Meeting of the Parliament 09 January 2019
I thank Mairi Gougeon for advance sight of her statement. I refer members to the voluntary part of my entry in the register of members’ interests, which says that I am a member of the League Against Cruel Sports.
There is much in Mairi Gougeon’s statement that Labour warmly welcomes, from the intention to press ahead with tougher sentencing for animal cruelty offences to the proposed proper regulation of pet shops, animal sanctuaries and rehoming agencies.
On the specific issue of fox hunting, however, it is clear that there are loopholes in the existing legislation and hunts have gone out of their way to ride roughshod over the law in both spirit and letter. The measures to progress Lord Bonomy’s recommendations that the Government prevents trail hunting from being established and limits to two the number of dogs that can be deployed against wild animals are therefore a welcome step forward. However, we must not license cruelty, so I would be concerned about any proposal to introduce a licensing scheme that would enable more than two dogs to be used in hunting, and I am concerned about the lack of proposals on the use of mounted hunts.
Does the minister agree that, three years after the Bonomy review was announced, it is time for the Government to get on with consigning the barbaric practice of fox hunting to the history books once and for all by introducing legislation that ensures that the boxing day hunt in 2018 was the last one that we will ever see?