My Lords, I am sure contributors are right to distinguish between animal health and animal welfare. The important thing is to combine the two: you can conceive of an animal being entirely healthy but having extremely unsatisfactory welfare conditions.
Therefore, regardless of how you draft provisions, it is important that each is recognised as an independent concept. Support for livestock farming should be dependent on the satisfactory standards being reached in respect of each. I should declare that I am a livestock farmer and president of the Livestock Auctioneers’ Association.
The core issue we are discussing with these amendments was articulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, earlier when she said that animals should have a good life and a good death. That must be the starting point.
Like many of your Lordships, I am also delighted to see the return of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who combines expertise and robust common sense about these things. Of course, he is right. I personally do not like factory farming, but one has to recognise that, to feed our population, various forms of intensive animal husbandry will take place. I hope we can improve the standards of welfare that the animals experience over time and there must be a level below which the standards should now not be allowed to fall.
Against this background, it seems entirely appropriate that welfare and health should be a component of any support that might be provided for animal farmers. First, it must be right that the conditions in which animals live have to be above a certain minimum. Secondly, it is worth remembering that you have to move animals about. The conditions in which they are moved must also be appropriate. Finally, of course, we must turn our attention to the food on the shelves of our supermarkets and shops. No doubt we shall go back to this at a later stage in the proceedings and the Bill, but I have serious problems with the standards experienced by animals that are dead on the shelves, which would in no way be permitted if they had been reared in this country. That was the point that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, alluded to.
It is a difficult problem for the reason one of the noble Baronesses gave: we are not creating new criminal law here. Issues of animal welfare depend on the animal, not on the system of agriculture in which it is reared. While I do not believe that animals have rights, I do believe that we have obligations towards them, which we jolly well must honour.
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