Animal Welfare Bill

I rise to oppose this amendment, and do so from long personal experience of training dogs, particularly German pointers as gun dogs. This experience leads me to believe that the introduction of the electric collar has made dog training much easier and quicker than it used to be, and very much more pleasant and rewarding for the dog. I have read the memorandum from the Kennel Club, for which like other noble Lords I have much respect, but I fear that its wish to ban electric dog collars is simply too extreme. From my infancy I have always been surrounded by dogs at home, and some of my earliest memories are of my father beating them when they had not come back when called, having preferred to continue their chase of some unfortunate animal. I admit that many of our dogs over the years have displayed what the Kennel Club is pleased to call ““behavioural problems””. In other words they had pretty strong characters, allied of course to great charm and affection for their master and, I am glad to say, his children. I suppose that my father also suffered from behaviour problems, if by that it is meant that he was an exceptionally irascible man, used to getting his own way in life. My mother, on the other hand, was a somewhat milder creature who hated seeing the dogs beaten when they eventually returned from the chase. She put forward and tried to practise the theory, now advanced by the Kennel Club, that my father’s violence was unnecessary and that our dogs would have been as good as gold if they were constantly rewarded for good behaviour and never chastised when they went astray. The Kennel Club claims to have scientific research to back this up, but I fear that the researchers cannot have met our dogs and many others like them. That fact is that over a period of at least 10 years, my mother’s methods failed with all our dogs of strongish character. I do however accept that dogs of a fairly sensitive nature can be trained by a reward-based system only, but my remarks are not about those dogs or their trainers. I am talking about dogs with strong characters, and it is with these dogs that the electric collar has proved to be such a boon. I should point out that the modern electric dog collar has two devices which make it possible to administer the mildest possible inconvenience to the dog consistent with stopping it doing what it is not supposed to be doing, such as pursuing any form of mammal which may now fall foul of the unfortunate Hunting Act, or any other act of indiscipline which will earn it the disapproval of its owner. The first device is a button which allows the shock to be turned up from the mildest tickle to whatever strength is necessary to check the dog. The pain is never anything like the average thrashing administered by my father or, I fear, by several keepers and dog handlers today. I have to say to the noble Baroness that the shock of a cow or a deer touching an electric fence with its wet nose delivers an altogether different level of pain, as I am sure she is aware. In my experience, you only have to use the electric collar in this way, turning the current up until it has the desired effect, two or three times for the dog to desist from doing whatever it is that is wrong. You do not just loose off a strong charge; you turn up the current as slowly as you can until you see the desired effect. The other most important device in the modern collar is the warning signal. This is a high-pitched whine which is emitted from the collar before any electric charge is released. In my experience, even a fairly headstrong dog quickly learns that the whine is about to be followed by a growing shock, and you very soon do not have to do any more than press the whine button for the dog to stop doing something wrong. In fact, you soon do not have to do any more than put the collar on even the strongest character, and it is remarkable how well behaved it becomes. Of course, I admit that there may be irascible or ignorant people who may send out too strong a charge and I imagine that that could do lasting damage to a particularly sensitive dog. But those are the same sort of people who will beat their dogs when they return from bad behaviour, which, I submit, is likely to be just as painful and damaging as is an electric shock. I would have thought and hoped that nowadays, such people are in a dwindling minority. Perhaps the greatest advantage of the electric collar over traditional training methods is that you can apply the brakes while the dog is committing the offence. You do not have to wait until it returns to you for it to be deprived of its biscuit under the Kennel Club’s rules, or be beaten under my father’s. The trouble with both of those systems is that most dogs have largely forgotten what they have just done wrong, and so the lack of reward or punishment loses much of its effect. With the collar, you bring home to the dog what it is doing wrong while it is doing it, so it learns very much more quickly what it is supposed not to be doing, and reacts accordingly. Here, of course, I agree with the Kennel Club when it says that dogs have strong bonds with humans and can be at their happiest when they are working together as a team with us, and earning our admiration and affection. I submit that the modern electric collar can contribute much to their happy state of affairs and that it would, therefore, be a mistake to ban it. I oppose the amendment.