My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 28, which is supported by my noble friends Lord Trenchard and Lord Hamilton of Epsom, and
Amendment 42, which is linked. The purpose of these amendments is to require that any report of the animal sentience committee be peer-reviewed academically before publication and, connected to that, that the period for the Minister to respond to any such report be not three months after it is published, but three months after it is published in the said peer-reviewed journals. The second amendment is tidying up and consequential.
Science is at the heart of the Bill. Every proponent and supporter of it would agree that the claims for animal sentience must be scientific, not merely a sort of infantile anthropomorphism. At Second Reading, my noble friend Lord Inglewood said rather tellingly, and rightly I thought, that Bambi was an illusion. If our approach to animal sentience is simply that animals feel and look nice—what I would call Bambi-ism—then the whole Bill is pointless. The Bill has to rest on a proper scientific basis. I thought it was worth having a few moments while we are in Committee to discuss some things about the science of animal sentience because they have not as yet been debated. These amendments give an opportunity to do that and a rationale for them as well.
When we met a couple of weeks ago, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, pushed back against any suggestion that there was no science behind animal welfare. Before she becomes too worried or excited, I am going to agree with her on this: there is indeed science behind it. She cited courses in animal welfare at the University of Glasgow and the University of Winchester and the Royal Veterinary College’s animal welfare science and ethics group, which specifically researches in the field of animal welfare, animal behaviour, veterinary ethics and law. What is notable and revealing about that list—as I say, I agree with everything the noble Baroness said, as a matter of fact and a matter of opinion on this point—is that nowhere in it is animal sentience.
It might be easily thought by the Committee that “Ah, you see, animal behaviour generally must include sentience” and so forth, and that it must be all wrapped up in there, but there is a genuine conflict between animal behaviourism and animal sentience as a scientific methodology. If one goes back, in the great part of the 20th century, studies of animals and animal welfare were based on behaviourism—the study of behaviour. So if you apply a stimulus, the animal reacts in a certain way; if that is repeated in other cases and experiments, you begin to establish a body of knowledge about the behaviour of animals. That scientific approach specifically eschewed trying to delve into what was happening in the animal’s mind, so to speak, because there is almost no scientific way in which one can establish that. It dealt with the epiphenomena of behaviour in trying to understand how to deal with animals and how to do so in a kind and humane fashion.
The origins of animal sentience science come much later. At Second Reading I mentioned the work of Professor Peter Singer and his seminal book Animal Liberation, published in 1975. I remind noble Lords that when a young man, Professor Singer was suddenly converted to vegetarianism and then, as a professional philosopher, later wrote a book trying to justify the choice he had made. At the root of this was the
concept that what animals and humans had in common was sentience. It is not surprising that studies of animal sentience science as a discipline originated in that last quarter of the 20th century, but it is at odds with the traditional and established behavioural approach, which has not been abandoned, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, illustrated when she listed the subjects of study there.
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The consequence we have from this is that this scientific methodology is still contested to some extent, is operated as a relatively young science and tends to attract—I mean no disrespect—practitioners who have to some extent a prior mental, perhaps even political in some cases, disposition to certain sorts of outcomes and who, in the literature, often attract funding from organisations that have such a prior political agenda. A review of the literature will show this and can be done on the internet to some extent. For example, I printed off a paper—I will not mention the name of the academic but they are a perfectly respectable person—giving a review of where we are on animal sentience science. It is a very balanced paper and I have no complaints with it but, when I turned to the end, I saw that the financial sponsorship for it came from the World Society for the Protection of Animals.
We are not dealing with the fundamental principles of physics, about which there is no dispute. We are not even dealing with something like climate science, on which, although it is perhaps disputed at the margins, there is broad consensus among scientists. We are dealing with something that is relatively young, relatively prone to capture and still contested to some extent, and we are putting it at the heart of government decision-making. All these amendments do is say that, if it is to be at the heart of government decision-making, it needs to be on a proper academic footing. It needs to have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals first. In a sense, I regard this as a helpful amendment, as I hope the Government will, because it would give the animal sentience committee greater credibility and show that the Government are responding to correct science.
The final question is, what are the appropriate academic journals in which that peer review should be carried out? Across science in general, there are highly respected academic journals and others where being peer-reviewed probably does not add very much to the credibility; I notice the noble Lord, Lord Trees, smiling in what I take to be agreement at that remark. When I originally drafted the amendment, I included the words “reputable academic journal” but was persuaded by the clerks that that was much too fuzzy.
I will leave that issue for the moment but, when we come back to it—I am sure that we will—we will have to hear from the Government what they think is an appropriate type of vehicle for academic peer review. As I said, it is important to think about the science and to understand that it is in a relatively new state. If it is to be credible, it needs to have academic peer review. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will see that and find a way to agree to this very modest and supportive suggestion. I beg to move.