Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior
Vet who championed animal welfare but ran into controversy on the Burns inquiry into foxhunting
LORD SOULSBY OF SWAFFHAM PRIOR, who has died aged 90, was veterinary surgeon to the Queen, an expert on parasites in pets, and the only member of his profession in the House of Lords.
A professor of animal pathology and former chairman of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, Soulsby was an expert adviser to the government on animal welfare, science and technology, biotechnology and environmental issues and worked tirelessly for the welfare of animals both as a vet and as a campaigner.
In his career as a vet he chaired the British Veterinary Association’s ethics committee for many years and was patron of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments. In the Lords he demanded that the government should introduce compulsory licences for pet owners and, as co-founder of Vets In Support of Change, helped lead the successful campaign to reform Britain’s 90-yearold quarantine laws (his own cats having had a traumatic experience in quarantine).
But his record did not impress more radical animal rights campaigners when, in 2000, he was appointed by Labour’s Home Secretary Jack Straw to serve on the government’s inquiry into foxhunting chaired by Lord Burns.
Three years before, in 1997, Soulsby had published a report, commissioned by the British Field Sports Society, in which he evaluated a two-year study carried out for the National Trust by Professor Patrick Bateson, a former colleague of Soulsby’s at Cambridge, which found that being hunted was as traumatic to deer as losing a limb in a road accident. Bateson’s report had led to the trust banning the hunting of deer on its land and put the government under pressure to ban deer hunting on Forestry Commission land.
Soulsby’s report, based on a closed forum of 18 independent scientific experts, concluded that Bateson’s findings were not scientifically conclusive. While the scientists agreed that hunted deer showed evidence of having undertaken extensive and prolonged exercise, there was “a division of opinion” as to whether the welfare of the deer was unacceptably compromised as a result. One expert noted that deer were “superlative runners of great endurance” who had evolved naturally to recover from strenuous exercise. Others noted that changes in blood which Bateson had attributed to stress were part of the normal response to intense exercise.
When Soulsby was appointed to the foxhunting inquiry, there were therefore protests from campaigners who felt he was biased. Indeed Soulsby, who had been raised on a farm, made little secret of the fact that he regarded hunting as less cruel than other methods of killing foxes.
But they need not have worried. Soulsby’s criticisms of the Bateson report were not sufficient to persuade the National Trust to overturn its ban on stag hunting on its land, and the conclusion of the hunting inquiry that there was not sufficient evidence to prove that hunting foxes is cruel made no difference to Labour MPS’ determination to press ahead with a ban.
Ernest Jackson Lawson Soulsby was born on June 23 1926 and brought up in the former county of Westmorland on the family farm at Williamsgill, Newbiggin, Temple Sowerby. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Penrith and at the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College in Edinburgh, where he went on to take a doctorate. After graduation he served for several years as a municipal veterinary officer in Edinburgh, and it was during this time that he became interested in animal parasites.
After a short period as a lecturer in Clinical Parasitology at the University of Bristol Veterinary School, he went on to Cambridge, where he established his reputation. After nine years he was recruited by the University of Pennsylvania to a chair in Veterinary Pathology. He travelled so much that his position became known as the Pan Am Chair of Parasitology.
He returned to Cambridge in 1978 as Professor of Animal Pathology, eventually becoming dean of the veterinary school. During the late 1980s he fought off proposals to close the school under a rationalisation programme set out by Sir Ralph Riley, arguing that Britain would be excluded from crucial research into “magic bullet’’ anti-cancer drugs if the proposals went ahead.
Created a Conservative life peer in 1990, before his retirement from Cambridge in 1993, Soulsby held visiting professorships at various universities in Europe and the United States. A member of the Council of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) from 1978, he was president in 1984 and president of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1998 to 2000. In 2015 he won the RCVS’S Queen’s Medal.
In the House of Lords he was president of the Pet Advisory Committee and of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee; vicepresident of the All-party Group on Animal Welfare; and chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. He also chaired sub-committees of inquiry looking into resistance to antibiotics and fighting infection.
He served as president of the Royal Institute of Public Health from 2004 until 2008, when it merged with the Royal Society of Health to become the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). He served the new body as President until the end of 2009.
Soulsby published 14 books on animal parasites as well as numerous articles in veterinary journals.
He married, first, in 1950, Margaret Macdonald, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and secondly, in 1962, Annette Williams, who died in 2014.
Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior, born June 23 1926, died May 8 2017