My Lords, there are four amendments in this group in my name, Amendments 48, 52, 53 and 57. I will come in a moment to say exactly what they would do, but I shall make some preliminary remarks that arise from something my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering said and which has not been sufficiently discussed. This is the famous metaphysical bit that the Minister has been worried about, although I hope to get through this while skirting Descartes—or anybody difficult or foreign, for that matter.
The difficulty we have is that we are asked to assess to what extent, in a meaningful way, we think that animals can feel pain. That requires us to think a little about what pain and feeling are. My noble friend Lady McIntosh brought up insects as an example of this, but it relates to other creatures as well. Pain itself, of course, is not just an interior experience; it is, to some extent, a social concept. Pain is an abnormality, but we learn from others that it is an abnormality that is expressive of something that requires a response. So, we learn as children, “Don’t put your hands on the coal. If you do put your hands on the coal, that is what we call pain; learn not to do it again.” There is a social element to it, and it is not by any means clear that that can be translated to animal experience. This is the problem of operating on a non-behavioural scientific basis.
We humans also have coping strategies for dealing with pain. When I know I am going to have an injection in my arm, I always make sure that I look the other way; that is a very small example of a coping strategy. That illustrates another thing about the human experience of pain, which is that very often it is worse in anticipation than in the experience itself. All of this is tied up with what we understand by pain: for humans, it is not simply a neurological experience that can be tracked by chemicals and electrons, although it has all those aspects to it.
It is very difficult to know how one can map that across the bulk of animals. It is easiest to do so, of course, in the case of mammals, because there we have a closer link with ourselves in terms of DNA composition and so forth. To map it to fish and birds is extremely difficult. Indeed, it is scientifically quite challenging to understand how the very limited neural capacity, or brain capacity, of fish and birds could accommodate that range of complex experiences of pain characteristic of humans and, perhaps, of primates and other higher mammals.
There is also a similar question about what it is to feel something. In ordinary English, “feel” has two aspects: I can feel a table—that is a physical sensation—but I can also feel love, disdain and other emotions. Nobody
doubts at all that the vertebrates we are discussing can feel in the former sense but, simply as a matter of their neural and brain capacity, the notion that they even have the ability to feel love, affection, fear and complex emotions such as those is a very challenging one.
We really need to understand that sort of background before we do what the Bill does, which is to cast an extremely wide net. It includes all vertebrates, but it goes beyond that: it gives the Secretary of State the power, which I think is completely unprecedented, to decide that any invertebrate, including the insects referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, are in fact sentient. That is the power given to him which, as I say, is almost incredible.
I turn to the detail of what my amendments seek to do. They would cut the thing in different ways. First, Amendment 48 suggests we “leave out ‘vertebrate’” and limit the scope of the Bill to mammals. This would make it much easier for the public, and for many members of this Committee and your Lordships’ House, to accept the Bill. It could be regarded as a first stage; there would be nothing to prevent the Government coming back subsequently and saying, “Having won over opinion on the question of mammals, we could now extend it to the broader class of vertebrates.” Amendment 52 explicitly invites the removal of fish—it is playing the same tune—and Amendment 53 proposes the removal of birds. These are all different ways of coming at the same thing.
Amendment 57 is slightly different, because I still cannot get over my outrage that Parliament is proposing to give the Secretary of State the power to designate any invertebrate as sentient. Here, simply for the sake of modesty and respectability, this amendment would limit that power to “cephalopods and decapod crustaceans”, simply because one knows from conversation and debate that that is the category of animals most likely to come within scope of this unprecedented power. It should none the less, in my view, be limited.
That is the purpose of these amendments and it is important that we explore them, because I do not accept that it is easy to map notions of feeling and pain on to these classes. Perhaps I may briefly refer to—