Is It Time for the UK to Strengthen and Enforce Farm Animal Welfare Laws

In recent years, lawmakers in the United Kingdom have started addressing cruel agricultural practices such as gestation crates, battery cages, and branding. As such, it is natural to assume that the U.K. has made tangible progress for farmed animal welfare. However, in this comprehensive report, the organizations Animal Equality and the Animal Law Foundation dissect the “Enforcement Problem” endemic in the U.K.’s response to farmed animal protection laws.

Broadly, an enforcement problem occurs when laws exist “on paper” but are not regularly enforced by authorities in the real world. This issue is particularly striking in farmed animal law due to recent whistleblowers’ and undercover investigators’ accounts of systemic, violent — and often deliberate — animal abuse. This first-of-its-kind report gathers and disseminates data from sources ranging from local authorities to government officials to document how and why the UK fails to identify and prosecute animal abusers in compliance with national law.

To understand the Enforcement Problem of farmed animal protection, it is first necessary to know which laws are not being enforced and by whom. Examples include Animal Welfare Act 2006 in England/Wales, the Welfare of Animals Act 2011 (Northern Ireland), the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2006 (Scotland), and the Welfare of Farmed Animals Regulations that exist throughout the United Kingdom. These laws assert “minimum welfare standards” for farmed animals and ban actions causing unnecessary suffering. In slaughterhouses, laws include Welfare at the Time of Killing Regulations, intended to “protect” animals in their final living moments. Animal transport, meanwhile, is guided by Welfare of Animals (Transport) legislation.

The U.K.’s farmed animal protection is supposedly centralized under the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). However, Defra outsources many of its enforcement tasks to other bodies, leading to a fragmented animal protection system that lacks continuity and accountability. Regulatory oversight is shared between multiple governmental bodies across nations, including Scotland’s Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate and Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs (DAERA). Not all of these bodies perform the same tasks. While all are responsible for legislation, only some actively perform the monitoring and surveillance necessary to enforce these laws. Furthermore, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) often steps in as the main investigator and prosecutor of crimes against farmed animals.

The fragmented process of farmed animal welfare oversight comes in many forms. On farms, for instance, most on-the-ground enforcement of animal welfare tends to come from the farmers themselves. Inspections often happen following complaints by the RSPCA, a community member, a veterinarian, whistleblower, or other complainant. While inspections and subsequent violations can result in a prosecution, other common “enforcement” actions include mere warning letters, improvement notices, and care notices, suggesting to farmers that they need to improve their animals’ situations.

Furthermore, there are no hard and fast rules as to how often inspections should be performed. Indeed, the most likely persons to be convicted for non-compliance with farmed animal welfare were those who already had previous convictions. Due to this reactive, not proactive, “risk-based regime,” inspections likely do not capture the full breadth of welfare violations behind closed doors. From 2018-21, fewer than 3% of U.K. farms received an inspection. Only 50.45% of farms were inspected after receiving direct complaints about animal welfare, of which 0.33% of farms were prosecuted following initial complaints. Some of these data points can be attributed to a lack of available full-time inspectors, as there is only one inspector for every 205 U.K. farms.

Undercover investigations have thus revealed far more violations of animal welfare standards than prosecution rates would lead citizens to believe. In February 2022, for example, BBC Panorama aired Animal Equality’s undercover investigation into a Welsh dairy farm, showing egregious and purposeful animal abuse. The media coverage resulted in public outrage. However, since 2016, 65+ undercover investigations have occurred, of which 100% revealed mass welfare violations. 86% of the investigations passed the footage to relevant authorities. Of these, a full 69% resulted in no punitive action being taken against the offenders. These data points represent systemic under-enforcement of farmed animal welfare laws, even in the face of direct video evidence.

The report also presented a series of case studies of systemic farmed animal cruelty in the U.K. — in other words, the immediate victims of the nations’ Enforcement Problem. These case studies demonstrate how a lack of enforcement has caused extreme suffering to nonhuman animals. The cases presented include dairy cows, chickens, pigs, fish, and general farmed animal experiences in slaughterhouses, all revealing severe instances of animal cruelty that violate the U.K.’s farmed animal laws to little consequence.

One example is the cruel practice of “tail docking,” which routinely takes place on pig farms despite clear legal regulations stating that the practice should only occur as a last resort after all other methods to prevent tail biting have been tried. Data suggests that 71% of U.K. pigs have had their tails docked. Tail docking causes extreme suffering to pigs, who only bite other pigs’ tails out of boredom, frustration, illness, lack of space, or other signs of an inappropriate farm environment for these intelligent mammals. The lack of inspections and enforcement, coupled with a lack of record-keeping, means that tail docking routinely occurs to the detriment of pigs, who experience physical and psychological distress as a result.

The report also revealed that welfare standards at the time of killing were not consistently enforced. The U.K. slaughters over 2 million cows, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep & lambs, 80 million farmed fish, and 950 million birds per year. Despite multiple Welfare at the Time of Killing laws in place throughout the U.K., undercover investigations consistently showed noncompliant, extreme, prolonged, and abusive activities during farmed animal slaughter. For example, in 2020, the Animal Justice Project covertly filmed ducks set for slaughter in clear distress. Some were shackled, some were grabbed and dragged by the neck, and some were left hanging for over ten minutes. The shackled ducks also experienced irregular movements via sharp bends and drops on the shackle line, causing the very types of “avoidable” pain and distress that Welfare at the Time of Killing Laws were designed to prevent.

A law that exists on paper is no law at all if it is not adequately enforced. The U.K.’s farmed animal protection laws are commonly and flagrantly violated, leading to the unnecessary suffering of animals. If the U.K. is serious about its animal welfare standards, it is essential that activists, lawmakers, and ordinary citizens press for stricter enforcement of the laws currently in place.