S4M-09418 Animal Rights and Human Responsibilities

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Elaine Smith): The next item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-09418, in the name of Christine Grahame, on animal rights and human responsibilities. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.

Motion debated,

That the Parliament considers that companion animals, farmed animals and wild creatures are sentient beings whose contribution to communities and the environment should be recognised and celebrated; acknowledges, in particular, the positive role of pets in the lives of children and adults throughout Scotland, including in Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale, and the comfort and assistance that they provide for many people who have difficulty with vision, hearing, mobility or socialising, and affirms that animals need and deserve the best possible welfare standards appropriate for their species whenever they are bred, reared, traded or kept.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP): I congratulate Christine Grahame on securing the debate and on arranging the spectacularly interesting and engaging display that we have in two locations in Holyrood. I am slightly worried that my two cats, Malcolm and Donald, will hold me to account for submitting their photograph without their permission, but I guess that I will just need to live with that.

As he did on many subjects, Winston Churchill had something to say on the subject of animals. He said:

“Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

He was a great fan of pigs. Like millions of others, I am a lower form of being, and am at the bottom of the pecking order—certainly in our house.

When Christine Grahame said that we are a wee bit higher up the evolutionary scale, I am not sure that she is correct. The fruit fly has eight chromosomes and man has 46. However, hermit crabs have 254 and the Ophioglossum fern has 768. More fundamentally, the Oxytricha trifallax has 15,600 chromosomes—2,000 copies of each of them in a single cell. Perhaps that animal does not engage with us because it is so intelligent. We will never know—it is not interested in the lower form of being that we are.

The motion talks about farmed animals and wild creatures, but I do not think that anyone has said much about wild creatures so far. Where I live, we have badgers about 400m away. We have roe deer—we once had 20 of them in the garden. We have foxes and weasels—I have seen a weasel drag off a young rabbit about 10 times its size. Of course, we also have those interlopers that the Normans brought about 1,000 years ago: rabbits.

In the country, we also have lots of farmed animals of one sort or another. All those farmed, wild and companion animals occupy important ecological niches and interact with each other.

Alex Fergusson rightly referred to hearing dogs, and we have dogs that help people without sight. We also have dogs that look after people with failing mental faculties and keep them from danger. Animals are a very important part of many people’s lives. The widowed or deserted can have long conversations with their companions, maintaining mental alertness, and the daily walk with a dog maintains physical fitness in many of our older people.

A well-cared-for, well-regarded animal companion who has been trained to understand proper relations with humans—it may be boisterous but may not bite—can gain, just as we do. We protect such animals from hunger, disease, debility and danger. We also have duties to them. We must keep the sheep from the goats—Ezekiel 34:17, in the Bible, makes reference to that practice from many years ago. Specifically, we have a duty to neuter our cats, as our failure to neuter an adequately high proportion of our cats is diluting the stock of Scottish wildcats to the point that there are now fewer pure-bred wildcats left than even the threatened Bengal tiger.

I will close by illustrating one businesslady’s attitude to her animals. Halfway between here and my home in Banffshire is Peggy Scott’s restaurant on the A90. Unless they have talked to the owner, few people will realise that Dawn Scott always names her businesses after her pets. Peggy Scott is actually a wee dug, and she has her own restaurant.

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