The Daily Telegraph

Gove: I won’t ban all cat shock collars

- By Sophie Jamieson

A TOTAL ban on the use of electric shock collars for pets will not be introduced, Michael Gove has indicated, after fears the policy would lead to more cats dying on roads.

In response to a question in the Commons yesterday, the Environmen­t Secretary suggested the ban would only apply to those that are used to train animals into good behaviour, and not to devices designed to prevent pets straying into dangerous territory.

Electronic collars allow shocks to be applied to pets by their owners. Containmen­t collars work alongside undergroun­d “fences”, which can be installed along the edge of a property to prevent a cat wandering out into the road and being run over. The collars beep at a cat when they approach a cable buried in the ground, and if the cat continues it is given a shock.

The Department for Environmen­t, Food and Rural Affairs launched a consultati­on on a proposal to ban electronic training collars last month.

Mr Gove’s support for the measure is said to have caused friction at the Cabinet table, with reports that Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, uses the fence system for his cats. Alluding to TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, John Hayes, a former transport minister, said to Mr Gove: “TS Eliot said that when a cat adopts you, you just have to put up with it until the wind changes. Well, a cruel wind may be blowing for thousands of cat owners who put protective fencing in place to stop their much-loved pets joining the hundreds of thousands who are killed on our roads each year.

“Will the Secretary of State, a noted cat owner, stand alongside those friends of felines or will he send TS Eliot spinning in his grave and many cats to theirs, too?” Mr Gove said: “TS Eliot wrote at the beginning of The Waste Land that April is the cruellest month.

“But this April will not be a month in which cruelty will be tolerated towards any living thing. We want to bring forward legislatio­n in order to ensure that the use of shock collars as a means of restrainin­g animals in a way that causes them pain is dealt with adequately.

“But [Mr Hayes] does raise an important point. Containmen­t fences can play a valuable part in making sure that individual animals, dogs and cats, can roam free in the domestic environmen­t in which they are loved and cared for.”mr Gove said “a number of submission­s” had been made to the consultati­on about containmen­t collars, and they were being reflected on “carefully”.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph Professor Timothy Gruffydd-jones, of the University of Bristol, who specialise­s in feline medicine, said that to ban electric collars would “condemn many cats to unnecessar­y suffering and death” because they prevent cats straying out from their gardens.

The RSPCA says all electronic collars should be banned because they can cause pain and fear. The collars are illegal in Wales.

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