Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Tories make a pig’s ear of welfare law
WE are a nation of animal lovers, right? We’re famed for it. No wonder. It’s estimated that we and 54 million pets currently huddle alongside each other on this little old island.
I LOVE animals. I grew up with dogs and once had a rabbit. I swear they communicated with me. Even Emma, my goldfish. It’s why, when I read Bob Geldof ’s autobiography featuring his recollection of witnessing cows screaming with terror while waiting to meet their fate in an abattoir, I became vegetarian (31 years ago, yikes!).
I also brought my boys up on a meatless/fishless diet until they got led astray by fellow teenagers and the mass-meat purveyors KFC, Mcdonald’s, Nando’s etc. In literature and in the Bible, those who care for animals are portrayed as good, kind people.
You’d think then, wouldn’t you, that our avowedly Christian
Prime Minister –
“all creatures great and small and all that” – would be of the same mindset. That our politicians would innately feel the love that we slather our pet pals with. But, like a nasty bite from a usually docile dog, things are not as they seem. As part of our unnecessary, divisive, foolish separation from the rest of Europe, our politicians have decided on our behalf to scrap EU legislation that sees non-human animals as sentient beings – i.e. to some declaring animals have no emotions. Clearly they had the mean creatures who become Tory politicians in mind when they worked that one out. Animals have no emotions? Have you ever heard a dog yelp if you accidentally tread on its paw? Did you see that mother pilot whale on Blue Planet carrying her dead calf around for days?
Did you know newborn pigs can respond to their own names by the time they’re two weeks old?
And what about that guilty look dogs have when they’ve wolfed down the Victoria Sponge you just baked? Animals are aware, responsive, reactive and capable of learning. They are sentient. They are also intelligent, which is more than can be said of MPS who voted to scrap the EU animal sentience amendment.
Environment Secretary, Michael Gove – emotions? intelligence? – has now said he’ll make any necessary changes to introduce the recognition of animal intelligence and emotion in UK law instead.
What? A dog, a pig or a pigeon could have told him it was best not to have voted against it in the first place.
Shall we have a public vote? Are Tory politicians sentient beings capable of running the country? Ha! We all know the answer to that.
Politicians scrapped an EU law that sees animals as sentient