I completely agree with my hon. Friend; he read my mind, because I was about to cover that point. We need to ensure that owning those dogs is not normalised in society. Ear cropping may be illegal in
this country, but as it is still legal to import mutilated dogs, the dogs are still coming in. Also, awful people are potentially mutilating in this country; there is evidence to suggest that is going on. That is not done by vets, nor with any form of anaesthesia or analgesia. It is an evil process that mutilates dogs and needs to be stamped out.
Six out of 10 small animal vets have seen ear-cropped dogs in the last year, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reports that there has been an 86% increase in them in the last year. As my hon. Friend said, we should not allow that to be normalised in popular culture, with celebrities advocating for it. Perhaps the celebrities do not realise how horrific the procedure is that their pet had done. People looking at those dogs think that they are acceptable. We have normalised that in society. One of my favourite animated films is the wonderful “Up”, but some of the dogs in it are cropped. “Up” is a few years old now, but when another wonderful animation called “DC League of Super Pets” came out this year, I was disheartened to see from the poster that one of the lead dog characters is cropped. We are normalising this in popular culture. It is a horrific process, and we need to stamp it out. The Bill could stop those dogs coming into this country.
As hon. Members have said, we should not forget about cats. Heavily pregnant cats are being smuggled, and some people outside this country mutilate cats. I am talking about declawing, which is actually just chopping the claws off. That is illegal in this country, but it is still legal to import cats that have been horrifically declawed.
We have heard today about the importance of checking animals for diseases as they cross borders. There have been increased reports of canine brucellosis in this country. That is a zoonotic disease—one that can be transmitted from animals to people. There is a case of a human who has caught that from an imported dog. We have to make sure that we do pre-import checks and screen animals that cross borders. There are other diseases as well, such as babesiosis, echinococcus and leishmaniasis. There are simple things we can do, such as reinstate mandatory tick and tapeworm treatments for companion animals coming into the country. We have to be cognisant of the biosecurity of animals in the UK, and cognisant of public health, because, as I say, some of these diseases can be transmitted from animals to people. The Bill will protect travelling animals, UK animals and people. It will protect animals large and small.
In promoting animal welfare, we need to ensure that animals are healthy. The Minister knows my stance on this, because I keep pressing him hard on it. We are in the midst of an avian influenza outbreak. The Animal and Plant Health Agency is coping admirably in this dreadful situation, but we need to ensure that APHA is adequately funded and staffed. Heaven forbid that something else comes into the country, such as foot and mouth disease, African swine fever or African horse sickness; APHA would be really stressed, so we need to ensure that the Treasury funds it. I sit on the EFRA Committee and was able to guest on the Public Accounts Committee when it looked at the National Audit Office report on the APHA site in Weybridge in Surrey. The site needs radical refurbishment that will cost in the order of £2.8 billion. The Government have committed around £1.2 billion, which is a lot of money in these tight fiscal circumstances, but I firmly believe that we need to fund it moving forward.
Larger animals should be covered by the Bill, too. Not one horse is moved legally from the UK to Europe for slaughter, but it is likely that thousands are moved illegally. The EFRA Committee took harrowing evidence on illegal animal movements across borders. It needs to stop, and this sort of legislation can control it. We need to improve equine identification and digital monitoring. I welcome the fact that the Bill covers the export of livestock, and would stop the movement of farm animals for slaughter and fattening, but we need to specify that it is all right in certain instances to move animals around for breeding purposes. That would be complementary to measures on the movement of animals. We need to ensure that the legislation works.
As I said, we have high standards in this country, and should be proud of that, but we need to work together to improve transport conditions for animals. It is important that farm animals be slaughtered close to where they are reared. One of the recommendations of the EFRA Committee report was on the need to bolster the abattoir network in this country. I attended a roundtable last week with the Minister on the importance of supporting the UK’s small abattoir network, so that animals can be reared, slaughtered and bought locally, and people can eat local and buy local. That would reduce the transport distances for animals, which we need to do.
I am proud that the Conservative Government have a strong record on animal welfare. We have heard about it today. The private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) on stronger sentencing in animal cruelty cases has been passed into law. The animal health and welfare pathway in the new environmental land management scheme is a new way to reward farmers and land managers with public money for a public good. Animal health and welfare is recognised as a public good; we should be proud of that.
The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act, which the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth, talked about, has become law. It is so important that we recognise animals as fully sentient beings. We should be proud as Conservatives that we are driving forward a lot of these changes, but we need to hold our nerve and keep going. Let us go back to our manifesto, much of which the Bill would enact. Animal welfare unites us across the House, and unites us in humanity. Introducing this legislation is the right and moral thing to do for these wonderful sentient beings, which we have a duty of care towards. To quote a famous sports brand, I say to the Government: just do it.
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