UK government votes that animals are incapable of feeling emotion and pain

boing
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The act applies only to ‘protected’ animals which means animals of a kind commonly domesticated in the UK and/or those under the control of man or “not living in a wild state”.

So all of what you quoted does not apply to ‘wild’ animals.

Which leads me to suspect one of the reasons for not including the requirement was… fox hunting.

Yet again. For some reason the conservative party has an obsession with removing the ban on hunting with dogs.

Which is an odd thing because all the people I know who actually go hunting couldn’t care less about the ban on hunting with dogs being repealed. They’ve quite happily accommodated themselves to the new legal landscape and don’t really want to go back to the previous set-up.

For those interested in the actual debate in Parliament:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2017-11-15/debates/7A700C0E-8BA2-4EEC-B53D-997028C06900/EuropeanUnion(Withdrawal)Bill

starting at column 471, 7:00pm.

It contains this wonderful bit of arse-creepery:

Summary

Sir Oliver Letwin

Well, we must leave it to Ministers to speak for themselves, but I have to say that the discussions that I and others had with the Secretary of State, who, as people have remarked in this debate, is of a very different cast of mind from some previous Secretaries of State, suggest to me that actually there will be an environmental protection Bill coming forward. I think that is—[Interruption.] Ah! Maestro! With perfect timing my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State comes into the Chamber, at just the right moment for him to signify with a nod, if nothing more, that the possibility of proper environmental legislation in the form of a new statute is on his mind.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Michael Gove)

indicated assent.

Sir Oliver Letwin

And his mind is one that is capable of grasping these matters, if ever the mind of a Member of the House of Commons was. The first point, then, is that a proper statutory basis is superior to a specific amendment to the Bill.

Bear in mind this is Michael Gove he is talking about…

So, the argument in Parliament is that the EU Repeal Bill is not the place to enshrine this protection because:

a) domestic law already does (well, no it doesn’t.) and/or;
b) the right place to do it is in a separate environment bill where it can be debated properly. (Because of course recognising the sentience of other beings is something that really does need several hours of intense debate.)

and not at all to do with keeping the barriers to removing/reducing environmental protections as low as possible. /s

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To think that animals don’t feel pain or have emotions is some sort of WILLFUL lack of empathy. Actually, I think that animals provide a kind of smudgy mirror through which we can use view the non-rational parts of our own emotional life. We tend to rationalize our emotional responses, but since animals lack language or much rational ability, when their responses are similar to ours, we can assume that our responses are similary non-rational in origin. Of course animals emotional responses are often different, as they have evolved to provoke different behaviors.

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I’d have moved to Scotland a few years ago if i had viable means to, it does certainly seem to be the part of the UK that has most resisted being turned into a horrible Tory dystopian fiction.

Alas, i’m stuck here for many years minimum, i’m just thankful that although my job is rather crappy, at least it’s a fairly secure one.

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Your “reason” and “reading comprehension” have no place here!

The Farm, immediately.

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… same as the old one…

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There are many protected wild animals in the UK, for example badgers, bats, owls, reptiles etc.

http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-3408 for a spreadsheet of 1000’s of various protected species.

You may be right about foxes though.

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No, it’s primarily a demonstration of lack of class or basic manners. Though the arrogance of the action is involved closely with smug self-importance, and that ties directly to insecurity.

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This just in, Congress votes that cheese and sausage is delicious.

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Attached to a bill further immiserating the poor no doubt.

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Yes, as the_borderer pointed out badgers are not perhaps the best example. Neither are bats, owls, etc. since developers hate them and lobby incessantly to minimise any protective measures intended to preserve habitats in the face of the desire to put up some more over-priced battery-homes.

I think the fundamental point on this one is one of the points made by Caroline Lucas. If the animal sentience bit is covered by UK law already or it’s going to be included in other legislation, then there is no good reason for not including one line in the Repeal Bill to confirm that.

The only reason to waste parliamentary time preventing that from happening is that those opposing it think it is not already covered and do not intend for it to be covered by any future legislation.

If it were a non-issue, one would simply say one thinks it’s already covered but in the interest of moving the bill on, put the amendment to a vote and get on with something else.

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Badgers are a protected species. Developers may want to kill them but that is illegal. Even working close to a badger sett is illegal without a licence.
Plans that are available to the public are not even permitted to show locations of badger setts in order to protect them.
I’m not saying their protection is absolute, like say a persons, but it does require parliamentary legislation to make a cull legal. I’m not in favor of culls btw as I don’t believe they work in terms of TB in cattle.
The original post made the claim that only domesticated animals are protected by law and that’s clearly incorrect.

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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.

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Thanks for this.

My initial reading of the story agreed with a couple of others - that they weren’t enshrining a “the sky is blue” type fact in law, which makes sense.

But politics, it turns out, is political.

What strikes me about this process of reconciling EU and UK law is that there doesn’t seem to be a default setting. We can’t read the decision to maintain an EU provision in UK law as a kind of neutral, status quo preserving action. We also can’t read a decision to not bring an EU provision into UK law as a neutral, this-was-the-point-of-brexit action.

The me the biggest test, if they are referring back to 2006 legislation is to ask what the present state of animal welfare in the UK is. If that 2006 law is working well then I don’t think that dropping the EU provision will necessarily have much of an impact since the people who enforce and promote compliance with that law probably aren’t going to chance what they are doing. But for people who are concerned about the current state of animal welfare, the government using Brexit to signal that they aren’t taking a strong stance in favour of animal welfare is a big, legitimate concern.

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Yes, it is an ‘interesting’ process.

The default is supposed to be maintaining the current EU law. Which will then be reviewed and amended to suit us in our new state of freedom™ as and when parliamentary time allows.

That is certainly one part of what people are concerned about.

The other part is that even where current UK law provisions are fine, being a member of the EU and having to maintain at least their standards on things and having the ECJ to decide whether provisions did meet the standards, etc. made it a lot harder for politicians to reduce protections in all sorts of areas.

Now that we leave the EU, the concern is obviously that the government is not more likely to increase protections (since despite what they would like to tell us in most cases you are perfectly free to provide for higher standards and protections than EU law requires). The inference has to be that leaving the EU provides greater opportunity to reduce protections.

One area causing a lot of concern (especially for me) is employment law. There are any number of provisions (many of which UK governments actually pushed for - as with a lot of EU law) which are very unpopular with some businesses and a lot of the current crop of politicians.

Conservative governments have frequently bemoaned the fact that EU law prevents them from accommodating the needs of business/making things easier for their cronies (delete whichever suits the reader’s political preferences :slight_smile:).

This is a relatively recent example under the Tory/LibDem coalition which gives a reasonable idea of the sort of aims they would like to achieve:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31583/12-825-report-on-employment-law-beecroft.pdf

Animal welfare is another example. One of the things that held up TTIP was the US’s comparatively terrible food standards provisions. Not surprisingly EU farmers (and consumers) weren’t keen to have their market flooded by US standard foodstuffs.

We tend to prefer rather fewer chemicals in our food (or at least different ones). We’re not keen on GM foodstuffs being included in our food without at least telling us about it and so on.

Once we’re out of the EU, we will of course be free to do our own trade deal with the US (which we are reliably assured your president is only waiting to hand us).

The concern that perhaps our politicians won’t be too keen to jeopardise any deal by insisting on not allowing the US to say flood our markets with chlorinated chicken or pigs pumped full of antibiotics is quite high and I think realistic.

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It wasn’t about stating a scientific conclusion. This is all that it said:

In formulating and implementing the Union’s agriculture, fisheries, transport, internal market, research and technological development and space policies, the Union and the Member States shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals, while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the Member States relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage.

Religious conservatives, when they object to something as innocuous as “since animals are sentient beings” due to a fear of evolution, are being anti-scientific. But they and their allies may use arguments similar to yours to justify opposition, casting it as something for scientists to decide, so that the law doesn’t touch the matter. (So watch out for that.) What does it mean for a mind to perceive, to feel? Under what circumstances should we prohibit or criminalize the causing of pain in the mind of an animal? (And guiding statements are often part of the basic law of a country/union.) It’s just science?

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Yup.

The statement is part of one of the founding treaties of the European Union. The bill transposing current EU law into UK domestic law is exactly where it should be.

The statement they were being asked to transpose was already about the most anodyne statement on the issue it’s possible to imagine since it leaves full room for kosher and halal slaughtering, fox hunting, bull fighting, the “running of the bulls” and any other sort of cultural or religious practice.

If they’re not prepared to include that, what would they agree to?

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