Kedgley Sue: Veterinarians Bill — Third Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Veterinarians Bill — Third Reading 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I place on record that the Green Party supports the Veterinarians Bill and indeed the veterinary profession. Despite the lengthy and tedious filibuster we have experienced over the past 24 hours on this bill I believe in fact that all parties in this House support the legislation and that all the hundreds and hundreds of amendments by the National Party were just part of some little game. I have not quite understood what it was all about; they were certainly not serious amendments but just part of a filibuster. So now we have a bill that I think every party in this House supports and we hope it will achieve its various objectives including that of protecting the reputation of practising vets. Indeed their brand has been mentioned a number of times as though everything in the world has come down now to brands. 
The interesting thing about veterinarians is that almost every vet I know—and I am sure that most vets—cares deeply about animals. Most people who go into the veterinary profession do so because they have a great affinity for animals. Certainly I could sing the praises of all the vets who have helped to keep our 18-year-old cat alive and I think we could all sing the praises—and they have been sung endlessly in the House over the last 24 hours—of individual veterinarians. 
But there is a mystery that I would like to comment on—that is why veterinarians who have a great affinity with animals are silent when it comes to major and important issues of cruelty towards various animals. In particular I am thinking of the cruel and shameful conditions that hens pigs and chickens have to endure in New Zealand. 
David Bennett 
: And fish. 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: The member is right—some fish in their cages as well. I am absolutely convinced that most veterinarians would feel as repelled and horrified as I do or in fact as anybody would who actually visited for example factories and saw hens stuck in cages with a space the size of a piece of A4 paper to move around in. It is a grim Orwellian sight. The hens cannot express any natural forms of behaviour. They cannot even extend their wings. They are kept in conditions of misery that it would not be an exaggeration to say are verging on torture. 
Pigs—highly highly sociable animals—are stuck in their sow crates unable to turn round and just standing there. That is all they can do day after day—those highly highly intelligent sociable animals who can in experiments play games on computers with joysticks. To see those highly intelligent and sociable creatures stuck behind bars unable to move and just chewing their bars in desperation would make most veterinarians feel repelled—as indeed I believe any member of this House would feel if he or she cared to go inside and observe the conditions those animals are kept in. They would feel that that is a very grave blot on New Zealand’s landscape and that we should not in this day and age in the 21st century be keeping animals in conditions that can only be called cruel. 
So it is a mystery to me when I am certain that most vets are opposed to those practices why the organisations and councils that represent them are silent for the most part about them. We look to veterinarians to speak up on behalf of the animal kingdom and I am sure that if they were not silent but spoke up those cruel practices would come to a swift end. But in fact it is their silence that enables those horrendous conditions to continue in our midst. 
That is why the Greens are particularly keen on the new functions of the Veterinary Council of New Zealand and its prime No. 1 function—that is to advise and make recommendations to the Minister on any matter relating to veterinarians and the practice of veterinary science. Councillors now have a mandate to give specific advice to the Minister on any matter of veterinary science and surely now after years of silence they will find their voice and see that mandate as an obligation on them to speak up for the animal kingdom—for those animals that have no voice in this Parliament. A veterinarian’s livelihood is based upon looking after animals and seeing that they are well cared for. 
So I look forward to hearing that the Veterinary Council has made recommendations to the Minister of Agriculture to get rid of sow crates from New Zealand and to get rid of cages where hens are jammed into spaces with an area less than the size of an A4 sheet of paper in which to move and also to look at the whole issue of keeping 20000 to 40000 chickens that we eat for meat jammed into windowless sheds where for much of the time they have very little room to move around and where they are continuously fed antibiotics in low doses for breakfast lunch and dinner even though they are not sick. 
Of course we know and every veterinarian in New Zealand knows that that particular practice is shameful and that it puts the health of future generations of New Zealanders at risk. If we wanted to have an experiment in creating and developing antibiotic resistance we would continuously feed millions of animals low doses of antibiotics. This practice is producing antibiotic resistance. Up to 50 percent of chickens tested have antibiotic-resistant bacteria on them. When we eat them we in turn can take on board those antibiotic-resistant bacteria and of course those bacteria can pass to other bacteria in our stomachs and so on. It is a shameful practice it has been banned in many countries overseas and I do think it is time we acknowledged that this practice is putting the health of New Zealand at risk. 
It is up to veterinarians to take the lead on this issue because after all a small number of veterinarians are filling out the prescriptions and allowing—recommending in fact—millions of chickens to be fed antibiotics continuously which they do not need because they are not even sick. I have no problem with giving antibiotics to any animal that is sick but I do have a huge problem with feeding antibiotics continuously to any animal that is not sick basically to make that animal grow more quickly and to prevent disease from sweeping through flocks. 
Other countries have banned that practice because they realise the huge risk that overuse of antibiotics places on our future. More and more diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics and we are facing a future where we will not be able to treat many diseases with antibiotics. When we face that future people will look back and ask why we allowed that practice to happen and why veterinarians stayed silent about that practice and allowed it to continue by filling out prescriptions that allowed it to happen. They will also ask why the Veterinary Council of New Zealand did not take the lead in getting rid of this and other shameful practices such as the keeping of animals in cages in conditions that could really be described only as torture. 
The Greens strongly support this bill. We are very hopeful that the new role of the Veterinary Council in making recommendations to the Minister and in giving advice on any matter relating to veterinary science will result in the Veterinary Council and the veterinary profession at long last finding their voices on those issues taking a lead and getting rid of some of the shameful cruelty that millions of animals in New Zealand still have to endure.