A brand new regulation that will strengthen punishments for cat and dog theft is predicted to be backed by the Government.
Conservative MP Anna Firth’s Pet Abduction Bill would create a selected crime of animal theft punishable by as much as 5 years in jail.
The regulation is about to be debated within the House of Commons on Friday, and ministers are understood to be “very sympathetic” to the plan.
Pets are presently thought of property below the regulation and stealing them is roofed by the 1968 Theft Act in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Ms Firth, who serves because the MP for Southend West, instructed the BBC that low prosecution charges for animal abduction made it a “low-risk, high-reward crime”.
A report by animal rights group Pet Theft Awareness revealed that police-recorded cat abductions surged by 40 per cent in 2021 and had greater than quadrupled since 2015.
Annabel Berdy, senior advocacy officer at charity Cats Protection, mentioned it is very important that any new felony offence covers cats in addition to dogs.
She instructed the BBC: “If you included dogs from the outset with out cats, on condition that these are the 2 companion animals, it’d drive exploitative criminals or folks seeking to steal animals for money in direction of cats.”
The regulation must also recognise “the very comparable emotional worth and attachment that homeowners can have with their cats, as they do with dogs”, she added.
It comes after Conservative MPs criticised the Government for failing to ship on animal welfare commitments included a now-scrapped invoice final yr.
The Animal Welfare Bill, which might have cracked down on puppy smuggling, banned reside animal exports for fattening and slaughter and helped sort out pet abduction, was scrapped final May, almost twoyears after it was first launched.
Labour made an unsuccessful bid to convey again the laws, however its vote on the matter failed to realize the assist of a single Tory MP.
Leading Conservative politicians used the debate last June to condemn the Government for permitting the animal rights invoice to fall by the wayside.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the previous Tory chief, instructed MPs that “we should not have discovered ourselves in a state of affairs the place this invoice needed to be dumped and we’ve got to start out over again”.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a former Tory minister, mentioned she was “immensely disillusioned”, including that “the general public need us to ship” the invoice.
They had been among the many 99 Conservative MPs to abstain from the vote to revive the laws, with an extra 181 MPs voting for it and 252 in opposition to.
