Animal Welfare Bill

My Lords, I am particularly interested in subsection (2)(c) of my noble friend’s amendment, on the, "““identification of greyhounds employed for racing purposes””." One reason why I was eased out from running the Greyhound Racing Fund was that I wanted to be absolutely certain that the dogs could be properly identified. At the moment, dogs are identified only by an earmarking scheme. I see from the fund’s annual report that the amount of money spent on the earmarking scheme over the past 10 years has hardly varied. It is not a very satisfactory situation putting a mark in a dog’s ear. It is very easy to adjust it at certain times. The proper way to do it would have been to chip all the greyhounds. When a greyhound goes to race it is weighed immediately as it has to come within a certain weight limit, so it would be perfectly possible to put something that could read its chip above the place where it is weighed. That could be done at the same time. It is very interesting that all dogs from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home are chipped, and I do not believe that those chips can have done anything but good, as they enable dogs to be properly identified. We must make a move in that direction. I turn to the other interesting thing about the amendment. If you look at the things on which the Greyhound Racing Board spends money, you can see that it is doing absolutely everything that the amendment asks for, including drug testing. Every dog is tested for drugs before it goes onto the track, so that is already there. All the veterinary surgeons are independent and attend the meetings. The licensing of kennels is very difficult to enforce, but the other real problem is the maintenance of tracks. In Ireland, there was a big programme to get all the tracks up to a certain standard. In this country, the existing 30 tracks have a very restricted standard. Then there are the 17 flapping tracks. What are we going to do about the tracks in Wisbech and other places that do not come under the National Greyhound Racing Club? So although the amendment may be desirable, a great deal of the work is already being done, and I would rather see it being done by the greyhound people rather than have something inflicted on them by the Government.