Clause 4 - Unnecessary suffering
Animal Welfare Bill
4:00 pm
Bill Wiggin (Shadow Minister (Agriculture & Fisheries), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Leominster, Conservative)
I have been listening carefully to what the Minister has said on both occasions, and I am grateful for a second chance. I understood that if the animal was abandoned and subsequently injured itself, that would be cruelty however that injury occurs. But if the animal were simply abandoned, that would be a failure under the duty of care. That seems to be rather an unfortunate choice for the courts to prosecute.
With an all-embracing piece of legislation, such as the 1911 Act, there was only one charge—cruelty. Now that there are two charges, we need to know how they will be defined. A person who abandons a cat at the side of a motorway hoping that it will be run over, is clearly much nastier and sicker and determined to cause injury, and should be prosecuted for cruelty, than a person whose cat simply wanders off never to return because he has shut the cat flap and forgotten about it, or one who commits all sorts of other minor, human mistakes that could well be abandonment. The definition is quite critical. I am keen to see how the Minister will separate the two things.