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Lord Hoyle: My Lords, I explained that only 6 per cent of foxes are actually killed by fox hounds; 94 per cent are already killed by other methods. So what difference would that make?
The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford: My Lords, I take the noble Lord's point. But I think that a lot of evidence would suggest that the culling of foxes, particularly through shooting, is indeed a very hazardous and imprecise method of control.
The second principle that I want to underline is that human beings demean themselves as well as animals if they cause wanton cruelty to animals or act against the long-term well-being of the animal species. Here the question of motive is vital. In the main, the dominant motive of the hunt and the hunter is not the prospect of the killing of the fox, but rather the social interaction, the relationship with the countryside, the exhilaration, the challenge and risk of jumping dangerously over fences and hedges. Are we not in danger of creating a sanitised society?
Where I now live in East Anglia there have been significant changes in hunting practice since the Independent Supervisory Authority for Hunting was formed. Hunts no longer meet in places where they could cause inconvenience to local people. They no longer meet at pubs alongside busy roads or where they could cause congestion in the middle of small towns or villages. They generally meet at farms or
private houses off the road. Hunt boxes are no longer parked where they can cause inconvenience or traffic congestion. Field masters who are in charge of the mounted followers take care that they should not ride on public footpaths to avoid cutting up the ground and making it inconvenient for those walking in the countryside. Great care is exercised to prevent hounds from running across busy roads and into people's gardens and other public places. These and other changes since self-regulation came into being strengthen the confidence that the middle way is the one to pursue.The hunting debate needs surely to be seen within the overall care of rural Britain. Fox hunting cannot, I believe, be seen in isolation from the total picture of our responsibility as co-partners with God the creator, for the stewardship and care of our countryside.
As we well know, many people who live and work in rural areas have taken devastating knocks in recent years and not only through the consequences of the outbreak of foot and mouth. In the countryside there is a widespread and growing feeling of being beleaguered, of alienation from urban dwellers. As one farmer's wife put it to me the other day, "We can't seem to see any light at the end of the tunnel". The noble Lord, Lord Rees-Mogg, expressed aptly in The Times yesterday this need to relate the urban to the rural, the need to respect our different communities. He put it this way:
- "Britain is committed to a pluralist society; we have many different communities, some with their own faiths, some with ritual methods of slaughter, all with their own pattern of life, all with their own values. The only way this can be made to work is by mutual respect, community to community, majority to minorities. A nation which refuses respect to the community of the countryside will not be able to hold together all the other communities of modern Britain".
In conclusion, I ask the question: is there not a very real danger that this whole debate will obscure wider and, I suggest, even more important issues concerned with animal welfare? As I have indicated, I shall vote for the middle way, but I am even more concerned about the conditions under which live animals are transported hundreds of miles across Europe, often without food and water, to be met at the end of their horrendous ordeal with a death that is far less humane than the one suffered by the fox.
4.27 p.m.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, in preparation for this debate I looked at what I feel about animals in all the various ways in which we use them and relate to them. I find that I am remarkably inconsistent. I am a mess of emotions, prejudices and particular feelings and experiences. That is probably the way most people feel. It is the human condition. It is something that we should not seek to alter. But I think that we can reasonably ask for consistency of government.
When we look at all the existing legislation and practice in the ways that we deal with animals it is clear that there is a lot to be done to improve the level of consistency across our general practice. There is a general pattern. Apart from those who oppose the use of animals in any form whatever—they certainly have a defensible and honourable stance—most of us are prepared to do harm to animals in return for a benefit to us.
The most obvious example is the use of animals as food. We kill millions of animals every week in order that we may eat them. By and large we seek to impose standards on the way we keep them. We demand that animals are kept in reasonable conditions. We do not look too closely. I do not think that many people who enjoy chicken have spent much time on a battery farm. The average chicken that we eat lives six weeks from the moment it hatches from the egg to the moment it is flung into a small cage packed tightly with other chickens so that they break their legs on the way to the abattoir. That is not a nice life. It is not a fulfilling life. I am sorry that the promoter of the Welfare of Ducks Bill is not with us today. That Bill seeks to tackle a small part of the problems we impose on poultry. There are many other animals where perhaps we could look more honestly at the cruelty we impose as part of the process that we require in order to have cheap food at supermarkets.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford has drawn attention to another of these aspects; that of transport. Over time, in blind accordance with European regulations, we have reduced enormously in number our local abattoirs. That was done from a misguided thought that we would thereby increase the safety of our food. The result has been a great increase in the harm done to, and discomfort suffered by, animals sent to abattoirs, along with an increased danger of food poisoning. In those large abattoirs, disease has proved much harder to control. When outbreaks do occur, they are much larger than ever they were in the little back premises of the village butcher down the road. At least there you knew which animal you were buying.
At the moment I serve on a committee which is looking at the use of animals in research. In the course of scientific research, things are done to animals which would lead to those involved serving very long prison sentences if such things were done in any other context. We are prepared to expose animals to the extremities of discomfort in order to avoid exposing ourselves to a chemical which might do us some harm. Animals are dosed to the point where they can take no more and where their suffering is extreme. When we want to find out how the nervous system operates, the heads of rats are cut open and electrodes are put on what is inside. Those rats are then left alive and unanaesthetised for months, simply so that we can see what is happening. We benefit from such research, but in the main I do not think that we appreciate the extremities to which we expose, if not the majority, at least some of the animals which are subjected to research.
I turn to pest control. If you have a mouse problem, you get the mouse man in and the mice go away. We do not think any more deeply on the matter than that. Warfarin does not result in a "fun" death, the common form of control. If we consumed warfarin, we would take hours to die in agony and discomfort. Where rodents have learned to avoid the poison, we put down mouse papers, sticky pads which, when a mouse comes along, will hold fast its foot. More often than not, the mouse will tear itself free, leaving behind a leg. It then wanders off to die in great pain elsewhere. We do this to avoid a bit of mouse shit in the cornflakes, to avoid an animal with which we have evolved and survived over thousands of generations. Such practices are of relatively little benefit to us but mean a great deal of suffering for a mouse.
Many of us are prepared to keep cats as pets. I keep one myself. We are happy with the consequences; namely, that hundreds of millions of wild mammals and birds are killed every year by cats. When feeling so inclined, cats will kill with great cruelty, playing with their victims for half an hour or so with no great difficulty. We are happy to allow our cats to exercise their natures in that way. But when it comes to allowing dogs to exercise their natural instincts as pack hunting animals, we seem to think that that is something extraordinary and horrible. A little consistency would not go amiss here.
In his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said that "thou shall not kill for pleasure". That is a reasonable position if taken consistently. However, what I find hard to understand or to deal with is that there are those who say that about fox hunting, but then go out fishing. If fox hunting was conducted in the same way as fishing, it would be an extraordinary sport. We would gather up 100 or so foxes in a little fenced field. We would throw over baited hooks and we would play them for 10 to 20 minutes, pulling at a hook in each fox's mouth which would cause great pain. Eventually we would exhaust them, whereupon we would haul them in and hit them on the head.
How someone can think reasonably that in this country we should introduce laws to ban fox hunting but that we should not tackle the cruelty of fishing is quite extraordinary. In another place, the main proponents of the legislation are fishermen. That, too, I find extraordinary. They should look harder at what they themselves do before they look at what other people are doing. They should recognise that a parallel may be drawn, in particular in an area where both groups are doing much the same thing. They are gaining pleasure, if not from killing—the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, was wrong in that—then from the hunt.
There is a great difference between hunting an animal and killing it. The noble Lord might well take a fish out of a bowl and hit it on the head, but that would not be fishing. The difference is bred into us because we are hunting animals. All societies and many, many people take pleasure in the hunt. I myself take a great deal of pleasure from hunting animals and consider it a noble part of my make-up. I am not in the least ashamed of it; it is a part of being human.
However, as already pointed out, at its edges the hunt can descend into cruelty. A fox let loose in a barnyard full of chickens will eat one and kill all the rest for the sheer pleasure of killing. In the past people on the edges of hunting have done many things which were cruel. The noble Lord mentioned bear baiting. Indeed, hedgehog football was only recently outlawed. But the fact that hunting can become cruel does not mean that we have to regard all forms of hunting as automatically cruel. Those of us who are prepared to admit to taking pleasure in the hunting instinct must look at those activities in which we do not participate—I am neither a hare courser nor a hunter of foxes—in parallel with those in which we ourselves indulge.
If we can accept that, in the widest sense, human beings are hunting animals and should be allowed to exercise that instinct, then we have to look at each particular case on its own merits. We must look at what benefits are derived and what harm is done; what benefits are brought to the countryside and its economy and what costs are borne by the way in which an animal is treated. Such problems do not call for a ban to be imposed on one particular practice; rather they should be addressed by a well thought-through Bill which I hope we shall see in due course from the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. That should come to pass once all the consultations being undertaken on the welfare of animals have been completed.
I hope that we shall be offered legislation that looks consistently across the spectrum at what we do to animals. Similarly, I hope that we shall be able to move away from involving the courts or other judicial mechanisms in deciding when and under what circumstances a particular practice is or is not reasonable.
It is reasonable for us today to look at what the Commons have decided and to say, "Yes, we understand those emotions". However, in fairness to everyone and in pursuit of a law which all will feel provides an honest reflection of the ways in which we conduct ourselves as well as the ways in which we want others to conduct themselves, then today we should vote for the middle way. I did so on the last occasion. This time, I hope that I shall be able to take with me enough of my noble friends to make that Motion the one which is carried rather than the outright defence of hunting.
4.39 p.m.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, I rise as speaker number 39 in a cast list of 45. Noble Lords are quite right: there can be very little new that could be used in the argument. The last occasion on which I spoke towards the end of a debate was around three years ago. At the time I was the 182nd speaker out of a cast list of 190. That took place at 2.30 in the morning when we were debating the future of the hereditary peerage. I was as proud then as I am now to have the opportunity to express an opinion—not as an expert, not as a participant but as someone who has the chance to express an opinion on what he has felt all his life was either right or wrong. I shall not go into the
detail of the arguments. I come to this issue in the way I came to the issue of the hereditary peerage—with emotion and the belief that it was wrong.
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