Schedule 3 - Hunting with dogs: prohibition
Hunting Bill
12:30 pm
Mr Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire, Labour)
There has been much passionate advocacy about the argument, and I want to make what I am afraid are dry points about the wording and meaning of the amendment. The hon. Member for Gainsborough—who is always interesting—glossed the amendment. I am sorry that he is not in Committee at the moment, and I hope that I will not misquote him. He said that the amendment would make the clause read, ``so as to cause unnecessary suffering to the wild mammal compared with other methods.'' The last words are not in the amendment. The amendment says,
``to cause unnecessary suffering to the wild mammal''—
full stop. It does not mention shooting, trapping or any other method; these have formed the bulk of this morning's debate. The debate about which method is the cruelest is valid, and will no doubt come up during consideration of other groups of amendments.
Earlier, I asked the hon. Member for Aylesbury to define necessary suffering in the context of hunting. If an amendment makes an exception to an activity by stating that a person cannot do it if it is unnecessary, that amendment must identify when it is necessary. For example, in the pharmaceutical world, which has been in the news recently, the suffering of animals may be accepted—perhaps reluctantly—because it is necessary to produce a medicine or treatment. However, within the context of banning hunting with dogs of deer, hare, fox and mink, it is obvious that that suffering is not necessary.
I admit that we can get into tangles because the Bill pays some attention to pest control. We have wrangled about it already and shall continue to wrangle about the necessity of using dogs for pest control in certain circumstances. That will be discussed when we come to later amendments. We will then consider whether other methods of control are equally efficient. The House has already decided that it wishes to ban hunting with dogs of certain species of mammals. The House could not logically decide to ban hunting with dogs if it believed that it was necessary. How could any legislature ban an activity that it believed to be necessary? The amendment is therefore otiose.
The hon. Member for Aylesbury is left with his argument about suffering. If the amendment had said, ``so as to cause suffering to the wild mammal'', that would at least have made sense and enabled the courts to act, even if the hon. Gentleman would not have liked it. We now have a strange situation where we are busily comparing the merits and depths of suffering, and whether an animal suffers more or less through different methods of pursuit.