Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:06 pm on 19 June 2018.
I'm not going to repeat, obviously, everything that people have said, but I particularly want to support what David Melding has said about, particularly, people who have had animals for a long time, and those animals are ageing, and are being subject, really, to a death sentence, because nobody will take them on.
But I also want to focus on the whole intention of what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is advising people how to look after their animals in the right and most appropriate way. Yet, I did a very quick survey myself, and found that not many people knew we were doing this. They didn't actually know anything about this code of practice for companion animals amongst the general public, and I think that we need to do a piece of work, whether it's us or others.
But there is an area I want to focus on, and Vikki Howells has alluded to it, and that is dog fighting. Dog fighting isn't only bad for the animals, which of course it clearly is, but it is a whole network wrapped up, very often, with criminal activity, betting, drinking and also drug taking. It is very prevalent, I have been informed, in certain areas of Wales, and we really ought to be tackling this head on, because it is one of the worst crimes against the animal, and it has almost, in some places, become quite acceptable behaviour.
This is going to sound odd, but I'm going to bring in another area that I think we ought to think about when we're thinking about animal welfare. We also need to think about what we buy in our pet shops that might affect the ecology elsewhere, and I'm talking particularly here about tropical fish and whether we need to do a little bit of work around—because there is evidence coming out—the major damage to coral reefs because people are just simply going in to grab the fish that exist there, for people to somehow sit and look at in their tanks at home. The evidence has really come out of that Disney film, Finding Nemo, and people's children wanting a fish that looks just like that. So, there is a wider debate here, when we look at animal welfare, about the destruction that, very often, what we buy is affecting communities, quite seriously, elsewhere.