Well, the original post (i.e. Mark’s) said nothing about domesticated animals.
Dire’s post said that the ‘spirit of the clause’ was already covered by UK law and specifically quoted the Animal Welfare Act.
Being a pedantically minded soul, I pointed out the Animal Welfare Act does not cover ‘wild’ animals.
You quite rightly pointed out that there are other protections for various ‘wild’ species which is fair enough - there are. I never said there weren’t.
We can happily debate whether those protections are worth the paper they are written on in many cases (it does seem to have worked quite well for badgers - there’s certainly a lot more about than when I was a child) but as you say that is a different question to whether the protections exist.
The argument Caroline Lucas is making is that it took long enough to get any sort of general acceptance that animals are capable of feeling pain and that maybe we should try and minimise inflicting pain on them where possible and that having finally agreed on that, there does not seem to be any good reason why that acceptance should not be included in UK law as part of the great transposition - unless of course all the talk of using our leaving the EU to ensure that we have the highest animal welfare standards in the world is in fact complete tosh.
