Schedule 3 - Hunting with Dogs: Prohibition
Hunting Bill
3:30 pm
Mr John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon, Conservative)
I should be interested to know whether the hon. Gentleman will propose a schedule to the Bill showing us how we will shepherd game birds and rabbits into abattoirs so that they can be killed in accordance with an EC regulation. That is not the distinction. The distinction, presumably, is to try to restrict the occasions on which that can be done, but it has nothing to do with morality. If the Bill is not about morality, it is about nothing at all. It is simply about the interference in personal freedom by people who do not like what other people do. The Bill must be about morality; otherwise there is no justification for it. These anomalies demonstrate that there is no morality behind the distinctions made in the Bill.
I want to give some other examples. At present, the Government are changing the law to protect Huntingdon Life Sciences from the demonstrations that are going on outside—rightly, because we impose obligations on the pharmaceutical industry to test drugs on animals. What an extraordinary contradiction that is. The Government are introducing a Bill to make something illegal on animal welfare grounds, and at the same time they are reinforcing the law in an area where cruelty to animals clearly is taking place. It may be necessary cruelty, but it is still cruelty.
I said on Second Reading that much had been made of ritual methods of animal slaughter by certain religious groups. I shall not mention them, because I got into a little trouble with one of them for mentioning it in isolation before, but there are several. To many of us, these methods of slaughter seem particularly cruel and unnecessary. Ministers who have had responsibility for such Bills in the past—one Labour and two Conservative, of whom my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) was one—said that they had considered the issue and decided that the sensibilities of those religious minorities outweighed other considerations.
Thousands of animals are slaughtered each year by having their throats cut when they are alive and being allowed to bleed to death, and yet we are doing nothing about that. They are much more sentient animals than the mink and the rabbits, to which the Bill gives a great deal of protection. Where is the morality in this? Where is the principle? Where is the focus on improving animal welfare? I do not believe that they are there.
We have talked about fishing and shooting, and there has been quite a lot of argument as to whether the Bill will lead on to those sports. The RSPCA has come to the conclusion that fishing is cruel and the League Against Cruel Sports has said that shooting is next on its agenda. Labour Members may say that that is not so, but I shall try hard on Report to table a new clause that forces them to vote on it, so that they have to vote against making shooting and fishing illegal; that will be on the record for the future.
It is almost impossible to argue that it is cruel for a hound to kill a fox— which it does extremely quickly—but that it is all right to put a metal hook in a fish, which it may swallow and get down into its gut, and then, when the fish is hauled up on the bank, to knock it on the head with a stone. What has put me off fishing is the process of killing the fish, which is particularly unpleasant. Anybody who has been shooting will know that even the best shot only wounds birds, which then end up fluttering away until they are probably eaten by a fox, which there may or may not be more of after the Bill is passed.