Scottish Animal Welfare Commission: welfare of animals as sentient beings - activity review 2025

8. Discussion

As Session 6 of the Scottish Parliament enters its final few months, SAWC notes that the focus of the Scottish Government is on completing work initiated over previous years, with limited proposals for new legislation. As might be expected, given the amount of time required to pass primary legislation, only six Bills were scheduled as part of the Year 5 Programme, with two carried over from Year 4 – a considerably shorter list than the 16 Bills in 2021-2022. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that neither of the Programmes for Government relevant to this review contained any new commitments specifically directed at animal welfare.

It is a fact of life that animal welfare tends to attract less attention from elected representatives than other issues, so that the passage of legislation in this area represents an achievement for politicians, officials and advocacy groups. Paradoxically, however, the passing of a Bill can presage further challenges when it comes to ensuring that the legislation is actually implemented and enforced.

For example, some sections of the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024 are not yet commenced. The widely welcomed ban on rodent glue traps was delayed due to the refusal of the previous UK administration to agree a derogation to the Internal Market Act 2020, to allow the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a ban on supply of the traps. It is now understood that this issue is resolved and that the measures will shortly be introduced along with potential licensing provisions for pest controllers. The original SAWC report into glue traps, published in 2021, recommended that there should be no more than a three-year transition period prior to a full ban. SAWC hopes that the time already elapsed since the Act was passed will be taken into account when setting the implementation date for these provisions.

The 2024 Act also provides for the use of spring traps for wild mammals and cage traps for wild birds to be made subject to a licensing regime. In October 2024, land management organisations began providing training courses in preparation for the proposed scheme. However, introduction of the licensing provisions of the Act has been delayed and is now not expected until late 2026. That will be a full seven years from the report of the Grouse Moor Management Review (the Werritty review), which initially proposed increased regulation of, and training for, the use of traps. SAWC believes that such delays can undermine the intentions of legislators and the public who, not unreasonably, expect laws to be implemented once they have been passed.

Another example is the Fireworks and Pyrotechnics Articles (Scotland) Act 2022. It was positive that this legislation took account of animal welfare from its inception. However, key provisions such as the licensing of private firework use and restriction of days of sale have not yet been introduced and thus the legislation is not able to deliver on its potential to protect animals from the fear, stress and injury caused by fireworks.

Some policy and legislation directly affects animal welfare even when that is not the primary motivation for proposing it. There is a role here for both advocacy groups and official advisors, such as SAWC, in promoting full consideration of animals’ needs. The national Good Food Nation Plan was one example where SAWC recommended wider and earlier coverage of animal welfare priorities. SAWC members now look forward to assisting with the development of further animal welfare indicators, as requested by the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands, in order to optimise the potential benefits of the Plan. This would be in line with responses to the consultation, where animal welfare was one of the most-mentioned areas where indicators were thought to be lacking.

Following the fairer food labelling consultation carried out by DEFRA on behalf of the four UK administrations, the governments recognised that there was strong support for the provision of clearer information for consumers of the welfare standards of their food, by way of method of production labelling. The governments’ response identified food labelling as a devolved policy responsibility and linked labelling with “the Scottish Government’s ongoing work to develop a national Good Food Nation Plan”. Method of production labelling is not mentioned in the Good Food Nation Plan that was published in June 2025. SAWC looks forward to seeing these two policy strands joined together and recommends that, in a Good Food Nation, method of production labelling should apply to all farmed-animal-derived products sold in Scotland (whether or not produced here).

Another issue raised in last year’s review was the constraints placed on officials and agencies due to Scottish Government emergency spending controls. This year, communications around the 2025 to 2026 Scottish Budget continued to emphasise “continued and unprecedented challenges to the public finances”. In such a climate, it is probably unrealistic to expect significant new expenditure on animal welfare, which lies outside the Scottish Government’s four declared priorities of eradicating child poverty, tackling the climate emergency, growing the economy and ensuring high quality and sustainable public services. Ambitions for far-reaching new regulatory regimes in the field of animal welfare are likely to be misplaced.

The three examples of new primary legislation mentioned in this report are all Members’ Bills concerning the welfare of dogs and are unlikely to impose significant costs on the public purse. Elsewhere, however, the effect of financial constraints on animal welfare policy, legislation and enforcement continues to be felt. In 2023, the Scottish Government consulted on proposals for the extension of animal welfare licensing of activities involving animals, or revised regimes, to cover businesses providing dog walking, dog grooming and livery stable services, canine fertility clinics, animal boarding establishments (including day care), greyhound racing, riding establishments and wider equine activities.

Analysis of the consultation responses, published in February 2024, found a high level of support for the licensing of animal care activities, with more mixed views concerning the licensing of greyhound racing. The analysis reported that:

“Respondents were in strong agreement that licensing animal care activities could:

• Improve animal welfare.
• Allow for the consistent application and enforcement of standards.
• Allow businesses to operate on a level playing field.
• Improve the wider public's perception of and trust in animal care service providers.
• Ensure accountability when animal welfare is compromised.”

However, many respondents, including local authorities, identified “significant budgetary pressure on local authority resources” and questioned whether it would be possible for councils to enforce any new licensing measures without additional ring-fenced funding for staffing and relevant training.

The Scottish Government has now decided to prioritise development of regulations to license canine fertility services – an area that presents increasingly urgent and novel challenges to companion animal welfare. In September 2025, two individuals were sentenced for animal welfare breaches – requiring euthanasia of six dogs to end their suffering – in their “clinic” run from a shed in Gorebridge, near Edinburgh. This was the second such serious case this year. SAWC therefore supports the decision to make regulation of these operations an area of urgent priority. At the same time, we hope that resources can be made available without undue delay for the other measures that were consulted on and supported by respondents in 2023.

Finally, and in a wider context, SAWC made a submission last year to the Finance and Public Administration Committee as it reviewed the National Performance Framework and National Outcomes for Scotland. Public authorities and other organisations with public functions must have regard to the National Outcomes in carrying out their devolved functions. SAWC suggested that the National Outcomes should take account of the welfare needs of sentient animals in Scotland and should contain content specific to those matters. We argued that it is not ethically justified to consider human wellbeing in isolation from that of non-human animals, who are affected by our use of animals, our behaviour, our presence and our impact on the shared environment.

The fact that these issues were not referred to by the Committee in its November 2024 report suggests, disappointingly, that they were not considered relevant to the wider wellbeing agenda in Scotland. The remit of the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission is to provide practical recommendations on the way that the welfare needs of sentient animals are being met by the Scottish Government in all areas of policy development within the remit of Scottish Ministers (policy note to the Scottish Animal Welfare Regulations 2020). This brings us back to the point we raised last year about the potential benefits of animal welfare impact assessments for proposed new policy and legislation across all the portfolios. These could be carried out at the time of consultations and would, it is hoped, keep the principle of paying full regard to the welfare needs of animals, as sentient beings, firmly on the public agenda.