Clause 16 - Powers in relation to animals in distress
Animal Welfare Bill
11:15 am
James Paice (Shadow Minister (Agriculture & Rural Affairs), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I want to pick up the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Leominster touched on tangentially. I had hoped to table an amendment, which would in fact have fitted into the group of probing amendments tabled by my hon. Friend, relating to road traffic accidents, which, unfortunately quite frequently nowadays, involve deer.
My understanding of the Bill and conversations with the Minister lead me to believe that a deer that has been injured and is lying on the verge comes within the ambit of the Bill because there is clearly an issue of how it is cared for and how its condition is resolved. If the Minister tells me that such a case would be outside the ambit of the Bill, that would partly resolve the matter, but my understanding is that at that stage it would be protected by the Bill, just as an animal caught in a trap is protected by the Bill. That can, of course, also apply to dogs or indeed to any animal, even, sadly, to horses on occasion these days.
These accidents can be quite horrendous. An animal can be very seriously wounded. I do not want to be gory, but bones can protrude. That sort of thing is quite clearly beyond veterinary help and recovery. A wild animal such as a deer would almost certainly never recover because of the trauma. I understand the purpose of subsection (4) and the need to destroy the animal humanely and as quickly as possible to put it out of its suffering.
The point on which my hon. Friend touched is very important, because inevitably after a road traffic accident, the animal is lying on the road or, more often, on the verge. It is an offence to use a firearm within, I believe, 30 m—