§ MR. MCCRAE (Edinburgh, E.)On behalf of the hon. Member for East Denbighshire, I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the veterinary and other yards to which the Metropolitan Police take stray dogs are subject to any and what inspection, and if there exists any and what prescribed method of destroying such dogs; whether his attention has been called to the fact that at the yard in High Street, Bromley, a dog was recently buried alive under the mistaken belief that it had been destroyed, and that at the same yard a dog was recently destroyed by suffocation and suffered great agony during the process; and whether he proposes to take any and what action in the matter.
§ MR. AKERS-DOUGLASDogs which are seized by the Metropolitan Police within the county of London or within the limits of the Metropolitan Streets Act are conveyed by them to the Dogs Home at Battersea. The local authorities outside the County of London are the county and borough councils, who appoint their own receiving places for dogs and their own veterinary inspectors, and are solely responsible for the control and inspection of those places and for the method of destruction 281 adopted. The yard in the High Street, Bromley, is under the Kent County Council. I am informed that the dogs are never suffocated there, but they are destroyed by means of prussic acid poisoning. It appears that on the 4th August, 1904, a dog which had been so poisoned by the veterinary inspector and which apparently was dead was buried lightly in a pit, but was subsequently found to be alive and was rescued. The case was investigated by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who came to the conclusion, I understand, that no cruelty was intentionally committed, but recommended that a considerable time should elapse between the poisoning and the burial of the dog.