Sale of Puppies

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Austin, and a great pleasure to speak in the debate. That might sound like an odd word to use in this context; I do not mean that I take any pleasure in the subject, but we are often called a nation of animal lovers, and anyone who came in and listened to the debate would be in no doubt that that is true. It is an important debate, not least because this issue has created a vast amount of correspondence to my office since I was elected a year ago. That is reflected in the number of constituents from Edinburgh West, 177, who have signed the petition. We can be in no doubt that the public not only care about this subject, but care that we are taking the time to speak about it today, so I thank the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for doing so.

Sales from legally reared and licensed puppies in this country are an enormous market; the latest figures I have show them in the tens of millions of pounds, which is why the demand for puppies opens a gateway to unscrupulous dealers. Last year, sales from illegal sources of puppies are estimated to have topped £13 million. That is an enormous amount of money, but also an enormous amount of misery, and not just for the animals that are the victims in this—the puppies born with horrible deformities, as we have heard.

Imagine for a moment the small child who is told they are going to get their first pet, the puppy they have nagged their parents for incessantly—believe me, I have been there. They go, they fall in love with that puppy and they take it home, only to discover that it might not survive, and if it does survive, it has been so horribly abused that it may never be sociable or properly house-trained and they may never be able to enjoy it. That child has fallen in love with that puppy and will do anything they can to protect it. While we all agree that we must do something to protect the animals, we must also think about the customers, the children and their parents, who often shell out a lot of cash, and the torment and pain they go through over having purchased a puppy that has been abused.

As the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk said, it can be so different. This weekend, my own puppy celebrated his 13th birthday. He is not a highly bred Labrador or one of the new fashionable breeds; he is a Labrador-collie cross. When we bought him we drove all the way to the borders, to just outside Peebles, where a chap with a farm had decided to breed gun dogs from his gun dog bitch. She was probably not the best behaved gun dog bitch in some senses, since she escaped in the night and, before he knew it, she had a litter of puppies crossed with his shepherd’s border collie.

When we went to see those puppies, the care they had been treated with was obvious. The mother was with her puppies and came out to greet us with the puppies. My daughter, who was then—I do not want to do the arithmetic—about eight, got to play with the puppies, interact with them and see how they behaved. I remember as a child being taken by my parents to get our first dog and doing the same thing. Part of what we must do is to ensure that parents know, before they give in to the pressure or indulge their child in the sort of pleasure they had with a pet, what they should be looking for. Education, as some hon. Members have said, will be vital.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

The hon. Lady has spoken passionately about the consumer, but there is one group that she might have missed out: vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, who take those dogs in for companionship and are so badly let down. Does she agree that that is something we must also tackle?

--- Later in debate ---

[Christine Jardine]

Absolutely; that is a good point. We hear all the time that pets are not just a pleasure, but can be therapeutic. Increasingly, they say that teenagers suffering from stress should be around happy dogs, puppies or cats. As the hon. Gentleman says, people who are vulnerable need protection as well.

I do not think any of us would disagree that Lucy’s law must be enacted, and enacted fully. We need better enforcement of existing animal welfare laws. It is intolerable that any animal should be born and live in poor or unsanitary conditions, particularly for profit. We need mandatory licences for dog breeding to ensure that when a breeder is found to be mistreating animals, their licence is removed. I know that some people will say, “What about the hobby, or the person who has a dog and thinks it would be nice to have a puppy?” We have to ensure that is controlled as well, and that that puppy is entitled to the same protection.

We will need legal identification for all sales, to crack down on unlicensed sellers. When people go to buy a pet, it is a huge investment—several hundreds of pounds—and often that price tag reassures people that they are buying a puppy that has been brought up well, but no. We need proper licensing and standards, so that we know they are being enforced. Legislation must be updated to include online sales. Buying a puppy advertised in a newspaper has been established over years, although we must be careful that they, too, are licensed, but online is different. It is difficult if a child sees a puppy online and wants to buy it. We need protection there.

Protection is the key word in all this: protection for the animals that will be victims of the puppy farmers who will use them to have litters, protection for the puppies that will be born in horrible conditions and be maimed all their lives, and protection for the children, the families, the elderly and the vulnerable who will buy those puppies, hoping to give them a happy life, only to find from the beginning that they cannot. All those things must be done.

I leave hon. Members with one thought. The person who sells us the puppy, or sells us on the idea of the puppy, is not always the person we expect. We had a dog who died when she was about six and my daughter was four. My daughter started school and the headmistress said to her, “Ah, Mhairi Macdonald, I see you out with your mum every day walking the dog. I haven’t seen you for a wee while.” Mhairi looked at the headmistress and said, “The dog died,” and quick as a flash the headmistress responded, “Well, don’t worry, mummy and daddy will buy you a new one.” And we did. Sometimes we need protection from all sorts of sources.