Clause 4 - Unnecessary suffering
Animal Welfare Bill
12:00 pm
Norman Baker (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Lewes, Liberal Democrat)
We now come to the clause relating to unnecessary suffering, which the Minister will recognise as a long-standing concept in animal welfare legislation. It features in the seminal Protection of Animals Act 1911, which has served us pretty well for almost a century.
I hope that it is not in dispute that an animal can be caused not only physical but mental suffering. For example, somebody who regularly shouts at their dog might cause the dog distress, but I am not confident that clause 8 would necessarily cover that in terms of the so-called five freedoms. We must identify the possibility of unnecessary suffering that is not of a physical nature.
The 1911 Act expressly included a provision for certain types of mental suffering. That was almost 100 years ago, and it would be prudent, unless the Minister can convince me otherwise, to continue with some reference to that in the Bill. Yet that provision appears to have been deleted. On the face of it, the provisions in the Bill could be regarded as weaker than those in the 1911 Act.
The Minister might argue that by not specifying the meaning of ''unnecessary suffering'' the Bill allows the court to reach a wider conclusion about the meaning, and that to specify types of mental suffering would be to eliminate those that had not been considered. I am arguing his case for him, but that would be the case only if a list of types of mental suffering were to be included in the Bill. However, that objection does not apply if merely the words ''mental suffering'' are to be included, because that would be sufficiently wide to allow the provisions to catch anything that had not been thought of. However, at least it would refer to mental suffering, which would therefore allow the courts to assume that the Bill has not been weakened from its 1911 origins. I am not clear on how many prosecutions are actually brought for non-physical unnecessary suffering under the current legislation; perhaps the Minister can tell us.
We need to ensure that the Bill, which is, by and large, a helpful move forward for animal welfare, does not start with an unnecessary and unwelcome loophole that can be exploited. Including the phrase ''whether physically or mentally'' would help to ensure that there is a belt-and-braces approach to the Bill without necessarily limiting the prosecutions that could be brought under the terms of the Bill.