Welfare of Pigs (Hansard, 26 November 1997)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision with respect to the health and welfare of pigs.

This is the third in a series of Bills that I have introduced, intended to mitigate the worst excesses of factory farming. My first sought to ban the export of calves to continental veal crates. My second tried, in the wake of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis, to establish a review board charged with examining the implications of intensive farming from the point of view of both human health and animal welfare. This Bill is designed to improve the welfare of pigs. Once again I am thankful to that splendid organisation, Compassion in World Farming, for the help that it has given me.

During the past few months, there has been welcome progress regarding animal welfare. In December 1996, the European Union agreed to ban the unspeakably cruel veal crate system. Sadly, that ban does not come into force until 2007, and we must watch carefully to ensure that the factory farmers do not come up with an equally odious alternative. None the less, history has been made. For the first time, the EU has acted to outlaw a cruel rearing system. I hope that very soon, battery cages and sow stalls will be scrapped throughout Europe.

In June at Amsterdam, animals were given a new status in EC law. For the first time, they were recognised as sentient beings capable of feeling pain, not as agricultural products subject to every conceivable cruelty that human ingenuity can devise. All credit is due to my hon. Friends at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, especially to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley)—who I know has animal welfare close to his heart—for that achievement.

Our task now is to ensure that the new status that the EU now accords to animal welfare does not become empty words. The Welfare of Pigs Bill is one small step along that road.

My Bill focuses on the 13 million young pigs, aged four to six months, slaughtered each year in the United Kingdom for bacon, pork and ham. Their treatment is one of the cruellest aspects of factory farming in Britain.

Pigs are intelligent, lively, active creatures. Left to their own devices, they spend three quarters of their daylight hours rooting, foraging and exploring, all of which is denied most of today's pigs, which are reared with a ruthless contempt for their well-being. Factory-farmed pigs spend their entire life indoors in barren, overcrowded sheds, without once experiencing fresh air or daylight until the day they are carted off to the slaughterhouse. Mostly, they are given no straw or other bedding. Instead, they are kept on bare concrete or slatted or perforated floors, which leads to lameness and damaged feet.

Lack of straw, combined with serious overcrowding, prevents pigs from engaging in natural behaviour. They cannot root, forage, explore or play. In order to find an outlet for those frustrated instincts, the pigs—whose pens are often devoid of any object—sometimes resort to chewing and biting one another's tails. My Bill seeks to put a stop to that. It provides, first, that indoor-reared pigs must be given ample space and appropriate bedding.

977 The second evil to which I seek to put a stop is forcible early weaning. In natural conditions, pigs are not weaned until they are between 13 and 17 weeks old, but on most of today's farms they are weaned at just three and a half weeks—the very point when their consumption of their mother's milk is at its height. That is done solely for the purpose of enabling sows to be made pregnant again at the earliest opportunity—in other words, it is all about profit without regard to the suffering inflicted.

Early weaning invariably inflicts stress on pigs. Specifically, a pig that has been weaned early still wants to suckle and, no longer having its mother's teat, turns to its neighbour's tail. My Bill prohibits early weaning. It stipulates that piglets must not be weaned until they are at least six weeks old. Ideally, it should be much later, but I am attempting to meet the industry halfway.

Thirdly, my Bill deals with tail docking. As we have seen, three factors—lack of straw, overcrowding and early weaning—combine to encourage tail biting. The consequences are serious. Wounds can become infected, resulting in abscesses and adding to the misery already inflicted on young pigs by the appalling conditions in which many of them are reared.

To a layman, the obvious solution would be to improve the conditions to the point at which tail biting was no longer a problem. Agribusiness, needless to say, has come up with a different answer. Having created the conditions in which tail biting is bound to thrive, the factory farmers introduce one of their cruellest tortures: they slice off piglets' tails with pliers or a hot docking iron. It goes without saying that no anaesthetic is used. That practice is supposed to be outlawed by the Welfare of Livestock Regulations 1994, but they have been largely ignored, as have calls for the practice to cease, which have come from the Farm Animal Welfare Council. About 70 per cent. of piglets still have their tails docked in that way.

978 The time has come to stop pig fanners behaving as if they were above the law. In its 1996 document, "New Life for Animals", the Labour party said that it would enforce the law to end tail docking. As far I am aware, not a single offender has yet been prosecuted. I should be grateful to hear from the Minister what plans he has for enforcing the law. To assist him, my Bill strengthens the current law and tightens up poor drafting that contains some unacceptable loopholes.

It will be alleged that the pressures of the market leave agribusiness with no choice but to inflict cruelty on farm animals. It is time that that myth was exploded. I draw the attention of the House to a report entitled "Factory Farming and The Myth of Cheap Food", which was recently published by the Compassion in World Farming Trust and which explodes the lie that factory farming has given us cheap food. The report makes it clear, using data from the Meat and Livestock Commission, that free-range pork and bacon are just as cheap to produce as meat from factory-farmed pigs. It is time for the pig industry to clean up its act, and I commend the Bill to the House.