Published 10/05/2010

There are encouraging signs of continuing support for farm animal welfare by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who have voted overwhelmingly in favour of an excellent report by Marit Paulsen MEP on the Animal Welfare Action plan 2006-2010. The report calls for the European Commission to put in place measures to develop, implement and enforce animal welfare legislation in the European Union (EU). As Compassion has all too often found, animal welfare laws are frequently not implemented or sufficiently enforced within the EU.

The Environment Committee of the Parliament has also supported Compassion's call to exclude food derived from cloned animals and their descendants from draft legislation on "novel foods", i.e. foods which have not been consumed widely before. The vote was on a report prepared by Kartika Liotard MEP, which was approved by 42 votes in favour, 2 against and 3 abstentions. We are really pleased with this vote, as the European Commission wanted to include food from the progeny of cloned animals in the legislation, which would have opened the door to cloning farm animals on a huge scale.

Our thanks to Kartika Liotard. The full Parliament will meet in plenary session to vote on her report, probably in July. Compassion will continue to lobby hard against allowing the cloning of animals for food purposes.

Read more

• Compassion's investigation into the state of EU pigs
• Farm animal genetic engineering and cloning ( 25.50KB)