I'd like to thank Andrew for bringing forward this debate. Our friendship with dogs has run across millennia and this is no way to treat them. In my constituency of Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, I am sad to say that puppy breeding is at an all-time high, and I have made it my business to get down close and personal with some of the people who do this. And I've been to puppy farms where the owner will actually say that they think they're doing a good job. And as a pet lover I walk in there and my heart does stop, because you're talking about dogs in very small cages being constantly asked to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce. It's no life for the puppies—as Andrew said, they don't get socialised—it's no life for the breeding bitches or indeed the breeding dogs.

But it's not just the puppy farms that I've been to. I also went, under disguise—I know, I'm not easy to disguise—to a rancid one, and I cannot tell you the shock and the horror that I felt when I went there. The barns with the holes in, the disuse, the rubbish, the filth, the stench—it was utterly, utterly appalling. And those sick puppies are now going to be sold to some family somewhere who are going to buy them in good faith.

And the last point I'd like to make, Cabinet Secretary, of course, is importation. Because I have also been present when a traveller's caravan was opened, that had just rolled off the ferry, at Pembroke. It was opened and I thought, 'Oh my God, what is that on the floor?' And then I realised it was seething with puppies, and they are shipped in. And they're shipped in because they make money and they're shipped in because they're a cover for other things that come in underneath them.

We have to stamp it out—it's cruel, it's inhumane. We should be better than that, and we have that opportunity. And, above all, I'll go back to what I said at the very beginning—they have become, in the heart of the nation, one of our best friends. The old turn to them when they're lonely, the kids turn to them to grow up as a playmate. Most of us have had an experience of dogs and cats. They're pets, we've loved them, we've brought them into our homes—we should treat them like family, not like this.