Animal Welfare Bill

My hon. Friend’s timing is immaculate, as was the case earlier with an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman. In fact I was going to speak about primates in a few seconds. With some animals, ownership can be justified only very rarely. In the case of primates, it may very occasionally happen that a scientist rescues one that is not suitable for release into the wild and which cannot be placed in a zoo because it is not au fait with others of its species. Such circumstances may come about on very rare occasions, but most people will cleave to the proposition that a human being does not need to own a primate as that would not be in the animal’s interest. The Bill does not deal with the matter of keeping primates as pets, and another large grey area in the proposals has to do with circus animals. Children of my generation used to love going to the circus, where the animals’ performance gave us much innocent pleasure. I remember, of course, the chimps’ tea party. I did not see anything like it again until I saw Prime Minister’s questions. [Laughter.] I also remember seeing elephants balancing on an amazingly small space. I have seen balancing acts in this place, but nothing in between that was as spectacular. Now, of course, I understand, as I suspect we all do, that much of the conduct used to persuade animals to act in that fashion is not benign—and that is a deep understatement. It appears that under present legislation it is legal to beat an animal in a circus in order to produce the required performance, although it is not legal to beat the animal once the performance has been produced. In other words, one may use physical punishment to train an animal in a particular method. That has to be wrong, because there is no gain for humanity in a successful circus performance. I am therefore concerned—and that concern is shared by animal welfare organisations—about some of the changes that have been made to clause 4. We are told that it has been tidied up, but the provision in clause 4(3)(d) seems to be a get-out clause, because it provides that an assessment of suffering may include whether it was"““proportionate to the purpose of the conduct concerned””." For performing animals, the purpose of the conduct is a perfect act, and a fair amount of physical ill-treatment could be justified as technically in proportion to the conduct.