Clause 56 - General interpretation
Animal Welfare Bill
1:00 pm
Ben Bradshaw (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Local Environment, Marine and Animal Welfare), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Exeter, Labour)
Clause 9 aims to protect animal welfare by prohibiting commercial and private vending to children under 16. We are not aware of any compelling reason to ban the hiring of animals to children. To the extent that there is a market for that, it is rather limited and already regulated. Riding schools, for example, which hire out ponies or horses to children, are subject to licensing requirements and will continue to be so under the Bill.
We believe that the case for regulating the exchange and barter of animals in transactions involving or taking place among children is also extremely weak. If two children aged 14 swap a hamster and a gerbil, why should they be criminalised? Does it make a difference if an 18-year-old barters his guinea pig for a 14-year-old’s two mice? To the extent that the animals being exchanged are a species that may be legally exchanged, they are transactions in which the Bill should not interfere. In all those cases, the animals are protected by the welfare and cruelty offences.
The hon. Gentleman said that in other pieces of legislation it is necessary to protect a particular species or type of animal. The law already bans, as he said, the bartering and exchange of badgers or live wild birds. The reasons for those bans are the conservation and protection of the animals concerned—the hon. Gentleman mentioned CITES—but we see no need to extend them universally. The definition of “sale” in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Protection of Badgers Act 1992 is not appropriate to the Bill.
In the second set of circumstances to which I have referred, the Bill grants the courts the power to sell animals that have been taken into possession because they are in distress, animals whose owners have been deprived of the right to own them or animals in relation to which a disqualification order has been breached. In all those cases, the courts have a discretion to dispose of the animals in accordance with the provisions in the Bill. It is highly unlikely that a court would seek to hire out the animals, and the possibility of exchanging or bartering such animals simply does not arise. Why would a court engage itself in such transactions? Therefore, we believe that the definition is inappropriate in the context of the Bill and I urge the hon. Gentleman to seek to withdraw the amendment.