Burns Brendon: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Burns Brendon: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:663;Page:11371] 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I am very pleased to take a call on the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill. This came before the Primary Production Committee and was a member’s bill but it has been adopted by the Government. I commend the Government for doing that because I do not think there is much that New Zealanders abhor more than cruelty to animals. 
This bill follows on from a number of high-profile cases that have seen appalling cruelty to animals— 
Hone Harawira 
: Cruelty to children cruelty to women? 
BRENDON BURNS 
: Yes cruelty to animals. I am not supporting cruelty to humans either but we are dealing with animals in this particular bill. We had a number of appalling cases which saw such things as a drunken man taking the head off a family kitten in front of his family. We also had the awful instance of a man feeding five kittens to his pit bull terrier and watching the animal while it killed them. 
That sort of treatment of animals is reprehensible and the fines and measures available to the courts are not of sufficient quantity or size to provide a deterrent message not just to people who engage in wilful ill-treatment but also to those who recklessly ill-treat animals. A new offence is added via the bill in respect of reckless ill-treatment. There is a definition around wilful ill-treatment currently in the law for those who have set out deliberately to ill-treat or maim an animal. But there is an issue around reckless ill-treatment whereby effectively animals are abandoned—left without food and left without shelter—by people who do not give a stuff about the animals for which they supposedly have care and responsibility. That is why as well as increasing the penalties for wilful ill-treatment this bill introduces penalties for neglect and ill-treatment which in the past have not been subject to such penalties. 
The bill also enables the courts to order the forfeiture of animals owned by someone who has been convicted of a serious offence against an animal. In the select committee deliberation we also recommended that anybody who takes back animals or starts to look after animals again when they have been subject to a penalty and a disqualification relating to the ownership of animals can then face the same penalty all over again for taking on animals after that person has been told that he or she is not allowed to do that. 
As mentioned the bill was subject to considerable submissions from animal welfare agencies—the SPCA amongst a number of others. One of the more curious submissions came from the New Zealand Pork Industry Board. I had to say to the representative of the board that I found it a little bizarre for that industry to be submitting in support of the bill given that in the eyes of many New Zealanders the pork industry is an industry that raises a number of questions regarding its approach to animal welfare. For the Pork Industry Board to say it was shocked by some of the incidents of animal cruelty that it had seen reported was a little strange given that for many New Zealanders the issue of animal welfare was most brought into highlight by the  
Sunday 
 documentary last year in relation to the continued retention of sows in sow crates. So that was a rather odd submission to be made. None the less there were a number of other submissions. 
Debate interrupted.