Maes wel defnyddwch y ddefnydd y 16 ddim yn 2017 mewn clywynedd y Unig, Cymru, Cymru, ac rwy'n gweithio i ddim yn Davydi Stewart. Felly mae'n ryebeth iングwch y chyfliadau yma, mae gennych i gyd, rwy'n gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gweithio i ddim yn gwmwyngen. allwch i'r ddeall. The second item of business on our agenda today is to hear evidence on the prohibited procedures on protected animals' exemption Scotland amendment regulations 2017 draft. We have two panels today. I welcome the first panel, which is Dr Tim Parkin, a panel on one. Members will have a series of questions for you, Dr Parkin, but we may have other issues that come out in the course of the discussions, and we may indeed write to ddim ddyliau'r postving o'u ddysgu ffuddol. Dwi'n ddigon i ddarlatio gyda dronrheifer. Can you briefly summarise the methods that were used to carry out the studies that we are looking at? Is there any limitations or bias in the studies? Rwy'n dod, ond ond rwy'n ddigon i ddarlatio'r studysau diwn lovingilig. Felly, at the offset, it is very important to understand that in both laboratory is there are very different case definitions or definitions of injury, tail injury and equally very different denominators or populations at risk. One is the survey that we conducted with shooting people and asking them about injuries to their dogs in work during the 2010-2011 shooting season and the population at risk in that particular study is true working dogs, so dogs in work. The second study was an examination of enemy records from 16 practices throughout Scotland and the denominator or the population at risk in that is working breeds, so it's quite important to make that definition, so in the second study we're not talking about dogs that are necessarily in work, so in the first study we conducted an online questionnaire that was distributed by relevant organisations by email or publicised on websites asking individuals of the shooting fraternities to complete a questionnaire about injuries in their dogs in the 2010-2011 season. The results of that or the methodology is a well-used methodology, it does have its flaws in terms of being an online survey in terms of being able to identify a response rate because you really don't know how many individuals you actually hit, how many people actually saw the questionnaire and then didn't respond or did respond, but that's a well-known issue with respect to online surveys. There are clearly potential biases in that study because of the population that we are questionnaireing and it's been an emotive issue over the last 10-15 years, but it is the only population that we could ask about injuries to those working dogs essentially. Would there not also be a bias potentially in the second study because if you're consulting vets practices, you're excluding any injuries or information on any injuries that perhaps gamekeepers or other users of working dogs would have deemed appropriate to address themselves and not take to veterinary surgeon? That's exactly right, but that's exactly why it's important to understand that the two different studies have different definitions of injury. The one is I would refer to owner-reported tail injury with no validation, no verification of the severity of that injury. The second is tail injury is that required veterinary treatment or the owner deemed to require veterinary treatment, so it is quite important to make that difference. Okay, thank you. Mark Ruskell. Morning. I noticed in the British Association for Shooting Conservation's submission to committee that they said that they were involved in helping to frame the studies. Can you just explain in what way did they import into the framing of those studies? Yeah, so we had a steering group that advised us when we acquired the funding from Scottish Government, we were provided with a steering group from interested members, had BVA, Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, BASC were on it, SGA were on it, so we had a representative from all the interested parties on that steering committee that we met with every three months during the one year of the study. The primary input into the study design from all of those individual groups was in terms of the design of the questionnaire and ensuring that we asked appropriate questions in that questionnaire. So quite a lot of work went on at the beginning to ensure, because you only get one shot at this, to ensure that the appropriate level of detail was acquired during that questionnaire. Okay, and just in terms of the data that came out of the study, did it show that there were injuries to dog's tails that were docked, as well as those which were undocked? Yeah, there were injuries to, I'd have to look up the figures, but there were injuries to docked tails, undocked tails and everything in between. I think the important thing from that owner survey study was that it suggested that, certainly for spaniels and hunt point retrievers, if they were docked by a third or more, they were 20 times less likely to end up with an injury compared to an undocked tail. Given the limitations that we've already discussed in the two studies, how confident are you that these form a sound basis for policy making? We made a statement at the end of the first paper, I think, that I still stand by, that I think says something along the lines, I believe this form is the best available evidence we have, and I think that's probably true. Now, it is an issue with observational epidemiology, the type of work we do, that there are always going to be biases in these data and these studies, so we can never be 100% sure. Uncertainty is the one issue that we always deal with, that we find very difficult to get across to policy makers, stakeholders to understand that we are never going to be 100% certain in what we're saying. Is there any work being done comparing the level of damage to working dogs' tails in the parts of the UK where there is an exemption? Do we have figures about what the vets are seeing when a tail has been shortened? The level of injury is still a car set against what's happening in Scotland? I don't believe we do, apart from potentially the diesel study that was partially funded by the Scottish Government, but I'd have to look into the details of that. I think the issue with the diesel study is that it wasn't purely working dogs, it was pet dogs, and only 9% of the dogs reported in that study were working dogs. My view is that the two studies we have here are much more applicable to deciding on legislation going forward in terms of working dogs, specifically on point of entry into the spaniel. Mark Ruskell, do you have any more questions in this area? Yes, I'll just come back to another area convener. I've had a quote here from Professor Donald Broome from the Royal College of Veterinary Science. He says that removing a significant part of a dog's tail is like preventing a significant part of human speech. I've also got a quote from one of his colleagues, Sarah Heath, who's a European veterinary specialist in behavioural medicine. He said that in interactions between dogs, the subtle signals of tail position will help to create an accurate impression of emotional state and therefore expected behaviour responses. This can be vital in predicting potential outcomes of encounters between dogs and reducing the risk of confrontational interactions. Would you say that the work of vets across Scotland involves a significant number of treatments of dogs that have been involved in confrontational interactions? I have no figures to base any answers on that. I wouldn't know to what degree individuals vets in practice deal with confrontational interactions between dogs. I would say that dogs are attacking dogs. I don't know. I would say that probably the breeds that are involved in that sort of confrontation are not the breeds that we're talking about today. Would you say, though, that the removal of a tail, would you agree with our colleagues in the veterinary profession and the RCVS that the removal of a tail does actually inhibit communication and can lead to these, in the words of Professor Confrontational Interactions? Potentially, but I would remind you that we're talking about the removal up to a third of the tail, not removal of the whole tail here. The degree to which you might modify communication is probably questionable in terms of removal of one third of the tail. I don't know. I just don't think we have strong evidence to say yes or no whether that would alter communication between individual dogs. In terms of the evidence that you're presenting in front of this committee and the studies that you've done, you haven't looked at any potential negative impacts of tail shortening on the behaviour and communication of dogs and, following from that, the likelihood that those dogs need to seek veterinary treatment? No, that wasn't part of the study. Did you also cover any aspect of physiological pain or problems post docking that Nebula has caused by the right tealings of nervous system? Again, this was a one-year funded master's study that we had quite a tight timeline on. There was a very specific remit laid down by the Scottish Government in terms of what it wanted addressing, and that was a large epidemiological study to identify whether there had been an increase in risk of tail injury post the legislation introduced in 2007. The issues around pain and that sort of thing were not things that we investigated. In terms of the validity of the study from a veterinary point of view, as providing an accurate assessment of both the risks and the benefits of tail docking, would you agree that it perhaps doesn't incorporate all these other aspects? It doesn't incorporate those other aspects. I think what we're quite clear, what we're stating, is that there is clearly an increased risk of tail injury for those undocked, especially hump point retrievers and spaniels, and we've made estimates of the number of puppies you would need to dock in order to prevent one of those outcomes, whatever that outcome might be, with the different definitions. That's as far as the papers go. So, if there was, say, a dog which had a behavioural problem as a result of its tail being docked, and that was, say, one dog in every hundred, would that be the basis for concern of perhaps balancing out the benefits of this policy versus the concerns? Well, I mean, that one dog in every hundred is a number presumably plucked out of the air, or does it have any basis? I mean, if it's one out of a hundred or if it's one out of 10,000 or one out of a million, then that's a very different assessment, isn't it? Yeah, I'm just pointing out that that doesn't appear to be an assessment of what these implications might be from tail docking in terms of behaviour on communication issues, so it's very difficult to talk about. No, I can't remember in the discussion whether we mentioned whether we put a line in there about impact on communication or not, whether we put that in the discussion. Certainly it wasn't any of our work to examine the influence of or the impact of tail shortening on communication, and that wasn't part of the study. Okay, that's clear. Thank you. Claudia Beamish. Thank you. Good morning, Dr Park. Could I ask you if there's any evidence or information you could point us in the direction of in terms of the numbers of working dogs in Scotland? Very difficult, and I noticed from some of the papers and assessment, I can't remember which section it was on, but trying to get an idea of the number of licensed breeders and to be a licensed breeder, I think you need to have at least five litres a year or something like that, so I think the vast majority of breeders in Scotland probably aren't licensed, so I think that information is lacking, and I think it's one of the recommendations we made in one of the papers to follow up and try and identify how many breeders are impacted by the current legislation and how many Spaniels and Hunpoint retriever breeders there are in Scotland, but I just don't have those figures, I just don't know. So, would that be something that, in your own view, would be difficult to collect, that sort of information, on what basis would you have any suggestion of how that might be best collected to inform the discussion? Presumably, the people who would have most information with respect to that would be the SGA and the BASC individuals, plus those licensed breeders, but those individuals, I'm sure, would be able to answer those questions much better than me. Thanks for the guidance. Following on, do you think that the proposed regulation will mean that full litters of puppies of the relevant breeds will be docked since breeders and vets? I will not know which ones will go on to be working dogs. I think it's probably undoubtedly the case. I think what's really important here is that if there is an intervention introduced, it is as targeted as possible such that if we had a crystal ball and we could definitively say that this dog is going to get a tail injury as a working dog at five days of old age and we would say would you therefore dock it or shorten it and you say yes. We're not in that situation so the key is to make sure that as few dogs or puppies are docked as puppies that are not going to go into work, but it is undoubtedly the case that it's very likely. You can't tell the difference between five-day-old puppies, which of those are most likely to go into work, so it will be the majority of litter or all the litter. If all of them go into work, that's good, but if only one of them goes into work or none of them go into work, then clearly that's an intervention that potentially is not warranted. Thank you. Just to take it a step further, could this mean that most puppies of the breeds in question will be docked? Again, it depends on how you come to that definition of which breeds or which breeders and the evidence put forward to the vet to determine that those puppies are most likely to go into work, so whether those breeders have a history of breeding dogs for work, whether they have shotgun licences, etc. Those bits of evidence are key and those things have been put in place in England and Wales to different degrees. That's one of the key considerations that should be put in place for this particular legislation, if it goes forward, in terms of ensuring that the intervention is targeted as possible. I think that we have a real opportunity here to make legislation that is significantly better than that that is in place downstairs. It's too broad spectrum in England particularly and in Wales because they've got England terriers, so I think that you have an opportunity here to ensure that it's as efficacious as possible for the particular breeds that are affected. Thank you. Can I tease that out? That's perhaps an unfair question, director, at yourself, but we're getting into this area. If it would appear reasonable from the evidence that we've heard that a significant number of veterinary surgeons made the client to carry out a tail-shortening procedure, if that happens, doesn't that fatally undermine the role that vets have under this instrument, where they're determining from their knowledge of the person who's presenting dogs for tail-shortening that those dogs are likely to have a working wife? In terms of, give me that question again. Sorry, I'm not explaining that particularly well. If, essentially, let's say 50 per cent of vets opt out carrying out this procedure, does that not undermine the central tenet of this, which is that the vets will make the determination of whether a dog from their knowledge of the breeder is likely to be used as a working dog? Because if so many vets opt out of it, how can we be assured that the vets who are making the determination actually know the breeders and their background? My anticipation would be that the vets that would carry out the procedure would be those that are motivated enough and see sufficient tail injuries in working dogs to understand that it is potentially a good thing to do. Those vets are those vets that are likely to be in the areas of the country where there are shooting fraternity, where there are the breeders. I would hate to say that a lot of this determination may be based on the fact that they know those people for 20 or 30 years and that they know that their friends are down in the pub or something like that, but that will be part of the issue in terms of understanding who the individuals are. I think that it's going to be unlikely that we're going to get to the situation where you've got individual breeders going and seeking out an individual vet who is likely to be in favour of tail shortening in a different part of the country, just in order to get their puppies tail dogs. Finlay Carson. That may be a difficult question for you to answer right here and now, but I think that it's quite important that we get an idea of how many numbers are actually going to be involved to get the proper perspective. Are you able to estimate how many dogs might be covered by the exemption and of those which might end up being docked? I think that your first statement was correct. It's a very difficult thing for me to answer. I just don't have that information. I think that other members of the second panel will probably be better placed to answer that. I just don't have that information, sorry. Alexander Bournemont. You convener, can I note my register of interest around countryside management? I think that we all agree that the objective here is just to reduce tail injuries in working dogs later in life. Are you able to offer any alternative actions which owners might take to achieve this? I'm not a shooting, hunting, fishing person. We did put in the discussion on the first paper, I believe, recommendations that wherever possible individuals when they are out hunting or shooting do so in areas which are less likely to result in tail injury, not in heavy cover and that sort of thing, but that we recognise that that's a very difficult thing to recommend and a difficult thing to do when there are particular areas of the country where shooting is obviously more likely to occur and does happen. Other than that, I think that it's very difficult to think of any other interventions potentially that I know of any way that they're likely to have an impact. Can I just pick up on that? The BVA in its submission state, and I quote, chronic pain can arise from poorly performed docking. Can we read from that that their members may lack the necessary skills? I think that I read somewhere that there are no vets in Scotland under the age of 29 who would have carried out this procedure other than when a dog's a lot older, or are they suggesting that there is docking going on illegally at the moment? Given the cut-off of 29, that's probably suggesting that anyone who has done it under the age of 29 and has practised solely in Scotland would have been doing it illegally, so that would be the basis of that, I presume. I don't know whether there's docking going on illegally. I think the anecdotal, I've not heard any anecdotal evidence to suggest that there is. I would suggest that it would probably be pertinent if, given we haven't had tail docking in this country since 2007, it would probably be pertinent for anyone willing, any vet willing, to tail shorten to actually undergo CPD training to ensure that they were doing it correctly, because it may well be something, but likely to be something they weren't exposed to as an undergraduate vet and wouldn't have been trained in. To me it's a very simple procedure, how could you do it wrong? Okay, I'm a vet, I'm an epidemiologist, I've spent two weeks in clinic, I could probably do it wrong. There are plenty of ways you could make a mess of tail docking, I'm sure. The whole point is we're suggesting that you remove up to a third of the tail is appropriate. So you could end up with people removing much more than a third and that would be one way where you could end up with an incorrect tail shortening taking place. But would that necessarily be something that would increase the pain of the pop if you took more than a third off? I'm coming from this as a farmer, I've never tail docked a dog, but in my previous experience I've tail docked thousands of pigs and I did it myself and we tail docked pigs right down to a stump left, so it's not a third, it's three quarters that comes off. It's a quick snap and the job's done, and I don't know how I could have done that wrongly because it's over my fly. I would tend to agree, I think it would be difficult in a puppy less than five days old to do it wrong, but I'm sure that there would be the occasion where someone, inexperienced, perhaps very nervous about doing it for the first time or for the first few times, actually did something incorrect, I don't know. A brief supplementary about some of the origins of tail damage. I think the study that you referenced earlier on by diesel suggested that kenneling, incorrect, kenneling was a greater issue than actual working dogs going through cover and getting snagged or whatever. Is that something that you looked at and have you got conclusions on kenneling? In the questionnaire we asked about the responders to talk about their worst tail injury that the individual dogs had suffered and indeed I think it's about eight per cent of those worst tail injuries occurred in kennels, the vast majority occurred during work in cover or in training. The diesel study is probably unsurprising that the majority of tail injuries occurred in kenneling because more than 90 per cent of the dogs in that study were pet dogs and not working dogs, so they wouldn't have been exposed to the risk of work, so that's the big difference between the two studies. What about the Cameron study though? The Cameron study? There was no details in that study about how the individual dogs received their tail injury. We simply had a large database of clinical records and we were able to identify the breed of the dog, the age of the dog or date of birth and whether they had a tail injury or not. In those clinical records it may or may not be the case that certain vets might add details of how the tail injury occurred or greater details, but the vast majority simply didn't. They said tail injury, tail fracture, tail laceration etc. That's it. It didn't investigate the cause of that. Emma Harper Thank you, Corvina. Good morning, Dr Parkin. I'm interested in finding out more about the pain management aspects of it. One of the main reasons for allowing tail docking is that the pain of a tail docking for a puppy is much less than the pain caused by a possible injury later in life. One of the arguments against that is that tail docking or shortening causes distress and pain to the puppy. As an evidence-based person, my previous experience was assessing pain in non-verbal children or non-verbal adults. What can the science tell us about the pain and distress associated with the tail docking for a puppy compared to the pain and distress for an adult dog? It's very difficult. There are a couple of papers that are on Noonan's paper that talks about behavioral changes at the time of tail docking in puppies where they went from whimpering when they were picked up as they called screeching, when actually the tail was removed and then it concluded that within 15 minutes they were back to essentially normal. Even that doesn't convince me in a great deal that actually that truly measures or reflects the degree of pain that the puppies were exposed to. What we're simply measuring is their behavioral response that it may well correlate with pain level but actually we have no real evidence as far as I'm aware to suggest that that's the case and maybe you do. In terms of comparing that to what adult dogs experience when the tails are being accutated for example, again I think it's very difficult to weigh up the differential pain that those two situations present for the individual animal. I don't have evidence either way. I'm aware that there are pain assessment tools used for dogs or other animals. Is there room for maybe studying perianalgesic aspects of the procedure where you would do like a pre-made type of analgesic so that you would maybe limit or reduce amount of pain so oral or whatever? In puppies I think the issue is that all those drugs are offline and so actually their livers as far as I'm aware are not sufficiently developed in order to enable use of pre-made analgesia in puppies so that's one of the reasons that they're not used when tail docking. I've read that essentially the risk associated with those pre-meds would be greater than the risk associated with the docking of the tail so I think it'd be quite difficult to develop those studies and get those get licenses to conduct those studies. You'd be looking at probably getting home office licence in order to conduct those individual studies to identify whether there's significantly reduced pain in puppies with or without pre-med analgesia probably due to the risk associated with the pre-meds in a five-day old puppy. Thanks Kate Forbes. Thanks very much. You've already mentioned that your studies wasn't actually analysing the argument around pain now versus pain later but there is one point of judgement and that is and I quote, these results suggest a clear potential benefit to be gained from docking at least by one third in Spaniels and HPRs. What is that main potential benefit then? For me that's simply looking at the figures suggesting that those dogs that were docked by a third or more were 20 times in HPRs in Spaniels, 20 times less likely to end up with a tail injury in work in that one season. I think something we haven't touched upon is the fact that we were asking about one season's exposure. Now many dogs might work for four or five years so clearly there's going to be a cumulative effect of that potentially protective effect of docking as a puppy over multiple seasons so that is only a 20 fold reduction in risk in one season. You could extrapolate that up to multiple seasons for an individual animal so that's the basis of that statement simply looking at the figures in terms of the reduction in risk of owner reported tail injury with or without a tail that is one third docked or more. Mark Ruskell. Just following on from that convener I think you've quoted the stats that to prevent a tail injury you'd need to shorten the tails of between 18 and 108 puppies. What about the numbers that would be required to prevent a tail amputation in later life because clearly a dog could be presented to a vet because it had a minor injury you know some treatment could be applied that would be it but an injury that's so severe that a tail would have to be amputated I think is the key concern that you're you're focusing on in your evidence. So what are the numbers on that? Well in terms of in terms of one tail amputation then the figures for spaniels and hunt point retrievers suggest that you need to dock between 320 and 415 puppies to prevent one tail amputation. Right. I mean I'm not this is this is one of the reasons that we did the two studies because we're looking at different levels of or different definitions of injury in or different severity of injury in the two studies the one is the only reported injury tail injuries clearly they're more common so you're going to be able you you don't have to dock as many puppies to prevent one of those as you do a tail amputation in terms of a tail injury that required veterinary examination then the figures are between 81 and 135 tails that puppies that need to be docked to prevent one of those. So if I've got this right we'd need to dock potentially we need to amputate the tails of 415 puppies to prevent an adult dog from getting a tail amputation is that in order to prevent a single tail amputation then the expectation given the prevalence of tail amputation which is quite low then you'd be looking at docking 415 puppies tails to prevent a single amputation so it all comes down to where you decide an adult tail injury is severe enough to warrant the intervention as a puppy so in animal welfare terms does that single prevention of a tail amputation in later life outwey 415 amputations of a puppy less than five days old? In terms of a tail tail shortening as a puppy my view would be no but we're not just talking about tail amputations are we we're talking about everything from tail amputation to minor nicks and scratches that are owner reports in the field so we're talking about everything in between so we're not this is not just about tail amputation it's about tail injuries minor nicks that can be recurrent that can be that can become infected that can be of any scope of injury from as I said a minor tail nick to a full blown amputation okay okay that's Richard Lyle yes Cameron was quoted earlier basically said overall prevalence of any tail injury amongst dogs of all breeds taken to vet in scott between 2002 and 2012 was 0.59% so and the prevalence of a single tail injury examined by a vet and working dogs breeds between 2002 and 2012 was 0.90% so why would we want to shorten the tails of many puppies for something that's not happening very often so the figures you're quoting are from the veterinary clinical data it's probably very likely although we don't know this it's likely that the vast majority of those dogs although they were working breed were not actually working so the whole point here is that actually we target the intervention at working breed dogs that are actually likely to work the whole point about the veterinary investigator the veterinary clinical data investigation is that there was no indication at all as the level of work that individual dogs are doing so that's the key we're talking about working breeds rather than working dogs in that particular study I think the last question I want to ask you is sorry if it sounds very simple dogs that are going through hedges etc whatever the most often hurt their ears so why shouldn't we cut off their ears I think there's a question that's been put to me on multiple occasions and and I think I'm not convinced that they do most often hurt their ears I think the evidence suggests that actually tails of the particular appendage that ends up being injured more often I don't have evidence to say that ears are more often hurt than tails and indeed it's potentially the case that the the waggy nature of the tail ends up being a more severe type of injury than you do when you have a ear injury I don't have the evidence to suggest that it is more frequently injured than tails sorry I do apologize I do have another short question sorry why would we want to inflict pain on many puppies for something that's not happening routine way every day well I think this is it come back to the tenet of what I'm saying I think the key here if this if legislation is going to be introduced it needs to be as targeted as possible such that it is only an intervention for individual animals that are most likely to end up with tail injury as an adult hence hprs and spaniels only from breeders who regularly supply puppies for work own a guard on a shotgun license or whatever it may be some way of ensuring that that intervention is as targeted as possible so that you get you avoid the situation you're talking about thank you what do you have any concern about dogs of these breeds with with long tails which are non-working dogs and the injuries that they might sustain as well because it would seem that through sitting in a kennel or whatever the the way in which they might receive that injury that that is also an issue and I'm just wondering if you have any comment on that clearly if if we're talking about working dogs that are sitting in a kennel then the intervention is going to prevent that tail injury whether it be in kennel or whether it be in work from the first paper I think we suggested that 8% of the worst tail injuries were incurred in kennels so it's a lesser of an issue or it's a lesser of a risk factor being in a kennel and it is going out to work so that's that's the key but clearly applying that intervention to a working dog that's in a kennel and it's probably the most I don't know this is probably this is anecdotal it's my it's my guess that actually working dogs are more likely to be kept in kennels that are more likely to result in an injury than pet dogs are more likely to be kept on someone's bed or you know in a house etc so they're the ones most likely to be exposed to that kennel risk as well as the work risk but surely there'd be ways in which working dogs who are kept in kennels could have the sort of bedding that would enable them to avoid that injury absolutely I'm sure there are I I have zero knowledge re kennel design but I'm sure there are optimal kennel designs that would prevent tail injury yeah I'm sure there would be yeah thank you Emma Harper the quick supplementary Alex Sanderburn I asked about alternatives is alternatives of Vaseline or trimming the hair or tail wrapping or tail tip points in America they use that for their gun dogs like actual tip covers again I have no no evidence either way whether any of those methods are efficacious or not and other members of the second panel might be able to point to evidence of that nature right but I for me I don't have anything to answer that sorry okay thank you my colleague Angus MacDonald has a question coming up in a second but before we get to that you touched earlier on the opportunity that we have here in Scotland to produce better legislation than exists elsewhere in these islands could you expand on that in terms of what's wrong with the exemptions that exist elsewhere in your view in my view the exemptions elsewhere are too broad in their scope in terms of the specifically in terms of the breeds affected we were very that the initial remit of the Scottish Government research that we've funded to do looked at specifically spaniels hunt point retrievers and terriers so what those are the three focus breeds that we were asked to look at in terms of the risk associated with tail injury and whether they've been docked or not and we definitively came up to the conclusion that terriers were not at greater risk in Wales terriers are currently allowed to be tail shortened in England then there's a whole raft of individual working types of dogs that are allowed to be tail shortened and we found no evidence to suggest that terriers are any greater risk we there were particular issues around why that might be the case we may have been asking the wrong type of people and we may have been asking out of the wrong type of season in terms of pest control but certainly from the evidence we have we had no evidence that terriers so that's why we're specifically saying if legislation is produced it should be as targeted as possible simply for hunt point retrievers and spaniels that's what our evidence suggests okay thank you we know from the proposed regulations that to permit docking the dog must be five days old or or less the dog is a spaniel at a hunt point retriever breed the procedures carried out by vet etc etc are there any aspects of the regulations that you have concerns about i don't think so i think that again it comes back to the same issue the key is to ensure that whatever aspect whatever is put in place to ensure that we are docking as few puppies as possible that aren't going to go into work is the key issue and and anything that can be introduced to tighten that as much as possible will only benefit will be the benefit for this particular legislation i don't have any particular concerns for either legislation as it's written now okay okay okay thank you for your evidence dr parking you will be joining us in the second panel to provide any input to any of the issues that arise but in the meantime can i thank you for that evidence could i also invite you that if anything comes to mind by way of evidence that's out there that would inform our deliberations if you could get that to the committee before next week's hearing because this is a very emotive issue on both sides and the evidence base the greater the evidence base we have the better for the members so thank you for that i'm going to suspend briefly while we get the second panel lined up welcome back to this meeting of the environment climate change and land reform committee we continue our discussions with stakeholders on the prohibited procedures on protected animals exemption scotland amendment regulations 2017 draft and we have been joined by melissa donald who's the scottish branch president of the bva jim dukes of dukes vet practice who is here on behalf of the scottish gamekeepers association to offer his expertise runa hannigan a deputy veterinary director of the dogs trust and alan marshall who's a scottish committee member of the british association for shooting and conservation we're also as i noted earlier joined again by tim parkin um we move on to a series of questions i'll kick this session off by asking each of the witnesses with the exception of dr parkin in one minute to outline their position on the regulations as they are set out who wants to go first mr dukes i'll start first yeah um all right i think my understanding of the current legislation is that it's not permissible to dog or shorten any um puppies tellers a prophylactic measure in scotton to prevent injury um i think that that was arrived on on the basis of trying to avoid um what's termed unnecessary mutilations and uh seen as being generally beneficial for dogs and in many ways i can support that position and i think that in general terms there's no need to do something if it's not going to be a benefit however i think um and it's very clear from my experience when speaking to both professional colleagues and also to gamekeepers and people that shoot um that there is a significant problem and there is a significant problem with working dogs i think it's important to understand it's not just dogs that go shooting it's also police dogs and dogs taught um used for other tasks such as you know maybe search and rescue dogs or whatever that um and part of that problem may be because they spend a long time in kennels but also um which is the work that they do and i think that um when you're talking about comparison of pain having docked um a reasonable number of dogs tails in my time um you kind of snip the tail the puppy goes oh and then you put it back on the the bitch's teeth the puppy starts suckling and within five minutes the whole list of sleep once the procedure is finished by comparison with that um injury to dogs can be as Tim explained anything from a nick um to a gross infected tail the problem with those is that um they're difficult to treat ask no vet relish is treating a tail that's been injured if it's got to be amputated it's very difficult to decide how much to amputate um when you do amputate them um there's a high risk high complication rate um some of those dogs are very quickly some of those dogs are very protracted healings and some of them need two or three operations to actually um sort the problem out once they've been through all that the dogs can be quite traumatised um certainly painful defence about their tails so clearly they don't appreciate the procedure whereas with the puppies there's no evidence that from my experience that I can see that in any way there was in that procedure so I think yes you've got to dock a certain number to achieve a certain gain but the problems if you have a problem is a real problem and um both for the for the dogs but and for the owners too it's very stressful um a distressing to see your dogs like that um thank you more sir Donald thank you um I'm a vet of 30 years experience 25 years we're in rural first opinion practice and I personally did talk tails until the ban in 2007 when legislation made it totally unambiguous rather I always preferred it that the vet did it than an illegal lay person did it however times change and we're now aware we are so this must all be evidence led and we must never forget that the tail is also an essential part of canine expression not just um to talk to themselves about but to wag and everything else I personally feel it is very painful in pups just because they are quiet you cannot say they are not in pain they cannot run away from it at five days old they suckle I children suck their thumbs when they're sore suckling is a form of comfort so I there is no anaesthetic there is no analgesia we cannot say they are not pain free cats used to be so I used to say to clients that cats um if they slept 23 hours a day and had one healthy lively hour a day that was fine times change we know now that they are sleeping because they are sore that we do not have the evidence to say puppies are not sore um just the sheer numbers needed to shorten to be able to prevent the one amputation and also I dispute the injury scale if they're getting just a scratch or a bruise that is an injury but I scratch and bruise my hands in the garden I do not advocate chopping my children's hands off thank you dispute the injury scale what evidence do you have what figures would you put forward just in in the first paper it just said injury there was no definition of that injury it could just be a scratch okay okay thank you for that quality runa harrigan hello um I'm here representing dogs trust which is the largest um dog welfare charity in the UK and and we have um Scottish branches up here in Glasgow and West Calder um and we are firmly opposed to the docking of of dog's tails um we believe that puppies suffer unnecessary pain through that process um and are deprived of a vital form of um expression um particularly from a behaviour element as well um and so we would call to reject the proposals that have been put forwards and the exemptions to be made um the studies that have been carried out have got um flaws and bias in them and we are worried that they don't actually have the robust details to stand up to this um this exemption to be made we also are very concerned about the pain element and the behaviour aspect um and the ethical considerations around this which haven't been addressed by the papers that have been done more recently but surely as an animal welfare organisation you must be concerned about the damage that's done to working dogs tails there are there are cases where damage is is quite severe but when you look at the evidence that's been put forwards today um the amount of puppies that will need to be docked in order to prevent that is significant you're looking at anything between 320 to to 415 i think we're we're called earlier so i think that really is an unnecessary amount of dogs that would need to go through docking in order to prevent one amputation okay allen marshal i'm a vet in general practice and i've been for the last 35 years um we're not talking aesthetics here we are talking about trying to prevent an injury i think we see these injuries in presumably more in country practice um the injuries we are seeing in the spaniels and hunt point hunt point retrievers primarily spaniels and i think it'll depend on what area we're in which different dogs we're seeing it in primarily spaniels in my area um they are debilitating they are working dogs i think in my books we want to just try and prevent these painful injuries happening from the start before they get any further i see numbers i'm listening to the different numbers we're getting uh in my area i think i'm seeing a different number i'm seeing spaniels that are undocked with much more frequent injuries than uh we're talking about and i think we have to actually the working spaniels that are working uh i i see a much bigger number and proportion versus the 1 to 400 that we heard earlier thank you let's at this point pick up on on something that came up in the first session um and explore it with the principally with the three vets who are on the panel the bba submission which i quoted earlier says chronic pain can arise from poorly performed docking what are we getting at there are we saying that that many vets don't have the skills to carry this out regardless of whether you're in favour of the regulations or not that they don't have the skills required to carry this out or is there a suggestion that there is illegal docking going on presently in scotland mr marshall i don't think i've seen any chronic pain from incorrect docking incorrect puppy docking i think you asked the question earlier about illegal docking i think in the last 10 years we have we might have seen one or two cases where i think pups have come from dubious backgrounds okay i think vets we're we're not going to none of us are going to put our name on the line it doesn't matter how pro docking we are i don't think any of us are going to put our name on the line uh under these circumstances okay pain wise i just don't see this we we're probably going to come back to the um phantom pain and chronic pain i don't see it at all uh mr jukes um i think um i'm certainly not aware of um poorly docked puppy cells i think there is a right way and a wrong way to dock his puppy cell and i think that some sort of reeducation of the people that are not aware of how to do it would be quite reasonable um i was shown when i first went into practice how we did it in our practice we certainly weren't taught at college and i think if that skill is lost in some practice then um some sort of training would be useful um but as um uh i think um the person before who had his relative sorry peter um it's a relatively simple thing it's one cup with pair of scissors he's starting to stop the bleeding it's over in a second um i think you know historically i've seen spanish that are docked really really short and stuff like that i think it was very clear in the legislation it's got to be a third of the tale um if if it's people are familiar with the technique they're going to do it better um i think it's important so i think it's important to have that education um but i'm not personally aware of lots of puppies that have been badly docked recently so uh i'm lost here donald what were the bba driving at with that comment we're against any docking as you're you're well aware um the main issue would be that uh there are would need to be research to see if dogs who do have shortened tails um are more sensitive around the back end there are a lot of dogs who do not like having their back ends i don't think anybody has actually done the research to see if this is because they've got shortened tails or not historically it would be much easier because so many more would have been but there were a lot of dogs in in when i was in practice who uh the rock violas adobe women's who were were traditionally docked at that time who certainly did not like us going near the back ends but nobody would be able to say categorically evidence based if it was due to the docking okay thank you Claudia Beamish thank you cabina and good morning to the panel um could i ask um you jim jukes just in relation to your initial comments um that um you did i think say that um the there could be um seriously infected tails in in adult dogs the breeds were discussing um in what circumstances could that happen because and i don't want to um in any way cast dispersions on owners but um if if say a member of my family had an injury uh and it looked as if it might be going to go septic i i would make sure that we got to the doctor pretty quickly because of the the risks and i'm just wondering is that's a management issue or whether there's something more to this um no i think um sepsis is you're probably aware it's probably not um an absolute thing that if a dog has a cut it's going to be infected you know how big a cut does it need to become infected um and as you'll be aware there's kind of lots of stuff to think about the correct use of antimicrobials and that sort of thing and antibiotic resistances when you should actually necessarily treat every little nick and cut and clearly we wouldn't do it to ourselves so why should we be doing it to our dogs so i think um i don't necessarily say that um tail injuries can progress because it's a nasty injury that the injury is bruised and there's damaged the underlying tissue it's not necessary always easy to assess that from the start for the big problem with a tail is that it's a tail and it sticks out the back and it wags um and the end of the tail is quite a long way away from the rest of the body so it's actually quite an isolated structure and if so if you do get a nick or a cut in there an infection does set in and it's not always easy to see initially it does the second problem is much more difficult to treat and infection tends to track down the size of the tail and down the vertebra and if it gets into the bone um and it's quite difficult to assess how far down the tail the infection has gone and that's the problem when you try to dock it and that's why some dogs end up being docked two or three times it's difficult to nobody wants to take off more tail than they need but even for vets it's difficult to assess how far that infection has spread um so i i don't think that's necessary you could necessarily say that they're infected because they're neglected now i was asking the question rather than yeah my question was directed at practitioners but does the dog just trust want to make any comment and response to it um i'm a vet and research and i've been qualified for 20 years yeah so i'm very happy to answer that question um and have only just recently stepped out of clinical work as well so um from from my experience um having been involved in sort of rural communities as well as um looking at the the sort of legislation and the research that's come through for today um my concern over the pain and the the issues around docking which i think was your question originally um is that i have seen poorly docked tails i have seen litters die because of poorly docked tails um and i have huge reservations as to whether we can manage pain um efficiently enough around that process um and that's our issue with dogs that are under five days old um aside from the fact we can't tell if the entire litter's going for working or not but um the worry that i have is that pain management has become such an important factor as a veterinary surgeon now um and preemptive pain management is just as important now as um as it would be in humans so we can't actually do that with dogs we can't do that with puppies at five days old um when we go to the surgical corrections we're doing that under general anesthetic and we're doing that with preemptive pain pain relief on board so i do have reservations around that um when it comes to the um the chronic pain issues i know that from a behavioural element there has been some um thoughts looking at that there's a word called aledynia which explains sort of more sensitive pain issues um and they're wondering whether that's connected to painful procedures when dogs are much younger and sort of neonatal and and issues like that so that's where this really sits with us as dogs trust the poorly carried out docking that you've um seen was that carried out by a veterinary surgeon i couldn't confirm that um but i have seen a number of letters that have ended up very unwell um and whether that's down to the fact that we're actually cutting and tearing through tissue and that that tear effectively becomes infected or whether there are stress stress related factors behind that or not um it's hard to say as a vet often you you can be presented with these issues late in the day so it's very hard to try and correct or repair or or help that litter of puppies but setting aside the dogs trust opposition to this and what just got as four veterinary surgeons um do you believe that your profession could be brought up to speed to carry out these procedures whether you agree with them or not fairly quickly so that vets could carry this out if they so wish to jim dukes absolutely yeah but i think there's there are plenty of vets um i've spent the last week finding round um colleagues partners in general practice a number of practices across Aberdeenshire um and there's a number of them who've carried out docking before um who are absolutely believe it's the right thing to do and as soon as it's allowed to do it they're quite happy to go ahead and do the procedure um i'm sure that they will be perfectly um willing to become involved in educating the younger colleagues but i think um so i think there are already people who are perfectly qualified to do this um i think that um some sort of training or register whatever would be relatively simple to set up if you wanted to do that yeah with respect some people from outside might say that you would say that given the views you hold on the subject i don't mean to be disrespectful i'm really trying to press the two witnesses who are anti this on whether they accept that the skills are out there in their profession whether you agree with us or not that this procedure could be carried out effectively um by your colleagues if you mean effectively by the fact that tail is shortened then that will be possible but i don't think that we're taking into account the holistic side of this which is the pain that the puppies may experience but the skills are there that this could be done whether you agree or disagree with that i don't know if um this would be as easy to get like a suitable cpd to organise on this um mostly because there'll be very few teachers out there who would be willing to do teach this procedure without pain relief um which we as we've just said cannot do so how do you show somebody how to do it and gold standard which is what we need with no pain relief so okay thank you can i look at Peter Chapman now yeah i went to come i went to explore this pain relief thing a bit more i mean as i said earlier i i'm a farmer and have been a farmer for all my days and i've i've tail docked thousands of pigs in my time and i've never never known a pig to die because because of tail docked it i've never seen that you know and i as i say i have a long number of years experience of doing this and i did it myself which is to snap and it's away and in my experience there's a there's a squeak you put the pig back down and within 10 minutes everything's back to normal and i've never seen a pig die and a pig's a fairly highly intelligent animal we all agreed on that and it's still regularly done um so i don't know how we're getting so hung up on and tail docking a few few poppages to be perfectly honest and that's my that's where i come from and i'll be perfectly honest about that um so i just wonder what the the two ladies in the middle there who are also obviously against this what's your thoughts about tail docking pigs because you know it's a it's a it's a sentient feeling animal and it's it's done in a regular basis and it's a different animal except but it's the same it's the same procedure in my opinion i totally understand why you're saying that but there is evidence to show that because of the tail biting that the well the benefit is clear i think it's it to prevent tail biting you have to trim two tails to prevent one tail bite as opposed to 100 poppies need docked pigs do not last for 12 years they do not wag their tails as part of their expression and again for the reasons i said before just because they don't seem to be in pain they're also running around they're also more developed but just because they're not i'm sure they would be running away rather than having it done and then they go and suckle which as i say is a comfort thing um it's a very much a perception thing but on a welfare benefit it is most definitely worth doing the pigs because a they're not living as long and secondly it prevents tail biting which as um Jim pointed out earlier the the end of the tail is a very handy thing for another pig to grab a hold of i've also wondered how many as a percentage you may not have seen them die but have some degree of condemnation because of abscessing along the spine from incorrectly done well i mean i would say the only time i've seen abscesses along the spine is when the they get tail bitten not when you you're not when you trim the tail i've never seen that but if you get tail bitten yes absolutely um but they don't live for 13 years i think um that that particular question is very difficult for me to answer coming from a dog challenge oh so i can't say that i've done much pig practice no okay okay thanks for that let's move this on to Finlay Carson so i'm now going to move on to the views on the research from Glasgow University which the responses have been quite diverse some organizations saying that they don't believe that scientifically it's scientifically robust enough other organizations strongly believing that evidence presented confirms the pain docking outweighs the avoidance of more serious tail injuries so i'd like to ask the members of the panel do they think the research conducted by Glasgow University provides a robust basis for a change in the law but equally importantly when you answer can you let us know whether there's scientific research that you've done that supports your argument the thing about the Glasgow study is at least it is a piece of research and it does have some fairly strong conclusions um and i think that Tim would argue that they're fairly robust i think the problem is that otherwise it's a bit of conjecture and like local experience local knowledge um what i would say in terms of my research is i haven't um i haven't i have done a telephone poll of as many gamekeepers that i could speak to at the last fortnight since i knew i was coming here and as many practitioners i could i didn't speak to one gamekeeper who didn't believe that tail docking should be reintroduced i think people would argue that it's for cosmetic grounds whatever i don't notice them shopping in burgheries or down an Oxford street or whatever you know i think they're interested in their dogs for work they love their dogs they're not doing it because they want to in any way disfigure or harm their dog they're doing it because they find it's difficult to work their dogs without them um also on that same evidence there's when you're looking at these statistics i think you had to bear in mind that it is still legal to dock puppies in England and it is still legal to dock in Ireland and a significant number of the keepers i spoke to would no longer buy a puppy from Scotland and they only ever source puppies from England or from Ireland because they will only work docked puppies um so in fact the number of injuries reported maybe an underreporting of the breed because the working ones are still being docked because they're being sourced from elsewhere so i think it may be a problem that's actually more significant you think if you speak to people that have undocked puppies that work them then they have had horrific injuries some of them quite franken you know and i've also spoken to people who have given up breeding spaniards in Scotland um who had big list and have been breeding them for 15 20 years it's been their sort of life's work if you like or 30 years have stopped breeding because they wouldn't work puppies when the tails weren't docked so you know i think speaking to people if that's evidence um there's absolute strong support amongst that community um for docking because they honestly believe in their dogs they need their dogs their dogs are tools for work um and they sit as a vital resource and they just hate to see them injured and uh you know it's just not pleasant yeah the bva we were really disappointed in the uh numbers who actually responded it was um a self-selecting sample of only a thousand and five respondents um and just under three thousand dogs so um considering how passionate the people are about we were really surprised by the low numbers of people who actually did the survey um so therefore there is an overestimation of the risk of injury and although 29 for those complete in the survey reported that one or more of the dogs had sustained a tail injury only 103 dogs that's 4.4 percent of received a tail injury that actually went to need to see a vet a lot of the evidence that was gathered was anecdotal uh owners weren't required to provide evidence uh there again causing an overestimation um um from the two studies that were performed um looking at them we've got a sort of um a more qualitative view which is the letter of view looking at the survey um and when you're looking at surveys you do really want to get quite a high percentage of people responding um and our concern is that there's um perhaps a five percent uh response rate compared to the number of people that were potentially polled with that survey um i think most surveys like that you'd want to be reaching at least sort of 30 40 percent so it's quite a low response rate which gives a bias and perhaps an overestimation of the problem that we are seeing um and i think coming back to the camera and study which is more quantitative looking at the numbers of dogs um i think we still also have concerns over the bias that's within that paper um looking at the number of vet practices that did participate um when you look back in research to the diesel study they actually um state that some practices declared not to participate because they felt that this was such an emotive topic they didn't want to have their figures on the line um and so i think um i have concerns over the numbers of practices that did participate but actually with the camera and study um there's quite a large number of dogs that they're suggesting need to be docked in order to prevent one injury or to prevent one tail amputation so i still think that there are problems with both of those studies as they stand i think the the Glasgow survey uh from from recollection looked at uh injuries over one year uh i think at that stage my big anxiety with that was the fact that one year of a dog's life one year of a working dog's life is merely one year of a working dog's life um uh i had a dog in training at the time uh cocker spaniel in training at the time who didn't sustain an injury during that period but we're looking for 10 years work perhaps eight 10 years work out of out of the dog um and the dog subsequently had an injury and had to have a tail amputation so i'm coming from this from a sorry personal point of view and i and that's where i that's where i keep seeing these things when i see the problem okay tim parken a little defence maybe um i just want to point out with respect to the response rate there is no way of calculating response rate in this type of study where you're doing an online survey where you sent emails or it's been publicised on a website you have a number of people who may respond a good proportion of those are very unlikely to have seen the questionnaire or the invitation to respond to the questionnaire we simply don't have any idea how many of those who actually were aware of the questionnaire didn't didn't respond so quoting a five percent response rate isn't is not correct you cannot define a response rate in this particular survey okay mark roscol a couple of answer questions from the first panel firstly how many hunt point retrievers and spaniels that are working are actually living in scotland today i don't know how to answer that question jim said earlier with a number would be quite good or even an estimate i think it's numbers living or numbers of new pops coming in okay let's say the entire population of working dogs broken down by hunt point retrievers and spaniels because that appears to be a figure that's not in the study and tens of thousands tens of thousands tens of thousands how many tens of thousands but the kennel clock might suggest you may have a record on they will know exactly how many litter were registered every year and i was thinking it'd be interesting to look back and see if there were less litter registered now since the ban before if there's slightly more in englandam where you can see if those dogs moved to scotland or not might be an interesting thing to find out i don't know okay can i also just go back to the issue of evidence around behavioural issues potentially behavioural issues between dogs that have had their tails docked that wasn't the remit of this study but it seems that there's veterinary evidence out there to suggest that that's a risk and that may impact on the number of cases of dog on dog interactions that come into vet surgery so i mean what's the what's the evidence on that dog dog on dog interactions i think back to let's call let's let's talk about canine expression or communication i think the the breeds we're talking about here the spaniel breed the hunt point retrievers are i would suggest very expressive okay i think some of the dogs it was talked about earlier these are probably not the the dogs that will tend to be involved with dog to dog aggression two breeds i've passed comment on here on here certain breeds facial facial expressions less easy to read and i'm talking about probably boxer sharpie and each of the vets can come up with a similar breed that we can't read very readily i think if we can't read them dogs are a dam site better than we are at reading them but i think other dogs will have difficulty reading some of these breeds as well i think our the working breeds we are talking about here are fairly easy to read and even if they had a partly docked tail a two-thirds tail i think other dogs will read them quite well do you have evidence on that i'm hearing a lot of kind of fairly possibly i would i would assume you know words like that i mean where's the actual studies and the evidence on this can i ask the other panel members do we actually have evidence on this because i read out the quote in the earlier panel um from somebody who's um european veterinary specialist in behavioral medicine it is um is one of the sort of eminent behavior veterinary behaviorists in the country um and we've got another lady called Rachel Casey who works with us as well um as far as the research and the studies that have been done on this i'm not entirely sure that i'm the best person to to perhaps um say if there are or aren't studies out there however the um the issue that we do have is that um as you were saying um it may be that we can't read the dog's behavior if we're looking to actually dock um six puppies in a litter and one of them goes on to being a working dog the other five dogs are going to end up within family homes um and actually as humans and as the public we know as an organization reading dogs behavior is one of the hardest things to teach people um and so if we don't have that other element which is the dog's tail as well we can't possibly work out whether the the signs that they're giving us perhaps are warning signs or concern signs or fear signs that they might have so are you saying then that that's a risk to humans um i'm saying that it's a risk to to um dog-to-dog interactions and also to us understanding what the dog is trying to to say to us as as vets in practice or as members of the public as well um and i think it's really important that we are not ignoring the fact that this is a um an element of dog expression um and communication and i think your your quote earlier about taking away an element of speech is very important and it's certainly something that's echoed um by our organization in the fact that taking this stance taking the dog's tail um and amputating it is going to take away that element of expression for them Richard Lyle yes um basically we have regulations that are stating that the vet who carries out docking must be satisfied that there is evidence showing that the dog is likely to be used for work in connection with lawful shooting on animals in practice how would that work um i think um it's clearly very difficult to as everyone's already alluded to to decide um whether the dog is going to be working or not um and i think but there are certainly people i think you could make a very simple thing for showing dogs as in England and Wales that would be illegal to show a docked puppy so that it wouldn't be encouraged as like a breed standard and the breed standards have an undocked run short and tail i think that um clearly most practices the rim rural areas would know who the gamekeepers were and who the people who the keen shooters were um and those people who had enthusiasm of breeding dogs for shooting would be fairly easy for your local practitioner to identify and i think that's why it's important as Adam was kind of saying that you can having that local local knowledge is important and i think um but at the end of the day it would be down to the individual which i think what we're suggesting is it's a procedure that's essentially prophylactic procedure to reduce the risk of injury and it will be on an individual case by case basis for the vet to decide um on the merits or otherwise of that and he could make his own decision i think it's important that we allow a vet to make their own decision but i think that most times in general practice you know the dogs are specifically bred for either for pets or for showing or for working um they're not all going to go there but we've already know that but i think that there is enough information um for vets to be able to base that decision um on but to pick up on on the point that was following on from Mr Lyle's question that we touched on earlier can we uh confidently anticipate the element of the regulations where the emphasis is on the vet to make a determination that that will be seen through if a substantial number of vets as would be their right opted out carrying out this procedure um we could i would suggest the question i pose is um how can we be sure that any vet that was making the determination actually knew the breeder sufficiently well to be confident that the dogs were going to be used for a working purpose alan marshal i think the the draft legislation talks about evidence um currently the the english and Welsh legislation appears to be quite open i think we've i think firearms or shotgun certificates are clearly one possibility membership of a shooting um shooting syndicate might be another possibility perhaps a letter from a gamekeeper that you are a bona fidee beater or perhaps you have a stocking um a stocking facility that you're able to to bring bring forward to to the vet might be sufficient evidence most of all i mean the bva has a position on this as an organization but your membership will be split there will be members who will be prepared to carry this out can you give us a ballpark figure of what percentage of your members you would anticipate if this legislation was passed would take a principled stance of not doing it i haven't got any absolute figures but having worked with a lot of uh younger members of the profession i would say the vast majority of them would not do it which then leads into the fact that you would then have to travel with this bitch and young pups to find a vet who would do it who then does not know you which then there is an instant floor in the system alan marshal come back on that currently the the situation in scotland as gymdux has suggested is many breeders have stopped breeding in scotland we have the last 10 years has introduced another welfare problem in scotland where people with uh wanting to breed their spaniel or hunt point retrievers bitches have to take them to comply with the law they end up travelling south with a pregnant bitch getting them duly docked legally docked south of the border and then coming back up okay so we have still quite a welfare issue with that clearly south of the border they are not aware of any background i have a much better background gym has a much better background of the people that we see or are likely to see okay gym dux a couple of things on that i think um again i did as well as phoning a number of keepers i phoned as many vet practices i could get hold of and spoke to the principal partners and um all right it's not a uh a big survey but um roughly half of them are very keen and desperate to come back to senior partners and we'd be happy to do it straight away some practice certainly said they wouldn't be prepared to do it under any circumstances and then in the middle um the practice that said that they weren't really welcoming the reintroduction of it but if they thought that it could be justified they would do it in certain cases um i think what those people expressed um as being important was that the definitions were very clear to them so it's easier for them to make a decision and i think that's important to try and come up with some legislation that's easy to understand easy to follow um i also think within that and talk about the breeds it's really important to not water down this legislation by making it too vague as to what the breeds are and to be very very specific about what can and can't be done would be very very useful to ensure that it is targeted as effectively as possible okay can i ask Jim Dukes and Melissa Donald specifically within the the split that you've identified is there a split between urban and rural practices i personally don't think so because i as i say i was in a fairly rural area where we did have some of my clients were um gamekeepers and shooters um and and kept dogs for working in this and so i don't think so although we were in small town i don't i don't think so there's not that much Jim Dukes um i think um we're talking about sampling bias it's important to understand that um the shooting fraternity is quite a small paternity and um my understanding particularly speaking to the gamekeepers as well is that they tend to speak about which bits are perhaps sympathetic towards shooting and tend to go to them so some practices see a high percentage of actual working dogs never mind a spaniel than others and in those practices that saw them then they were definitely in favour there were certainly some rural practices that i spoke to that were not in favour but then they also said they didn't see tail injuries and in in working breeds um and so they didn't really understand why but my suggestion would be that perhaps that's either because of um the way that randomness works anyway that certain you'll see cluster of cases in certain places or it'll be that the shooting fraternity kind of votes with their feet and goes to the people that they know are going to be sympathetic so some practices see a large number of injuries some practices don't see any and so they're fine okay thanks Richard Lyle yes my question is mainly to Mr Dukes and Mr Marshall now i asked Mr Dr Park in this question in the last panel the overall prevalence of any tail injury amongst dogs of all breeds was 0.59% between 2002 and 2012 and working dogs it was 0.90% between 2002 and 2012 so why i've already asked you the question Mr Park but why is um you know why why do you support this when it's shown that it's not really happening all that often? I think Mr Park and wants to come in before anybody else answers that can I I just want to make it it's not working dogs it's working dog breeds yeah working dog breeds sorry i didn't that's fine i should have put my glasses on for that i apologise okay thank you thank you for that what clarification breeds something we've got an easy answer for for that one and i don't the figure the figure that's being quoted here is not the figure i see um i think throughout the country and it doesn't matter whether it's Dumfriesshire Ayrshire Aberdeenshire or down down parts of England i think we have different dog breeds and dog types i think we also have different habitat types different cover um the dogs maybe work through um i see i recognise a a different figure i'm not a i'm a general practitioner i don't do research i don't keep the numbers um that we've just been talking about that is not the figure i recognise and see before Mr Duke comes in with his answer i think you said earlier on Mr Marshall that you're been a vet for over 30 years 35 years if my memory serves me right um how many many tail tail injuries have you seen in that time i know you don't maybe keep that that record particularly we don't we don't keep that record i would i think do i see half a dozen tail injuries a year i think that's a it's an awkward question i think if i see half a dozen tail injuries a year um and the you know i'm seeing i'm seeing tail injuries i'm aware of what we're also not seeing tail injuries because the perhaps the the gamekeeping profession will tend to sort problems out themselves and although you know i think if they've got a major problem they're always going to see their vet but they may not always come to the vet as a vet you know i used to have two years of carriers as a vet you you'll see hundreds of dogs a month yes so you've only seen an average in a year six tail injuries i categorically did not say six i said maybe half a dozen i'm not i'm not splitting hairs you're trying to put numbers on me i'm not putting numbers on it okay i do see tail injuries uh we we see them infrequently but when we see them they are really the potential i can understand is that working sorry can you know if these working dog breeds or are they just ordinary like as i said two years of terriers who like to run through the the the undergrowth and whatever it will tend to be working dog breeds i think we haven't got to you know why why are we talking um the spaniels and the hunt point retrievers and i'm not sure if we're coming on to this i see the spaniels as having a very very fast tail wag it's non-stop i've got a very i look at them they've got a very fine hair on the tail the hair does tend to get caught it doesn't get caught first time they're through the brush but it maybe gets caught in a few hairs get removed each time they're through another bit of brush or bramble or gorse and it just more hairs get lost more hairs get lost and then we've got bear areas that start getting traumatised they're easily traumatised and as as that goes on that's where we get the the problem just becomes more more evident with time um it's steered away from your it's steered away from your question but the the problem is coming in a different way mr juke some is down to come in but basically the question i want to ask you as a dog lover why should we have this law when it's not happening very often yeah or people are not bringing them to the vets okay you're saying that they could be taking care of it themselves at home treating the dog but you're not seeing all that in your 35 years you've not seen all that many cases okay in that case back to your back to your original question why am i not seeing them because in our part of the country most people will not work a dog with a full tail most people in my part of the country will still be um bringing pups in from south of the border or from somewhere else the the the gun dog working population knows what the problem is very particularly we know exactly what the problem is and will tend to source a new pup from somewhere that is already tail docked or tail shortened thank you well i think um probably Alan's just answered that actually that might be quite a good result mind it that might demonstrate the benefits of docking at the bring the risk of tail injuries down roughly to the level of the rest of the population if that was surveyed against only undocked working dogs i'm sure it wouldn't be 0.9 of a percent it would be like 20 percent 50 percent whatever depending on who you speak to as tim has alluded to five you know i think it's just a statistic that doesn't really mean very much because it's not qualified thank you i've got a tangential question but before i ask it i want to be clear this is not a loaded question and not casting aspersions against the profession because i think everybody around the table today is coming at this from an animal welfare perspective whatever side of the argument you're on so let's take that as a given but i'd like a bit of an understanding of the costs involved in this what would the costs be for tail shortening and set against the costs that are incurred by owners where dogs are having their tails in later lives severely damaged or having to be amputated and i guess what is the income to veterinary practices from that from i don't know what people are going to wish to charge for i'm shortening a puppy cell at three to five days old but you know i'd imagine five to ten pounds for puppy would be perhaps a reasonable figure would it i don't know if you did a litter of six i you know i don't know what people are going to charge and i think that's pretty much i do have figures for docking of injured spaniels i give you just two figures from one person they took one dog to one vet um it took them um they were quoted four hundred pounds in the end cost them 800 pounds um they were told it took the two weeks it took nine weeks for the dog to get better and it basically was a big problem um another dog maybe 200 pounds so but you're talking in the hundreds to maybe up to a thousand pounds or more if you had a difficult case it needs to be operated on several times now for a gamekeeper that represents a significant part of their salary and they're not always supported by um their bosses to pay those bills so for some people it's a significant sum as compared to a it's like buying insurance the insurance is cheap if you have an accident it's expensive i've never heard the gamekeeper talk about the cost i've heard them talking about the animal welfare aspect of it only in fairness to to that profession what about the others i mean what's the what's the charging in england i'm afraid it's not something that i've ever done or charged for so i couldn't answer that question myself um i'm not entirely sure what um practises in england um or ireland would charge for that i've worked over in southern ireland myself as well so um i'm really not aware of the costs for that um the costs when it look when we're looking at amputating the tail later in life involve an anesthetic and pain relief so the the costs of that are instantly going to increase because of that um but it's a very important part when we're trying to maintain animal welfare most of all yeah the current price i would say of of i'm just taking an adult dog tail if with no complications would be about 200 250 pounds um we have to remember that pricing for puppy docking is 10 years out of date when we were doing it at very different times um and it was done as a nominal fee um and i would agree at that point it was probably five to ten pounds back in that day whether that would still go ahead at today's prices i have no idea but add a bit of inflation for that period and we're probably yeah and ethical considerations as well um making sure people really think about what they're doing price wise we it really was a nominal fee it's 10 years ago the profession probably wasn't as professional about charging as it is now okay okay i just thought it was worth that an area worth exploring um let's move on corrie abamish thank you gavina i'd like to drill a little deeper with the panel but if you've already made comment on on this we'll we'll um we'll have that noted already in the official report um i'd like to uh to ask some questions about the pain and stress associated with the docking of tails of puppies and how and if anyone's able to comment um if they haven't done yet or further on the pain and stress of working dogs sustaining tail injuries later in life and um some some of the submissions um without pointing to any at the moment have have made some assertions without um what would appear to be evidence for um these arguments and it would be helpful um if we could stick to any actual evidence um whether it's you know from your own personal experience or whether it's from um research which has been done the dog stress statement that was submitted um we referenced nunan in um the study that they did when they looked at 50 puppies um and that was around the procedure of tail docking um and they found that the puppies all the puppies struggled and vocalised vocalised intensely um and repeatedly as well um at the time of amputation amputation i think one of the points that melissa made earlier was um was also important to note in the fact that our understanding as vet as a veterinary profession in pain and recognising signs of pain is developing um and no more so than in the world of cats which again i'm probably stepping out of my comfort zone to talk about but um in the world of cats we're looking at pain being seen as cats that are quiet and perhaps reserved and retreating to the back of their kennel or or going on hiding um and i think the work that's done within the human field and i think emma you've mentioned this earlier that you'd seen um research or been involved in research around this um on pain scales and pain management um in pediatrics i think it's really important that we we look across different skills and different professions to try and understand what that does mean um the pain scores and the the um the pain tools that we have are made for dogs are put together and validated for dogs that are in chronic pain more often than not um and around surgery which is dogs that are sort of more adult and having general anesthetics i don't know of any that have been validated for puppies under five days of age to be able to help us understand and tease that out comments through the convener i can maybe come on that as um if um we all know that it's pretty difficult to decide to measure pain in animals in all animals and particularly in puppies that are tall and tense and the puppy is blind and don't really move and it's very difficult to assess so we can't assess that but if you know you keep going on about the puppies vocalising y up several times um i think the dogs trust as you're aware strongly promoted the microchipping of puppies if you've ever elitted microchipped a litter of puppies at eight weeks old and you measure vocalisation in them it would perhaps be a hundred times what they would make at three days old when they're so then more pain microchipping than they are when they're tell you know i just think it's it's not a really a worthy way of assessing pain and i know i understand what you're saying actually in trying to weigh up and validate the scales that we have to look at i think microchipping is a very different procedure to cutting and tearing the puppy's tail um at the five day mark um so i think it's a very different procedure to be trying to justify that argument with um microchipping is an injection and um that's straightforward we we will have injections and and dogs undergo injections all the time on vaccinations and preventative healthcare um but when we're talking about tail docking um you're trying to perhaps um weigh up two very different procedures where actually we are cutting and tearing through tissue um and through bone potentially with the puppy so it is a very difficult one to answer because it isn't really an equal comparison when you're looking at the the techniques that we're using i think using things like vocalisation is being emotive too and i think that it's very very difficult to assess whether or not the puppies truly do suffer pain they certainly don't appear to have a growth check um in my experience they just carry on as normal and if you compare lists of if you take um an evidence of chronic pain as ill thriving i don't think there's any evidence that puppies that are docked grow any slower than ones that are not and be any and maybe those sort of things to look at be more useful um but so in in my view just to any suggestion that any puppy that's docked suffers chronic pain is based purely on um sort of an emotive assessment of pain and not really on any science okay can i can i come back in can i come back in on that um just for clarification on that particular issue um in the written submission to the committee the bs sorry ba sc state it should be noted that the pain associated with the shortening of puppies tails has been seen as comparable with that associated with microchipping a dog now a legal requirement in scotland and i'm just seeking clarification as to um what the evidence for that is because we really need to drill down into where the evidence for these issues is and the degree to which it's a perception or you know or actual evidence i think that's probably probably anecdotal evidence and certainly from my point of view i see the the discomfort from microchipping pups as as jim juke says almost comparable i think it's the we get we get a response we always get a response from microchipping sometimes it can be quite severe i don't know if we end up with a microchip sitting right next to a nerve we've got some dogs that really take that quite uncomfortably and then they will settle down again fairly quickly right um are there any other comments on the um any comparison between the the welfare and pain and stress issues in relation to the tail docking of puppies and the and the stress and pain for for adult dogs to in relation to necessary amputation or injury that haven't yet been made and um let's look at the evidence space please well we we haven't spoken about the pain and distress with the adults um but i think it is quite clear that they do have um analgesia it is done under a general anaesthetic that is 100% is evidence on that they all have to be but each each injury is very individual but it can be done that if the pain control is good there should be very few complications afterwards at the antibiotic level is covered because these are usually dirty injuries to start with um then uh the the pain level the the complications do come where as has been said before maybe not quite has been taken enough has been taken off usually because of owner wanting to preserve as much tail as possible and a lot of the times the docking is done because of the chronicity of the wound it won't stop bleeding and if anybody is actually seen somebody's kitchen it is quite distressing but it's not necessarily painful there's as painful as as it appears it's more that it looks awful and it is a quick solution trying to get one of these tails to heal without amputation it can take several weeks and so it is a quick solution a cost effective solution which is why it's often offered early on right but um Emma Harper come in here thank you allen for allen marshal for clarifying the particular wagging tail behaviour that leads to the mechanism of injury of long tailed spaniels it's actually quite good to hear about that and you know and how these dogs end up with an injury in the first place i'm interested to know about the since the ban 10 years ago what has been the alternative practice that has been employed because surely you've not just sent the dogs out doing nothing so have we done things like vaseline cutting the tail tail protectors tail wrapping i believe in the usa they do other things but those were pointers that i was specifically looking at which might be difficult to wrap a tail on a spaniel for instance i think yes i heard i heard the question earlier and i think we can undo wrap tails and try and offer them protection and try and give them time to heal i think we will i think we'll all of the vets in general practice will tend to do that first way before we talk about amputation um so i think i think we will try and offer that protection and a degree of comfort to the dog so it's less likely to get to get knocked at the previous comment about tail amputation in the adult dog i'll dispute because in the tail amputation in the adult dog by that stage the dog has invariably gone through two or three months of pain and discomfort it doesn't matter how much we try and wrap it invariably if it is at all excoriated if it's raw at all there's there's got to be some discomfort going on with that even if we are wrapping it so that dogs invariably remained in a level of discomfort until we get to the stage of either full healing or adult adult dog amputation so even even though we're wrapping it i think we're trying to protect it by wrapping it and trying to give it a chance to heal but i think very often there's still some level of discomfort with that dog until we get it there there's no doubt when we amputate the tail we are giving and they are an amputing an adult tail the dog will get the full the full gamut of analgesics painkillers antibiotics of whatever but but it still is invariably quite a healing process it is not just like it is not just the dogs had a cut which seems to heal remarkably quickly the tail healing remains always a slow a slow process so i think just to clarify i mean are we sending dogs out to forget the vet injury or the practice if we're taking dogs out to shoot are we using Vaseline and cutting their tails or does that work as an alternative as a no idea and i think what you will realise is that Scotland's a pretty wet country so if you stuck a bandage on or whatever it's going to get soggy and fall off whatever you did and if you're working through thick brambles and thorns or whatever which is really what the Spaniards are ideal for and that's what they're ready to do then it's going to be impossible to keep any sort of dressing on a dog all day working through the wet and muddy ground so i'm not sure that's really an option i have never come across anyone with the idea of vastly i'm sure if someone had an injury they would put Vaseline or something on to try and prevent it getting worse but i haven't actually seen it use in the field at all as a prophylactic idea okay Claudia Beamish you want to come back thank you convener it was building on Richard Lyle's question just to see if there are any more comments on proportionality and based on the figures provided in the Glasgow University research or other specific research about the numbers of puppies it would require to have their tails shortened to prevent one tail injury are there comments on that and is it in the view of the panel proportionate i think certainly from from dog's trust perspective i think that it isn't proportionate to the risk that's posed so i think the fact that we started off with the diesel research suggesting that 500 dogs would need or puppies would need docking to prevent one injury we've moved forward to tim's research with Cameron and Ledra and i think even in those studies we can see that there's a large proportion of dogs of puppies that will need to be docked in order to prevent the injury and i think the worry about the owner led research is that it's owner reporting and we don't have any clarification on what that injury actually is and that's where the figures are the lowest when we look at the veterinary led ones we've actually got a higher number of puppies that would need to be docked to prevent one injury you're an animal welfare organisation you cannot be comfortable with the damage that's done to the tails of older working dogs i mean we've all seen some pretty horrific pictures what's the alternative to this is do nothing the best way forward i think Emma was quite right in perhaps asking about what options have been explored in the timeframe that we've had where dogs have been working and docking has been it's been illegal to dock in Scotland and i think it's in it's one of the things again that diesel brought up was looking at tailcoat coat type and tail length with the hair and whether that's a factor in these dogs catching so i'm not somebody who can probably comment on that particularly but i do wonder whether there are other ways of trying to manage it i think certainly when you look at horses that are competing they'll often be vaseline to try and avoid injury and so perhaps cutting the tail hair using vaseline those sorts of things would help to avoid the damage but i'm not in the i'm not a hunting shooting fishing person so i wouldn't be able to comment on that sorry go back to Cordia's original point so how do you want to come in on that docking puppies versus docking adults and how many would you have to dock i think the issue is really the answer that none of us can give is how much pain to the puppies feel because it's almost impossible to say but it would appear from as far as we can tell looking at their behaviour the way they grow that um and the lack of um problems post docking if it's done by a vet his experience and those what he's doing um compared to um a dog at inches his tail that potentially faces weeks or months um or sometimes even longer than that of injuries and if anyone's had like even an infected fingernail and it throbs and it throbs all done it doesn't go away and you can take some paracelon what you can take what you want you know i'm sorry but analogies as analogies and maybe short term during the operation in the 12 hours 18 hours afterwards you can perhaps provide really good pain cover you can't provide it in the two three months before when the dog is really sore you can't provide it in the two three months afterwards that some of these dogs take to heal um so you can't control pain those dogs and there's no question that some of those dogs suffer and show pain what the reason why um the keepers in particular so strongly want this done is because they don't want to see their dogs in pain and they compare one against the other and they see one as really a relatively simple procedure that the dog seems to tolerate fairly well and the other is something which they themselves find intolerable to watch their dog suffering. In terms of the numbers needed to treat from diesel three to r2 papers i think none of the figures are unsurprising to me it simply reflects and if we accept the fact that the highest risk dogs are those are in work the diesel paper was all dogs seen at veterinary practices so that wasn't even just working breed dogs that was all dogs so no wonder the prevalence in that population is going to be much lower of tail injury and the lower the prevalence then the higher the number needed to treat they're inversely correlated. In the veterinary practice survey data where we ended up with higher numbers needed to treat again that's working dog breeds not just working dogs in the owner reported survey that's working dogs and i accept again that is owner reported injuries which is going to be much more prevalent than injuries that go on to be seen by a vet so it's simply a reflection of the prevalence of the clear injury that is defined in the different studies in the populations in those three different studies. Mark Ruskell. I'll show that down a bit more in a few amputations which we discussed earlier on. I mean the panel hasn't been able to provide figures for how many hunt point retrievers and spaniels are in Scotland but you know let's say there are 20 000 hunt point retrievers based on the figures that are provided in the Cameron study if every single one of those dogs had had its tail amputated as a puppy and therefore no longer had a tail anymore that would mean that 48 adult dogs would no longer require amputation in their adult lives as a working dog now in terms of the trade-off there between what acknowledges a painful and devastating operation for an adult dog and an operation on a young puppy under five days old is that an acceptable trade-off you know 20 000 the entire population of working dogs of these two breeds in Scotland being amputated versus 48 adults I mean those are the those are the figures when we expand them out and you could you could add on you know 30 000 40 000 or 10 000 onto that but we don't understand the amputation of 20 000 dog stales we're talking about shorting of 20 000 dog stales as opposed to full amputation just to be clear on the use of the language what my understanding convener is there isn't much of a difference in veterinary medical terms between taking a third of a tail off and taking an entire tail off but that would be useful I mean firstly are they equivalent is amputation equivalent and secondly in terms of that trade-off you know 48 versus 20 000 if you say the population of spaniels is 20 000 I don't think I think tail shortening of a five-day old puppy is remotely equivalent to tail docking an adult dog we've just described two entirely different procedures I think there's explain why that is physiologically physiologically we don't think sorry I'll just remind you I'm a general practitioner physiologically I don't think the bone structure is not the same the vascular structure is almost certainly not the same but developing the nerve structure is not the same but developing okay I think and I think that's where that's where we're that's our starting point okay you the numbers you're the numbers you're trying to put in there I'm looking at one litter of cocker spaniels a litter of three two of whom are now tail docked as adults because of tail damage and I think we will both see many of us in general practice perhaps dealing with a similar population to what I'm dealing with or dealing with maybe dealing with similar occasions when pups have not been tail docked it does not it does not tie in with the number that we got from research but it's what I'm finding in general practice okay thank you um I going back to your point about tail amputation I think tail shortening tail docking and tail amputation are the same in my view the same thing we're actually taking away a section of the dog's tail um and by further clarification tail shortening will be perhaps taking less of that away but you're still amputating a section of that dog's tail um when it comes to the pain associated with it um I think that or the sort of development of the the neonate and the the pain that they may experience David Morton did a review of the two papers in the vet record and actually I don't know his background to this or where he he has qualified this statement but he has looked at or he has stated that in fact it has been shown for many species that neonatal animals feel more pain than adults and I think it's important that we still think of amputation of tail docking in that way a Morton also wrote a paper 25 years ago and said if 80 percent of working dogs of a particular sporting breed were likely to require therapeutic intervention at a later date then it may be possible to make a case for prophylactic docking but low percentage case that actually need vet treatment it would be hard to justify and the total amount of suffering caused by prophylactic docking of puppies is likely to be greater than the few requiring therapeutic surgery later on where appropriate anesthetics and pain relief are available and there is long-term pain relief available to give to dogs for the few weeks before and after surgery if required and one final point any pain caused by therapeutic surgery can be justified by being entirely in the interest of that animal not the pain prior to surgery sorry sorry could you go through the chair yeah sorry a bit confused as to who's speaking sorry um Jim Dukes come in on that point yeah i mean it just comes round and round to the same point effectively as to um what is the percentage what is the benefit and that's really what you're trying to draw down on to isn't it i mean your figure of 48 is presumably based on i don't know what the practices that i've spoken to on average currently docking two to three dogs per year the small mix perhaps one to two vet full time equivalent that i spoke to um now that isn't a lot but you're trying to say across scotland that's probably actually hundreds rather than the tens or whatever that you're speaking about um and as i say there may be an overrepresent you know you're not looking again because a lot of people who have working dogs bring in dogs on the rest of the UK um and elsewhere that you may not actually be the percentage of working dogs that are undocked and therefore liable to injury maybe much higher um than you're suggesting i mean with with due respect i'm basing my figures on the data that's been produced in the studies that are being used to back up this change in the law in scotland so i'm really trying to drill down into some certainty here and i'm really extrapolating that population out to 20 000 because i've heard absolutely no evidence this morning as to what the total population of these two breeds are in scotland so i've right now i think it's very difficult for this committee to understand what the benefits and risks are of this introduction to which end of the committee has to try and get that information in the next week and if anyone on the panel subsequently has access to that information we'd be happy for you to write to the committee and share that tim parking while the rest of the panel members have been talking about i've been doing some maths and if you look at the letter of paper and if you look at the uh of those respondents approximately a thousand respondents and if we take the estimate that are approximately 17 000 members of the shooting fraternity could have responded and if we so if we look at the number of spaniels amongst those thousand and multiply that up by 17 and there were 1330 spaniels amongst the thousand respondents then you're going to be in the region of about 23 spaniels in scotland and if you'd look at hbrs it's going to be in the region of three and a half thousand hunt point retrievers in scotland so i'm always very wary of extrapolating up from a relatively small sample but that might give us an idea of the ballpark figure of those particular breeds in scotland okay okay have we exhausted this particular theme is every finlay castron sorry i'd like to ask about is it reasonable to suggest that the number of dogs being presented with tail injuries can be dramatically influenced by the number of dogs that we import from south of the border that have already been tail doped and i suppose it's a question to the the dog trust i presume you lobby south of the border for a ban on tail docking would you accept that that may have an effect of increasing the number of adult dogs being presented with tail injuries in scotland after that say that was to take place and the figures were actually seen just now are not necessarily accurate because we don't know how many dogs have been imported with their tails already docked i think trying to understand the question i think one of the things that you are mentioning is that we actually don't know the figure of dogs that we have in scotland that are working at this point and i think that's something that i am unable to answer for you today i'm not sure i'd be able to find that figure out for you either and then the cross border action i'm not sure if anybody can evaluate that fully either because it's a very difficult market or route to try and look at i think so i'm afraid i probably can't answer that question totally for you today i suppose i'm coming from that you know what we've heard from the panel that it appears to be a very low number of dogs being presented in later life with tail injuries based on the number of hunting dogs there are but that might be quite dramatically affected by the number of already docked dogs we have so if we were to stop docking across the the whole of the united kingdom we might see these figures in scotland rise dramatically and absolutely we're active in in trying to make sure that docking of dogs tails is made illegal and we're very pleased that scotland has taken that stance up until now um they've really led the the sort of welfare aspect of of this particular point but i'm not tim parking in a second but but the other influencing factor here that we cannot quantify is the number of dogs tails in dog tail injuries that are dealt with by their owners so to get the full picture you would really need to have that information difficult though it is to ascertain tim parking coming back to that issue um one of the questions we did ask in the questionnaire was where the dog was bred and whether that was pre or post the introduction of the 2007 legislation and pre the legislation approximately 80 percent of spaniels owned by those respondents were bred in scotland post the legislation it went down to 51.5 percent so that gives you an indication of the cross border traffic if you like that has been the result of the introduction of the legislation okay let's move this on uh peter Chapman yeah well i'm i'm i'm i just meant to explore the types of dogs that we can possibly tail dock and it says in the regulations that of the type known as spaniel of any breed or combination of breeds or of the type known as hunt point retrieve of any breed or combination of breed now that seems fairly fairly vague so are you content with the breeds and combination of breed covered by the regulations i think it's i think it's got a huge there's a there's an element in that that could provide a huge loophole when you're looking at combinations of the breeds and i think also trying to identify those breed types when we look at the Welsh regulations where they've tried to list the breed types they're incomplete on the hunt point retriever side and there will always be changes in perhaps the types of dogs that are being worked in the UK with a wider market looking across Europe and in other countries so i think i would have concerns over the legislation trying to state that i mean so so are you saying that we should we should try and you know you're saying we don't need to state the breeds no i'm not up for this exemption at all i'm i'm very much thinking we really need to reject it but what i'm trying to say is that other areas of the country that have tried to look at this have not maybe captured the full list of breeds that would be related to the hunt point retriever breeds and also we have an issue where the cross is which could then make at a very broad sweep of what types of dogs might be presented for tail docking it doesn't actually help to tighten that up no i mean i know you don't want it but if we do agree to go down this road do we do you believe we should have a tighter list of an absolute list of breeds that can be doped it's difficult to answer that only because we're still we're so we're firmly opposed to this as a as an exemption at all however i appreciate that the research that's gone ahead and the focus of that was trying to identify the fewest dogs that would be affected so i appreciate from a scientific background that's really what the the remit was from the scottish perspective and with tim but i think we are in an age where we have so many different new breeds or new types of dogs coming forwards and coming from dogs trust we know that very much in other spheres that i think it's going to be very difficult to pinpoint exactly the type of dog that might be presented for a working breed okay anybody else i think you've i think you've got it fairly tight here i think the hunt point retriever breeds are fairly well defined in this country i think the spaniel or any breed or combination of breeds i think again from my area would basically be primarily cocker spaniel springer spaniel and probably springer cocker cross okay i think you've also got the the evidence to be presented to the vet well as soon as we're into that we're talking about a vet that hopefully already knows what what the game what the what the um the legislation is all about so that in itself is going to make a vast difference so we're already going to be ahead of the game and knowing that this dog is is not for working or this dog is highly unlikely to be for working i refuse to do this procedure we've gone away from the point in addition the fact that we have already stopped tail docking and in in all breeds in this country we've talked about Yorkshire terriers we used to do Yorkshire terriers we used to do boxers we talked about rock violars um we have stopped all of these other procedures we are trying it certainly in the shooting field to try and narrow this very down as close as we can to a narrow group of dogs and and i accept that we are trying to narrow it i think this is a very narrow group of dogs that we are aiming to tail dock just to point out my reading of it was the combination of breeds was combination of breeds within breed types so not expanding it to all other cross breeds and that sort of thing for if you have a rhimer on a cross with x y or z it's combination of breeds within the breed type so that kind of keeps it tight as well yeah okay thank you it's a question to sort of round up so there's anything else that you'd like to add in your answers feel free to but in recognition that there are some dogs who suffer working dogs who suffer tail injuries in later life do you think that the regulations are a proportionate response to this issue and what changes would you make to the regulations as a whole we've already touched on breeds but would you make any other changes to the regulations in recognition that there are problems later on in life for working dogs and if we just go through the panel and i'll give you an opportunity to make any concluding statements we start then with Jim jukes um i think in principle no i think it's it's for the people that affected by this and the dogs affected by this i think this legislation is really really important and it's going to change a lot of people a lot of working dogs lives if the amendments are made as suggested i think it's important that it's it's clear and it's straightforward and i believe it is and i think it needs to be robust in force and yeah in principle i would be happy to see the change yeah i would couple of points i still think there's only a tiny percentage that i actually need treating so i think it's a disproportionate response i feel that there's more can be done with prevention we've not heard anything about breeding for tail carriage or anything like that and we've had 10 years to to work on that but you haven't heard anything that people have actually been trying to breed from dogs who've not had tail injuries or any innovation to design a guard or sheath they basically want to do this and one final thing our oath is to protect the welfare of animals in our care to not inflict unnecessary suffering and we are the animals advocate prevention of damage later on in life as a direct result of human use of these animals is questionable from dog trust perspective we would reject the review of these regulations based on a lot of the arguments that we've made today the regulations that have been put forwards are very brief when you look at other documents in this in this field in other parts of the country i don't feel that we don't feel that it gives enough narrowing but actually it's based on research which we feel doesn't stand up to the concerns around the welfare and the pain of this procedure for puppies to undergo it is a surgical procedure and it's done at a point where we cannot help and manage pain around it so we have huge huge reservations for that and we've already mentioned about the breed perspective as well i think looking at the calculations far more dogs or animals would need to be docked than are injured and i think it is disproportionate in in light of the evidence that we've seen i think the the draft legislation reads well i think we would need to we may need to be more comfortable as to what evidence is shown but i think i think the draft legislation actually reads reads quite sensibly i think we have to remember we are categorically not talking about aesthetics here we're talking about and we've got four vets each arguing welfare from a slightly different perspective my version of welfare is very much i would be tail shortening the young pups rather than watching an adult dog i'm sorry it suffers chronic pain we know we've got we have we have some fantastic medicines there's no doubt about that but these dogs are invariably suffering some level of chronic pain up until and even after tail docking if that's what we have to do as adults i think it's also worthwhile let me remember that gun dogs are essential for and central for shooting or retrieving or deer snocking the gun dogs are actually an essential part of that whole process from a welfare point of view of what we may be hunting thank you dr parkin do you want to just summing up really given the limitations of the work that was commissioned by the Scottish government i still strongly believe that the two papers provide the best available evidence on which to base evidence based policy change i don't think that we could design studies that would improve the evidence in any way we did have a third aspect of this work that was trying to follow a cohort of individual animals through individual dogs through that was simply impossible to implement um which we didn't take any further i think this evidence uh here stands up to reasonable scrutiny we recognise the biases and the limitations within the work but i do think it provides the best available evidence to potentially introduce legislation that in my view is an improvement on that which stands south of the border can i thank all the witnesses for their evidence today that's been a useful session for the members again as we touched upon earlier if you come across in the next week or so any studies that are relevant to some of the lines of question today please do feel free to send them on to the clerks at its next meeting on the sixth of june the committee will take evidence from stakeholders on the wild animals and traveling circuses scotland bill and will consider the law current caron urgent marine conservation order 2017 ssi 2017 slash 158 as agreed earlier we'll now move into private session i ask at the public gallery we cleared as the public part of the meeting is closed