Fur Trade

Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) for securing such an important debate.

I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and my hon. Friend the Minister on their work so far in leading the way on tackling animal cruelty. However, we still have a long way to go. As an animal lover, vegetarian and lifelong animal rights activist, and as a compassionate human being, I urge the Minister to listen intently to the strong messages in this Chamber, coming from across the parties, in support of a ban.

I was pleased when fur farming was banned in England and Wales in 2000, and in Scotland in 2002. However, as we have discussed, fur products can still be legally imported from other countries and sold in the UK. In my opinion, the use of fur in 2018 is unnecessary and cruel. The fur trade is responsible for the suffering and death of more than 100 million animals each year—the figure was 135 million in 2015. The majority of the fur —about 85%—is produced by intensively farming animals in battery cage systems, as has been described.

Humane Society International has documented the conditions in which the majority of the animals are kept. I will touch on just a few points. As we have said, animals kept in battery cages on a fur farm are “at best” restrained for their whole lives in wire-floored cages hundreds of thousands of times smaller than their natural territory. They are denied their most basic behavioural needs. Many are killed by gassing or electrocution. Remember that those are the “best” conditions. Examples of the worst conditions of animal suffering in fur farms involve such things as cannibalism, poor psychological wellbeing, untreated wounds, deformities and injuries, and animals having been selectively bred to grow to unnaturally large sizes, with excessive folds of skin, which yield more fur. Then, finally, they are often brutally beaten and stamped to death, and some are even skinned alive.

Shockingly, 100 million animals every year live their entire lives in the barbaric conditions described. In the UK, leghold traps have been banned since 1958 because of their inhumaneness: animals caught in those traps suffer intense pain and injuries until the trapper returns to kill them. However, the three largest exporters of fur—Russia, Canada and the United States—have not banned the use of leghold traps, even though they are banned in the EU.

In 2016 the value of the fur imported into the UK was £55.6 million. The UK has some of the strongest animal welfare protections in the world. However, all we have done, as my hon. Friends have said, is outsource animal suffering to other countries. The only way to end the trade is to ban the sale of fur in the UK.

According to a 2018 YouGov poll, there is now major public backing for a ban; 69% of those participating supported a ban. I am pleased to say that 153 people in my constituency of Morley and Outwood have signed this petition and agree with me that we need a ban on the farming of wild animals in tiny wire cages, as it is demonstrably inhumane. There is no need for it in 21st-century Britain.

As I said, the Secretary of State has shown real leadership when it comes to banning ivory, introducing CCTV in slaughterhouses and cleaning up our oceans. I hope that he and his Ministers see the need to tackle this animal cruelty. In my opinion, by not banning fur, we are inadvertently condoning it by allowing it to be imported from other countries.

Sale of Puppies

Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Austin. I thank the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for introducing the debate following the fantastic public response to the e-petition. I will keep my speech as short as possible, because several Members want to speak about this important issue.

It must be said that the leadership on animal welfare by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been nothing short of remarkable. The Government are doing great things to tackle the scourge of plastic, deliver cleaner air and water, impose one of the toughest ivory bans in the world, and raise animal welfare standards by introducing mandatory CCTV in slaughterhouses. I congratulate the Secretary of State and the Government on their commitment to animal welfare and the environment, and I hope that they lead the way on this issue, too.

As an animal rights campaigner, a vegetarian and a passionate dog lover and owner, I was proud to see that 229 of my constituents had added their names to the petition. I am pleased that so many of them feel so strongly about the important issue of puppy farming, which I first became aware of back in 2015, a few months after I was elected. That year, I co-hosted an event in Parliament with Marc Abraham of Pup Aid, at which we screened a film about the horrors of the industry.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in paying tribute to Marc Abraham—Marc the vet—who has done so much to get a united voice on what needs to be done and to encourage our residents to engage positively to support us in pushing the Government in this important area?

[Andrea Jenkyns]

My hon. Friend stole what I was going to say. I am sure every Member in the Chamber pays tribute to Marc. His passion has been second to none, so I thank him for all of his hard work.

After an initial meeting with Pup Aid, I discovered to my horror that my own dog, Godiva, was probably born on a puppy farm in Lincolnshire. The pet outlet in Lincolnshire where I purchased her looked clean and sanitary, and everything seemed in order. However, who knows what conditions Godiva’s mother was kept in? That is the problem with the current legislation. Many of us have an idea of what constitutes animal cruelty—beatings, abuse and dog fighting—and we now see that as wrong. We have, correctly, legislated to stop such inhumane practices, to protect dogs and other animals from being abused by their owners. Without a doubt, we as a society have come far on animal welfare. However, there is still much more to be done.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that by animal cruelty we mean not just beatings, thumpings and all the other terrible things that go on, but pure ignorance? People sometimes get hold of dogs, horses or animals generally and do not know how to look after them. Not long ago, I visited many residences with the RSPCA and saw people who were unable to look after their animals.

[Andrea Jenkyns]

I agree. I, too, have been out on the beat, so to speak, with our local RSPCA and have seen the conditions in which some poor animals live. My hon. Friend is right: education can do a lot to help tackle that.

Lucy, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, endured a miserable start to her life. Her poor body had been ravaged after cruel puppy farmers, eager to sell as many young as they could in the pursuit of profit and greed, forced her to go through an obscene number of pregnancies. Vets advise that dogs should have only four litters in their lifetime and reproduce no more than once every year, but by the time Lucy had become useless to her breeders at the age of five, she would have had up to 10 litters, with her puppies ripped from her at four weeks—half the time recommend by vets. After having spent so much time pregnant in a tiny cage, Lucy could barely walk. Her hair was missing in patches and matted beyond repair, while her balding skin was raw from the ammonia burns she suffered from living continuously in her own urine and faeces.

Lucy’s law seeks a ban on the sale of puppies by pet shops and all third-party dealers, and states that all puppies should be seen with their mum when they are bought, in order for the transaction to be legal. It also seeks a ban on third-party or commercial sellers who remove puppies from their mother before they are sold, and transparency in the system to protect puppies from illegal farming and prevent mothers from being overbred. I fully support all of those measures, as some puppy breeders and dealers clearly do not have the dog’s welfare at heart.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I believe that Godiva has previously won Westminster dog of the year, along with her friend, so it is good to have an update on her. Does the hon. Lady agree that one particular problem is that people are not aware of where popular dogs, such as French bulldogs, are coming from? They are paying huge amounts of money, assuming—because of the cost—that their dog will have been well treated. People going for those popular, fashionable dogs need to be particularly vigilant.

[Andrea Jenkyns]

I wholeheartedly agree. As I said, when I bought Godiva, I made that mistake: having paid £550 for her, I thought she would have been from a decent, legitimate organisation, but clearly that was not the case.

Lucy died in December 2016, and I am happy to say that her later years were happier than her beginnings. We must do more to save countless other animals from suffering similar horrors to Lucy. Pup Aid has been campaigning on overbreeding of females since 2009, and I would like to take this opportunity to again congratulate Marc Abraham on his hard work on the campaign, as well as Lisa Garner, who is present and who rescued Lucy and ensured that she had a good end to her life.

As the hon. Lady has said, the public clearly remain naive to the horrors of the puppy farming trade, and that is why legislation is necessary to protect not just the puppies but their mothers as well as the public from facilitating this abhorrent trade.

[Lyn Brown]

A number of people have talked to me about how they were taken in by the sob stories of families in a flat who could no longer take a puppy so they had to give it away, with children roped into a farce and deception. We all need to be aware of the lengths to which people will go to exploit not only the animal but the person they are selling to, but the Government really need to legislate to give us the teeth so that we can keep them all safe.

[Andrea Jenkyns]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. I remind everyone that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling) has said, education is key to moving forward and ensuring that we save as many animals as possible.