Of course animals are sentient - but the Animal Welfare Bill will become a battering ram for militant activists

The ground is being laid for exactly the expansion of bureaucratic, non-parliamentary power that Brexit was supposed to counter

Do animals have feelings? “Feelings” is a tricky word in this context because it has such strong human connotations. It encompasses love, grief, joy, regret, wonder, humour, envy, pity, selfishness, pride and much more. It is a mistake to equate human emotions with animal ones.

All the same, the short answer to my question is “Yes”. Despite differences of degree – can one equate a lobster with a labrador or a dungbeetle with a donkey? – the essential point is that animals are sentient beings. Mammals, in particular, can demonstrably feel pain and pleasure. And while one must guard against sentimentality, those of us who know dogs well speak of them showing love for us. More arguably, the same can be said about horses. (I decline to enter into correspondence about cats.)

Since animals can feel pleasure and pain, human beings must act accordingly – taking care not to inflict needless pain. They must mind about animal welfare, not only because high standards will produce better eggs, meat, milk, leather, wool and so on, but also because of a deeper duty to living creatures.

So it might seem uncontroversial that the Government will introduce its Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill in Parliament next week. The Bill will “make provision for an Animal Sentience Committee” which will monitor “the effect of government policy on the welfare of animals as sentient beings”.

One should always ask, however, whether any piece of new legislation is needed. If there is no need, there should be no legislation. The tendency, much-loved by pressure groups, of trying to make new laws to express strong feelings, should be resisted. It leads to bad law, and politics conducted through the courts.

This is never truer than in the world of animal-rights pressure groups. Daniel Greenberg, the distinguished Parliamentary Counsel whose professional job included the drafting of the 2004 Hunting Act, said last year how “troubled” he had felt about it: “For the first time in my immediate professional experience, the mechanism of the law was being deployed not to further some public policy objective … but to inflict on the whole country the personal moral perspective of the 600 or so citizens who happened to find themselves in the House of Commons at the time.”

The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill is not in this category. It does not ban anything, and it is government legislation, not a Private Members’ Bill. But I fear it is driven by a similar personal moral perspective. This will emerge afterwards, when it is too late.

Rather as woke leaders within museums, Oxbridge colleges and the National Trust now claim that no one, before them, has ever confronted the history of slavery, so the animal-rights campaigners suggest that animal sentience has never before been recognised in our law.

This is quite untrue. Two hundred years ago, Parliament passed the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act. In 1835, the Cruelty to Animals Act followed (64 years before comparable child protection legislation). The very definition of cruelty to animals involves accepting they are sentient. You cannot be cruel to a lump of rock, only to a living being. As the Countryside Alliance briefing on the subject trenchantly begins, “Animal sentience is often incorrectly referred to as being a ‘principle’ when it is a question of fact.” (I should add at this point that I am on the board of the Countryside Alliance, but this article is only my personal view.)

So why is animal sentience being asserted in a new Bill? The history here is that when we were still in the EU, we were bound by Article 13 of the Lisbon Treaty, which refers to animals as sentient beings, and says that, in stated areas of policy, the member states therefore should “pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”. The Government declined to incorporate this in the Brexit Bill, promising its own legislation on the subject instead.

One Brexit benefit is that we no longer have to suffer the sort of continental legislation that declares a grand general principle and then invites judges to make what our tradition sees as political decisions in the light of it. The British approach is more pragmatic and democratic. Yet in this case, we appear to be creating a European-style law all by our ourselves, and gold-plating it.

The problem with the committee which the new Bill allows the secretary of state to create is that it depends entirely on the attitude of its members. Whereas the Lisbon Treaty version insisted that animal welfare requirements should be balanced against customs “relating to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage”, there is no such balance in this law. Whereas the EU restricted its scope to areas obviously involving animals, such as agriculture and fisheries, there is no such restraint here.

Nor is any distinction made between human duties to wild animals and those to domestic ones. Yet it is surely obvious that anyone with a pet or a farm animal under his/her control has a more serious welfare duty to that creature than he does to a fox that kills his hens or a deer that scoffs his roses. Even within the category of wild animals, our law has for centuries recognised the difference between “game” and “vermin”. Could sentience zealots override all such distinctions?

The new Bill certainly allows the committee to do so. It does not insist that the duties towards animal sentience should be held in check by any idea of the public interest. So if the committee is stuffed by representatives of well-organised animal-rights/green lobbies its power for mischief will spread right across government.

What happens, for example, if the committee finds that current laws about predator control fail to show “all due regard” to animal sentience? What if it decides to take on Muslim or Jewish rules of slaughter? What if it enters the issue of animals in medical research, or hurls itself into arguments about fishing and angling? Can it assert itself even on foreign policy?

The ground is being laid for just the expansion of bureaucratic, non-parliamentary power that Brexit is supposed to counter. The consequence will surely be an ever-greater resort to the courts, with pressure groups using committee reports as their weapons of “lawfare”. The committee could become a Trojan horse for extremism – and the Trojan horse, let us remember, was not a sentient animal, but a collection of sentient human beings using animal disguise to effect capture.

The Government must be aware of this but is letting itself be blackmailed for fear of being branded “anti-animal”. For the same reason, it will be frightened to go against anything the new committee recommends. As in so many areas of woke/green issues of “rights”, it will find it has created another bit of the “Blob”.

The legislation’s supporters will believe that, to coin a phrase, no animals were harmed in the making of this Bill. I am not so sure. The future of animals, particularly on a crowded island like ours, relates to our capacity to establish useful relations with them. If animal “rights” prevent us keeping sheep, cows or pigs to our economic benefit, very few sheep, cows or pigs will remain. If the day comes when bureaucrats decide that putting a bit in a horse’s mouth and a saddle on its back is the foul subjugation of a sentient being, why breed horses? The Government should not start out down a path it need not travel.