Hansard

I am delighted to support Christine Grahame on this issue, and I commend the leadership that she has shown on animal welfare issues for many, many years in this Parliament. I just hope that more of her colleagues will join her and the rest of us tonight.

Tail docking in a puppy is a painful tail amputation—it is not a shortening, it is an amputation—that is required to be carried out without pain relief. It makes no difference in terms of pain whether the tail is totally removed or partially removed. By the Government’s own admission, this law will require at least 80 puppies’ tails to be amputated to prevent an injury requiring amputation in a single adult working dog. How is that a net benefit to animal welfare? Does a puppy feel 80 times less pain than an amputated adult dog? Where is the veterinary evidence for that?

Let us be clear about where the proposal started. It began with Richard Lochhead in 2007—a new minister understandably keen to placate the country sports lobby. What followed was a series of flawed studies. The first one was based on a self-selecting survey of shooters who were asked to report tail injuries in working dogs. It was a biased, campaigning piece of research led by traditionalists, not veterinary evidence. A second study then looked at populations of working breed dogs, but there was a complete failure to investigate other more damaging causes of tail injury, such as poor kennelling, and no analysis of alternatives to protect working dogs, such as tail sheathing.

There was no research into the negative impact of tail docking on behaviour, communication and potential confrontations between dogs. Professor Donald Broom, in his evidence to the committee, said that removing a significant part of a dog’s tail is

“like preventing a significant part of human speech”,

yet the Government wants to allow it to happen to working dogs without any analysis of the behavioural problems that it could cause dogs and people.

A promised third study into the actual tail injuries of actual working dogs based on veterinary cases was never commissioned, but why bother with the evidence when the Government already has the votes in the bag?

The Scottish Green Party agrees with every professional veterinary body in the UK that the reintroduction of tail docking for working breed dogs is wrong on animal welfare grounds. Scotland had the most progressive animal welfare laws anywhere in the UK when the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006 was passed, but now we see the Scottish Government attempting a race to the bottom, to mirror the weak legislation and loopholes that exist in England.

We need rationality, reason and evidence brought to the Parliament whenever a change in the law is proposed. This proposal, shamefully, has none of those. It is a backward step and it is a dangerous precedent for this Parliament to set.