Animal Welfare Bill

I thank the hon. Lady. I, as a cat owner, who has had cats that have lived to be 23 before now and who regularly takes them to the vet and deeply attends to their welfare, am now being told that I commit an offence if I cannot say—which I cannot—how much my cat should weigh in order to keep me within the law, relevant to its bone structure, its size and its breed. I do not have a clue about that. Furthermore, I am informed that I commit an offence—if this code of practice informs the law—if I do not provide for due privacy for my cats when they visit the litter box. The code actually says that we must take cognisance of an animal’s preference for privacy. Do the people who wrote this code have any experience of animals’ preference for privacy? They do not have any preference for privacy when they are discharging their natural functions. They will walk out during a barbecue and do it there and then, in the middle of the lawn. However, I commit an offence in law if I do not have regard for the animal’s ““preference for privacy””. That may sound entirely humorous, but it genuinely is in the code of practice. The more serious point is that we all know what happens when codes and regulations get too detailed and the implementers get too zealous: ordinary citizens who cannot get the police round when they have been burgled find that they are on the wrong end of the law for what most people would consider entirely silly nonsense. We have to know that this code of practice, with all its silly detail, will be applied only with an exceptionally light hand and only in the spirit of the legislation, which talks about neglect, cruelty and indifference to welfare, and that it will not penalise some poor owner who cannot say how much her cat should weigh. I will of course make a point of asking the vet about that when my cats go for their annual boosters, and I will write the information down and carry it round in my pocket, so that I can pull it out if I am ever asked for it. I say that only slightly sarcastically, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because I know that law has a habit of growing its own legs.