MPs back bid for tougher animal cruelty sentences

TOUGHER sentences for animal abusers have moved closer to becoming law.

The Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill would increase the maximum sentence for animal cruelty offences 10-fold from six months in prison to five years.

The proposed legislation cleared the House of Commons after receiving an unopposed third reading from MPs.

It will now appear before the House of Lords to undergo further scrutiny.

Conservative Chris Loder (West Dorset), who introduced the Bill, previously explained he was inspired to seek tougher punishments after a mistreated dog he found abandoned by a road became his family’s treasured pet. The Government also supports the Bill, boosting its chances of becoming law.

The proposal was one of seven backbench Bills to clear the House of Commons on Friday, with the first one taking more than three hours and the other six being dealt with in 75 minutes. The Prisons (Substance Testing) Bill was among those to sneak through in the legislative blitz.

A REPORT today enthusiastically suggests that so-called ‘rewilding’ of the countryside can bring many benefits, from creating jobs and boosting volunteering, to providing homes for wildlife and helping offset the impacts of climate change with all its consequences.

Yet talk to many farmers about rewilding and you will get a short and often not too polite answer. Farming families who have built their lives over generations managing the land don’t necessarily take too kindly to the idea that they should take a back seat and let nature takeover.

They’re right to be sceptical. The problem, fundamentally, is in the name – rewilding. Because while it is a handy label, beloved of the green movement and shorthand for a whole range of measures that are supposedly ‘good’ for the environment, many of the measures being taken in the schemes analysed as part of Rewilding Britain’s report, are anything but.

They are nothing less than the continuation of land management, something which has been going on in Britain for centuries and needs to continue for centuries more if we are to get all we need – from food to recreation, climate change management to wildlife – from our relatively small and heavily populated island.

Some on the more extreme edge of the conservation movement – and often the ones who grab the headlines – propose a true hands-off approach to the landscape, allowing scrub and brambles, gorse and bracken to simply take over. They believe that ideally people should retreat from much of the countryside and see what happens. Wiser heads, however, know what would happen a bleak and unusable landscape would likely be formed. And while, over many, many years, a balance of nature might again be struck, land needed for producing food, providing us with places to enjoy and areas where we can intervene on behalf of the endangered species we cherish would be lost.

Talk to farmers and landowners about managing the land differently, moving some less productive areas out of food production and into other activities that can provide an income and enhance the landscape and they will tell you that is what they have been doing for years. When Victorian and Edwardian estate owners planted copses of trees and left fields fallow and hedges to grow out, no one called it re-wilding – they were simply managing their land to create natural beauty and, often, to encourage game birds and other species for country sports.

When they dug lakes and dammed rivers and streams, it was for its own sake, to create beautiful areas of water that could be stocked with fish and would bring in insects, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Not so different from the work that those now calling themselves “rewilders” are up to, flooding areas for beavers and planting woodland to create habitat for a range of creatures. The rewilders of 2021 wouldn’t characterise themselves in this way, but they are proving a point known to those who have worked the land for centuries – that in a nation like Britain land needs to be managed and is better for it. The name is divisive. The act is vital and will continue.

MR Clemens is ignoring basic scientific evidence in his letter of 8 March, 2021.

Firstly, in 2007 the recommendations of the Independent Scientific Group based on the Randomised Badger Cull Trial (RBCT) conclusively showed that culling badgers should have no ‘meaningful’ part to play in future bovine TB policy. This was a peer-reviewed, double-locked scientific study that is held in high regard by the international scientific community.

Secondly, the main driver of bTB itself is irrefutably cattlecattle transmission. As shown by the excellent visual created in 2016 by the Centre for Veterinary Epidemiology and Risk Analysis (CVERA), University College Dublin, cattle movements in this country, like Ireland, have increased exponentially over the last few decades.

Scientific evidence shows that the TB test for cattle has been (and is) woefully inadequate. To use the eloquent words of Mr Clemens, cattle drool and piddle all over the field as they graze so one cow with a false negative test can have a big impact on the rest of the herd outside, let alone inside.

Remember, the present Cumbria TB breakdown has conclusively shown it originated from cattle imported from Northern Ireland.

And so, cattle-cattle transmission should be addressed far more forcefully than has been the case.

Secondly, looking at the country as a whole not every farm by any means treats cattle bedding or slurry as it should and it is common practice that cattle bedding and slurry from TB-farms is transported to other farms to spread on non-TB farms.

Moving onto hedgehogs, as stated by the University of Brighton, other scientific institutions and charities dedicated to saving hedgehogs, the main reasons for the precipitous fall in hedgehog numbers are land use change in urban and rural areas, increased use of pesticides and infrastructure developments such as roads. A basic grasp of badger ecology shows that badgers rarely live long enough (a) to become infectious and (b) to die from bTB.

His views on the best way of creating a ‘healthy’ badger population are pure fantasy and, finally, I cannot find a survey that reveals 95% of vets support the cull.

In fact, a few years ago Farming UK reported that ‘vet support for badger cull falls’ whilst it should be well known that the British Veterinary Association withdrew support for free-shooting badgers some years ago. A fact that the NFU, the Government and cull companies still ignore.

Amanda Bristol