No, you have the wrong end of the stick, says the government. The Labour peer Baroness Mallalieu QC, who knows a thing or two about lawyers, opined: “It is likely to benefit lawyers, at the taxpayers’ expense, and to be a bureaucratic nightmare with no limit to its remit, unlike the EU animal sentience provision, no provision for adequate funding for such wide scope”. The government admits that it has not yet written the committee’s terms of reference or decided who will sit on it, making debate over the bill rather futile. Suspicious backbenchers in the Lords began to worry that this committee must be going to be more than meets the eye. Even less need for a bill to set it up, then, surely? Indeed, going down this route means that the committee will be in place months later than if the prime minister had just picked up the phone to some Professor Dolittle and asked him to chair a committee in exchange for a probable CBE in a few years’ time. Indeed, it already has a committee called the animal welfare committee.Īh, says the government, but whereas the animal welfare committee has a specific remit within a specific department and has the power to write rules, this new committee will range over the whole of policy, from roads to foreign policy, looking at any and all legislation, past and present, to check whether it takes into account the sentience of animals. The government sets up committees with roughly the same regularity and enthusiasm as a trout eats flies. As Lord Forsyth pointed out in the second reading debate, this is a bizarre thing for a bill to do because “the government do not need primary legislation to set up a committee”. The second does just one thing: it sets up a committee, the animal sentience committee. The first attempt had to be abandoned as unworkable. Yet to get the letter-writers off the backs of MPs, the government drafted a sentience bill. These rules assume that certain of these animals are sentient but don’t tolerate vindictive cruelty even to non-sentient creatures. Scientists who do experiments on mice, chefs who cook lobsters, farmers who dehorn cattle, abattoirs that slaughter halal or kosher meat, fishermen who catch and release roach and gamekeepers who shoot grey squirrels are all subject to laws that require them to minimise suffering as far as possible. Thus, far from setting Britain free to torture animals, leaving the EU would have no discernible effect. Spain would have vetoed anything that prevented bullfighting. (The actual wording is “while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the Member States relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage activity”.) This was no accident. Second, the European Union’s sentience clause was weaker than anything in British law, saying that “since animals are sentient beings” lawmakers should try to take their welfare into account but - I paraphrase - not if it gets in the way of everyday life. But there were two problems with the argument.įirst, British law does recognise animal sentience, and has done since 1822 when an act was passed to prevent cruelty to cattle. This was quickly weaponised in a letter-writing campaign to MPs. Some alert activist who did not like Brexit spotted that in leaving the European Union we would lose the passing reference in Article 13 of the Lisbon Treaty that animals are sentient. The real reason for the bill goes back to 2017. Nobody objects to some animals being declared sentient, but the government seems to be saying to one audience that the bill is a dramatic change that will do more to prevent suffering, while to another audience it insists that the bill is an empty gesture that will change nothing. The problem is political rather than ethical. Like a lobster in boiling water, a parliamentary bill on animal sentience is being tortured in the House of Lords. Lobsters and the like are given no more protection from cruelty under this legislation but bureaucrats will thrive on it
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