This is about placing responsibility on the owner, not criminalising the dog itself. That is exactly why I am bringing forward this private Member’s Bill.

When I first introduced the Bill, I was contacted by many dog owners up and down the country, who shared heartbreaking tales about the loss of their treasured dogs. Many of them have contacted me again and are delighted that the Bill is being reintroduced today. Let me deal first with the scale of the problem. The Minister knows that, in order to support Michael, I submitted freedom of information requests to all 43 territorial police forces in the UK, asking whether they record dog-on-dog attacks as a separate offence and, if so, how many they have recorded over the last five years. Shockingly, only 14 police forces currently record a dog-a-dog attack as a separate incident. In 2016, they recorded a total of 1,700 dog-on-dog attacks. Five years on, the number had skyrocketed: in 2021, the same 14 police forces recorded 11,559 dog-on-dog attacks—a 700% increase—with a shocking 2,264 in London alone. The true incidence of dog-on-dog attacks is likely to be even higher, because the fact that a police force does not record dog-on-dog attacks as separate offences does not mean that they are not happening.

On the current legislative framework, laws have been strengthened in recent years to protect the public where a dog presents a risk to public safety—whether in public or in private—but it remains the case that a dog owner is not automatically liable for any form of criminal prosecution when their dog fatally injures another, unless the other dog is a guide, assistance or service dog, the dog bites a human, or

“there are grounds for reasonable apprehension that it will injure any person”.

That sounds good—it is an objective test—but it is not universally applied, and the proof of the pudding is what happened in Michael’s case. He was asked whether he wanted to press for some sort of prosecution, but he said that he had not feared for his own safety. It had been clear that the dog was going for the smaller dog, and Michael did not fear that there was a danger to himself at that point. The law does not adequately cover this type of incident, and pet dogs should have the same protection as guide, assistance and service dogs, because the loss that is felt by a family following the death of their beloved companion is the same, if not more.