Examinations of Witnesses (Questions 240-252)
DR JUDY
MACARTHUR
CLARK, MR
GRAHAM GODBOLD,
MR MIKE
ATTENBOROUGH AND
MR DEREK
ARMSTRONG
9 SEPTEMBER 2004
Q240 Paddy Tipping: In your opening remarks,
Dr MacArthur Clark, you talked about enforceability. There is
an assumption lying behind this Bill that it can be done at no
cost or limited cost. Is that a reality, and what do you think
the costs are?
Dr MacArthur Clark: You ask me
what I think and I do not think it is a reality. My view is clearly
that, if this is going to be effectively enforced, there will
be costs for that and there are certain confusions in the enforcement
that I think need to be resolved. The enforcement lies with the
combination of the State Veterinary Service, of local authorities
and of the police and yet we also have the RSPCA coming in with
regard to prosecution, and I think that whole scenario needs to
have some clarification because there is potential confusion there.
We are concerned about the fact that it is not clear from the
Bill whether there is a duty on local authorities to enforce this
legislation or whether the Bill is giving permission to local
authorities to enforce this legislation. That may seem a very
subtle difference but it could be quite important because we could
end up with postcode lottery; welfare is good in Essex but not
so good in Shropshire or something like that—and please,
anyone from Shropshire do not take that personally! So I think
it is important that the enforcement is looked at and I do believe
there is going to need to be a resource otherwise the Act will
not achieve its objective.
Q241 Paddy Tipping: And there is a difference
between promoting good practice which you have all talked about,
and enforcing and investigating poor practice. Presumably there
is a cost in promoting good practice as well?
Dr MacArthur Clark: Yes. We all
talk about there being codes of practice for farm animals at present;
but many of them are many years out of date and therefore there
is a resource implication in terms of producing good quality codes
of practice. There will be an extension into companion animals
though I believe the intention is to have more generic codes of
practice for companion animals rather than a code per species,
and that probably is a good way forward at this point anyway,
but there is a significant resource involved in that. Indeed FAWC's
resource gets used in that as well because the normal way in which
codes of practice are developed is for FAWC to do a report from
which the code of practice is drawn, so there is a resource point
from our perspective for that as well.
Q242 Paddy Tipping: Graham, you have
a local authority background. What are the consequences for local
authorities in resource terms?
Mr Godbold: It is my understanding
that the Bill could place a high cost on local authorities because
I think this is a matter of saying "We understand what the
Bill is trying to do, but in the terms of any Act you will have
as much promotion and as much advice as it is possible to have,
there always has to be the big stick at the end." We have
had the carrot, and enforcement is the big stick. I think if you
put your finger in the air, should we say, to gauge what this
Bill will achieve in animal welfare terms on the farm. It is very
difficult at this particular stage to say it will have the positive
effect that it is meant to have, and there will always be the
necessity for enforcement. I think the Bill seems to suggest
increased enforcement powers, and increased formal activity by
developing the role of enforcement bodies, so it naturally comes
with it, that there needs to be some resource added to what local
authorities would do, and the question is of course whether that
is a national resource or a local resource.
Alan Simpson: I thought I had a fairly
good grasp of the issues we had to address here in terms of animal
welfare entitlements both in conditions in which they are slaughtered,
conditions in which they are reared, and aspects relating to cruelty,
but Dr MacArthur Clark has thrown me about whether the five freedoms
are being breached by the current way in which animals are being
bred, and the implications that may have in terms of conventional
breeding, and, as an extension of that, the implications of transgenic
species being produced and whether that is going to be compatible
with the five freedoms. Can you take us through this, because
I think we need to know whether the Bill as it stands contains
sufficient elements to allow us to address animal welfare issues
in the direction you have begun to take us in, or whether you
were raising that as a way of saying that the Bill itself needs
further clauses or provisions that will allow us to address welfare
issues that are breeding issues and not rearing ones.
Q243 Chairman: Can I just add to that
and say does that draw into question whether the use of the five
freedoms to describe the state of animal welfare is the right
way to deal with the issue?
Dr MacArthur Clark: Picking up
on your point initially, if I may, and it will lead me into responding
to your question, I think the five freedoms are still very robust
but we should recognise they are ideals, so one sees them as the
target of a system and it gives a very good steer to farmers,
stockmen and so on to understand what they should be targeting,
but they are a set of ideals. For example, it is not always possible
to allow freedom to express normal behaviour because sometimes
animals will kill each other if you allow them the freedom to
express normal behaviour, so there are limits. But your question,
Mr Simpson, is very important because if we produce a Bill that
is limited in its ability to respond to the sort of welfare issues
that we have created through breeding, and if it is unable to
do that, then we will have failed, you are right. I am not a legal
person and I am not clear at the moment that the Bill is capable
of doing this. I hope, as enabling legislation it will allow government
under subsequent regulations to set up, for example, a Standing
Committee that looks at breeding and breeding technologies. We
have looked at what sort of regulation could be put in place to
control this, and we have come to the conclusion that you cannot
design a law that will limit the way in which people selectively
breed in all of the different scenarios that one might have to
consider. The law would simply not be flexible enough to deal
with that, so we have come to the view that under an enabling
piece of legislation we should have a skilled body that keeps
under review these issues. A body that is looking at the way in
which broiler chickens, pigs, bacon pigs, sheep and dairy cattle,
for example—not only intensive agriculture—are being
led through their genetic selection and which works with the industry
to turn that around, and which takes welfare as a much more important
facet, rather than a single trait, as it is used, the single selection.
You should not believe that transgenesis and genetic modification
is the only evil that is going to come upon us and cause this
to be a greater problem, however. Even with conventional breeding,
there is a technology called "marker assisted selection",
which means that, with conventional breeding you can much more
clearly mark animals that have particular genes you want and select
for them and speed up the way in which you select for particular
traits. And let us remember that whenever we do that we may select
for good traits but we may also be selecting for a lot of bad
things we do not want to have—hence lame dairy cows, high
levels of mastitis in dairy cows, lame broiler chickens. All of
these things are a product of that selective breeding. We need
to make sure this Bill is capable, either in its main content
or as secondary regulation, to take on board this recommendation
to control this.
Q244 Alan Simpson: Bearing in mind what
you have just said, do you believe that the same set of regulations
will be sufficient to address the problems you identified in terms
of the use of marking in conventional breeding and the emergence
of transgenic species? Will that single set of regulations be
sufficient, or are you saying that we need to be thinking of two
in parallel?
Dr MacArthur Clark: No. I believe
that one structure—and I use the word "structure"
rather than regulations because regulations will apply some written
document that people comply with—whereas a structure which
is a review body, a Standing Committee, whatever you choose to
call it, could handle both of those. We produced in 1998 a report
on cloning and recommended that there should be a Standing Committee
to consider cloning. That could easily extend into all forms of
genetic modification but we see that same body being able to look
at marker assisted breeding and being the skilled, knowledgeable
body that understands quantitative genetics and how it can be
used to the benefit of animals rather than to the detriment of
animals and purely for the breeding activity. And also, if I may
add, this Standing Committee would have a communication role with
the public because what we do not want is for the public to view
breeding and selective breeding as it currently is in animals
in the same dark way in which they viewed GM crops. We do not
want to get into the same problem there. We want public decisions
to be informed into science, and science into the public, and
then those decisions are truly based upon what consumers really
want to have.
Mr Attenborough: As I am responsible
for our breeding programmes in the red meat species within MLC,
I would just like to comment on a couple of points about the breeding
aspects. Take sheep, for example. Breeding for resistance to worms
which infect the sheep has been something we have been researching
and are introducing into the sector, and that has a positive benefit.
It has a positive benefit to the animal, it reduces the cost of
treatment, and clearly there are environmental benefits as well.
So when one looks at selective breeding one needs to look at it
in much the same way as this issue of balance, because you can
do some very positive things from the animal welfare point of
view. Ten years ago I was research director for Dalgety Spillers
and we introduced a technology, which was a marker assisted selected
technology in pigs where we eliminated a gene which was associated
with stress of male pigs called porcine stress syndrome, and so
there are positive aspects of breeding and I think we need to
reflect that in the discussions today.
Dr MacArthur Clark: Definitely,
yes, and I did not take time to mention that. In our report we
have made the point that there is potential benefit for animals
through this selection and we really need to target on getting
the benefits and avoiding the disbenefits. At the end of the day,
the industry does not benefit from having a reputation of having
animals like chickens that are lame or which cannot be reared
within their environment. It is not good for the industry; it
is not good for the public or for anybody.
Q245 Joan Ruddock: I want to try to get
to grips with what you are saying in the way that Alan has expressed
because it seems to me that in the longer term the culture that
might come from this Bill could mean and should mean that nobody
would seek to breed an animal that was lame or that was subject
to mastitis or because of the need to produce more meat from that
particular animal or more milk from that particular cow, but I
cannot see now that you have raised it—and I am so glad
you have because it is tremendously important—that this
Bill would provide intervention at an early enough stage to ensure
this kind of breeding does not happen. It would say after the
animals have been bred and are on the farm, "Oh dear, that
is a problem" and is not conducive to the best welfare but
after that, of course, all the money has been invested and you
have the animals, etc, etc. So although Dr MacArthur Clark has
said she is not a lawyer, it seems to me as a lay person that
this Bill does not provide the intervention at the stage where
people are beginning to do selective breeding.
Dr MacArthur Clark: And you touch
exactly on the reason why we determine that regulations per
se would probably not work because they come into play after
the event, as you say, and this is where we are at the present.
This is why we recommend there should be a body that is skilled
to be able to evaluate, and we would see that this body would
have a dialogue with industry. Let me give you an example. At
the moment we are going down a route with our sheep industry where
we are selecting for scrapie resistance, resistance to let us
call it the equivalent of BSE in sheep. What we do not know is
what else are we going to select for at the same time, and if
we just select for that as a single trait, all sorts of other
disbenefits may come on board as well—sheep unsuitable for
the environment in which they live, and which carry other welfare
problems. We would envisage this body that we are suggesting would
be involved in all the development of that, would be advising,
would be monitoring what is going on, making sure we are not losing
the diversity that we need to keep. At the moment all we have
been able to do as FAWC is to protest to government about that
and say this needs to be taken on board as part of that policy,
but it really needs a much more skilled body to be able to look
at that. So we can get in there early but it needs a body rather
than a set of regulations.
Joan Ruddock: Should not that be part
of the Bill?
Q246 Chairman: We can consider that but
just to be clear, if you are going to have the body you are talking
about which is going to adjudicate on some of these matters, are
we not getting into quite difficult judgmental territory because
coming back to the question of offences, what you seem to be saying
is that if you go down particular breeding lines you can cause
welfare problems to be amplified in a particular breed or species
by virtue of the route down which you go but if, for example,
an animal with these accentuated characteristics was kept in high
welfare standards in every other way which the freedoms and the
Bill deal with, are we not going to get into some difficulty that
one person's judgment is that a welfare problem is being created
whilst another says "No, this is a proper line of breeding
and subsequent keeping of the animal?" I am just a bit concerned
about how in legal terms we would define an offence in the way
that you have described it to us. Have you given any thought to
this, or could you give some thought to it, because we could spend
the rest of the morning discussing a fine drafting point, but
I think, following Joan Ruddock's point, it would be quite useful
if you could consider submitting some supplementary thoughts on
that, (a) to describe the body and (b) the process of judgment
that could be involved if there were prosecutions that could be
taken under these matters, and it may well be that you might send
a copy to the MLC, because I put them in the world of having to
practically deal with these issues, so that they can comment on
it as well.
Mr Attenborough: We would be happy
to, Chairman.
Q247 Mr Wiggin: I would like to talk
about pigs' teeth because that is something that has not been
bred out, and it is a difficult subject. Do you feel the Bill
protects the farmer on this? If you do not cut pigs' teeth then
the damage is done to the sow, but if the piglets' teeth are cut
badly then obviously there is an issue with the piglet. Having
two vets here, the recommendation, I concede, is that this should
be done by a vet which considerably increases the cost, and may
be trivialising to some extent the work of the vet. Can you tell
the Committee a bit about this, and what you feel the Bill should
be doing?
Mr Armstrong: Currently, as with
tail docking in pigs, the code of practice recommends that it
should not be done, again unless you can demonstrate there is
a need for it. We did commission some research to look at this
a few years ago, and we compared on the same farm with and without
teeth clipping and there was significant damage both to the udders
of some sows and to the faces of some of the piglets, with the
result that some piglets had to be euthanased, so there are certainly
difficulties there. There are some farms who do not teeth clip
and do not have a problem but there are other farms where if they
do not teeth clip there are significant problems. Again, we are
not clear why some farms have a problem and some do not, but it
is recommended that farmers do their own mini trials to determine
if their farm actually requires teeth clipping or not. Obviously
we promote best practice in terms of teeth clipping because it
is an issue where different levels of skill are involved, and
there can be more problems on some farms than others where teeth
are badly clipped, as you said. That could be monitored by the
farm vet. We would not see it as a situation where it is economically
viable for a vet to be involved in teeth clipping but they can
monitor the situation, and it is that support that we would see
as particularly important. Since stalls and tethers have been
banned in the United Kingdom the number of breeding sows has fallen
by almost 40%. It is not the only factor involved but it certainly
was a significant factor in the decision by some farmers, and
we consider it is extremely important that as opinion formers
you should get the message to consumers that they should not just
make the statement that they support good welfare but they should
put that support into practice by buying products that are produced
to higher welfare standards, and that have been assured to those
standards by our farm assurance schemes.
Q248 Mr Wiggin: What about grinding of
teeth?
Mr Armstrong: The same thing;
it is down to the level of skill of the operator. In some cases
it can cause less damage but, again, care is needed and supervision
with proper training is the key factor.
Q249 Mr Wiggin: I agree with everything
you have said, but what I am concerned is that the draft Bill
is worded in such a way that the element of judgment about the
skill of the operator, whether he be a trained vet or a farmer
who has done it for 50 years, is far from clear and I do not particularly
want to see Bills going on to the statute book that put the farmer
in an impossible position. I believe this particular area is not
a function of intensity but a function of the nature of the piglet
and therefore it is something we have not got quite right in the
Bill, but again I would appreciate your views if I have got that
wrong.
Dr MacArthur Clark: It is quite
difficult to justify a five year education for a veterinary surgeon
in order to just do teeth clipping in pigs but, having said that,
there clearly is a very important training element for this and
FAWC emphasises the importance of good stockmanship which includes
good training on these types of things, wherever it is essential
to do a form of mutilation for the environment in which the animals
are kept. There are some good news items as well, though. For
example, debeaking in chickens has been a characteristic of laying
hens for quite some years, and recently the industry itself has
generated some evidence that using infra red beams to debeak is
a much better welfare system. So the technology is much better
for the animals' welfare and appears to work just as effectively.
The jury is still out a little bit on that because we have not
yet seen the final data, but it looks very promising.
Q250 Mr Wiggin: There is a fundamental,
though, between debeaking chickens which is something that you
have to do if you intensively farm, equally with tail docking
and equally with docking lambs if you are farming in lowlands,
equally docking cows—there are all sorts of real issues
on the style of farming, but this is not about that. This is about
the nature of the animal as it is born and is not something you
have been able to breed out, and therefore it is a fundamental
difference because the farmer will be prosecuted for failing to
clip teeth or not, and that is what I feel the Bill has not got
quite right.
Dr MacArthur Clark: Yes.
Q251 Chairman: I would like to put to
the Farm Animal Welfare Council a couple of detailed points arising
from your evidence. You specifically say, or question, why in
Clause 1(c) the words "the animal is a protected animal"
are required, and I wondered if you might be able to explain to
me why you question whether that part of the Bill should be there?
Dr MacArthur Clark: I was not
planning to go through detailed points of drafting at the moment.
We were thinking that the other three points would already include
that and that therefore there was no need for that section in
there.
Q252 Chairman: If you wanted to expand
on that I would be grateful. The other area which perhaps, again,
you might deal with in correspondence is you say in your evidence,
"It is a surprise that `animal' is not defined within the
Bill itself" and yet Clause 53 does appear to attempt to
do just that. You then go on to deal with an issue which other
witnesses have raised with us which is this question of vertebrates
and non vertebrates. The reason for my raising this is to ask
whether you had a fundamental disagreement with the way that the
description of an animal is dealt with in the Bill or simply whether
you felt it should be more extensive, ie to go into non vertebrate
species, and, again, perhaps you might be able to tease that out
for us in correspondence.
Dr MacArthur Clark: I would like
to return to you on those points.
Chairman: Fine. Can I thank you both
very much indeed. It has been a most interesting session and you
have given us food for thought!
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