Thank you for contacting me about farmed animals.
We are proud to have some of the strongest animal welfare standards in the world, and as the highest ranked G7 nation according to World Animal Protection’s Index, we are committed to ensuring all animals are treated well at all stages of life. Last month, our landmark Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Act came into law, capitalising on our post-Brexit freedoms and bolstering the UK’s position as a world leader in animal welfare standards.
The legislation delivers on a key manifesto commitment to ban the export of live animals including cattle, sheep, and pigs for slaughter and fattening from Great Britain. This will stop animals enduring stress, exhaustion and injury on long and unnecessary export journeys–and will ensure that animals are slaughtered domestically in high welfare UK slaughterhouses, reinforcing our position as a nation of animal lovers and a world leader on animal welfare, boosting the value of British meat and helping to grow the economy.
The Act is just one part of a wider Government effort to enhance our existing world-leading standards. For farm animals, we have introduced new statutory welfare codes for pigs, laying hens and meat chickens, banned the use of conventional battery cages for laying hens and made CCTV mandatory in slaughter houses.
Since publishing the Action Plan for Animal Welfare in 2021, we have brought in new laws to recognise animal sentience, introduced tougher penalties for animal cruelty offences, announced an extension of the ivory ban to cover other ivory bearing species, supported legislation to ban glue traps and the import of detached shark fins, and introduced measures to ban the advertising and offering for sale of low welfare activities abroad.
We have also achieved our commitment to deliver the Kept Animals Bill measures individually, with all of the measures that require legislation back before Parliament and the pets as primate restrictions already law.