Lord Taylor, Minister of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, will be attending the 24th April meeting to set out the Government's priorities for animal welfare and answer associate member's questions. Further information will be sent to members in due course.

The Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare has asked members to fill in a short questionnaire to establish what progress has been made on improving pedigree dog welfare. The aim is to produce an update report which sets out what actions have been taken, what remains to be done and how stakeholders can work together to achieve the best results. The questionnaire can be seen here.

If this is an issue which you are interested in, please contact the APGAW secretariat on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for further information

APGAW Members Conservatives Against Foxhunting and Humane Society International recently brought the problem of the lack of protection for pregnant and nursing hares and their dependent young to the attention of APGAW's chairman, Neil Parish.

There has been a serious decline in the number of hares in the UK, with surveys showing that the brown hare has declined by more than 80 percent during the past 100 years and in some parts of Britain, such as the south-west, it may even be locally extinct.

Other game species are provided with close seasons during the sensitive breeding period but, as this protection is not afforded to hares, many thousands of leverets can be abandoned and left to die each year.

APGAW feels that the protection afforded to hares is woefully inadequate and needs to be increased and wrote the following letter to the Minister;

Letter

At the last APGAW meeting, members discussed the issue of cloning. We heard some interesting perspectives from Compassion in World Farming, the RSPCA and the National Farmer's Union. The NFU particularly highlighted the concerns farmers had that science should not be prevented from making breakthroughs that assisted productivity and advanced their ability to meet the demands in food worldwide.  APGAW understood this view but also felt that as it currently stands, cloning is detrimental to animal welfare and should not be increased unless it would prove otherwise. Neil Parish MP sent the following letter to the DEFRA Minister