Non-stun Slaughter of Animals

[Sir Henry Bellingham in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered non-stun slaughter of animals.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this issue, which is of concern to me personally, as well as many of my constituents and the wider public. I thank the British Veterinary Association for campaigning on this issue and its guidance ahead of this debate. I declare that I am an honorary member of the BVA, for which there is no reward other than regular contact, which is available to all hon. Members. Many constituents have contacted me on this subject, including quite a few from the farming community.

Like many other people I am a consumer of meat and an animal lover, and I do not believe those two positions are mutually exclusive. A discussion of the non-stun slaughter of animals must be based not on strength of feeling, but on evidence. Having considered some of the evidence, I feel that there is a strong case to be made for the banning of non-stun slaughter. The BVA believes

“that slaughter without pre-stunning unnecessarily compromises animal welfare and that animals should be stunned before slaughter.”

Does my hon. Friend agree that the situation could be vastly improved in the short term by changing our labelling laws and requiring products to be labelled to show whether stunning has taken place? Does he further agree that one benefit of leaving the EU is regaining control of our food-labelling laws?

I agree with my right hon. Friend on both of those points. I will come on to say more about the former point; I suspect that I will be called out of order if I go too far down the latter.

Like the hon. Gentleman, I eat red meat regularly and I am also an animal lover. However, I do believe we can accommodate people. If we had the labelling to indicate whether stunning was used, people would have the opportunity to choose whether to buy that meat.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments.

Pre-stunning renders animals immediately unconscious and insensible to pain before they are slaughtered. In the absence of stunning, animals can feel the pain of the neck cut, experience a delay to loss of consciousness and experience the pain and distress of aspirating blood into the respiratory tract. While there is no nice way to end an animal’s life, many would agree that that is a particularly distressing account of the last moments of an animal’s life.

I understand what my hon. Friend is saying about stunning, but unfortunately, it does not always work. Something like 26,000 cattle, 100,000 pigs and 9.5 million chickens are mis-stunned each year. How do we solve that problem?

My hon. Friend raises a good and important point. I do not pretend for one moment that the practice is absolutely perfect. It does need to be improved, but the objective should be to go down that road, rather than have animals slaughtered without stunning. He raises a perfectly good point.

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that on many occasions stunning involves sending a very strong electric shock to the animal, which can suffer for about 20 or 25 minutes while it is being made unconscious, causing excruciating pain?

That should not be the case, but if it is, that practice needs outlawing as well.

I will give way as often as I am requested to do so. However, I am not yet on my second page. I am sure you will agree, Sir Henry, that time is limited as this is a half-hour debate and we have already used five minutes. I will give way to the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), then the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) and then my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann).

I will be brief. Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that one way to deal with this issue is to look at labelling from the potential of blockchain technology, which could provide complete traceability within the system and help to identify those abattoirs that are identified as having those issues, thus putting consumer power at the heart of the process?

That is a good point. I will come on to say that all this needs discussing in detail.

Many of my constituents have contacted me about this issue. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the traditional methods of slaughter, which are used in the Muslim and Jewish religions, are in fact more humane than some of the modern practices, which either do not work properly or do not give due consideration to the welfare of the animal?

That point has been raised with me. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman has seen appendix one to the briefing from the BVA, which gives quite a bit of distressing evidence about the non-stun slaughter of animals. Let us try to move on.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this debate and taking my intervention. Does he agree that many residents in my constituency want proper labelling—as has been mentioned—so that they can make a conscious choice about how their animals are killed? I am a great believer in labelling, and I hope that the Minister is listening. We should push for better labelling for slaughtered animals.