Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 February 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013: Post-Enactment Scrutiny (Resumed)

Mr. Tim Kirby:

I will speak on my own behalf. Certainly, without doubt, the drugs that would be used where a surgical procedure would be done are what we call controlled drugs. They are medicines that would only be licensed for use by a veterinary surgeon such as anaesthetics and pain relief drugs. The question is where some people would be accessing those medicines. The most likely scenario is that many of these drugs would be imported. There are reports of that with respect to generic drugs. For example, when a drug is launched, it gets a period of exclusivity and then the generic drugs come on the market. There are always reports that when a generic drug is launched there are counterfeit versions of that generic drug on the market. That is not a new feature of medicines. That has existed for years in animal health in particular. I imagine these drugs would be counterfeit generics of licensed drugs on the market. There are laboratories capable of producing those drugs. Scientists can reverse engineer them and produce them. They will make their way on to the market in some shape or form, most likely through importation. It is important to realise many of these facilities probably would not even have those drugs available. They would be using human drugs. People have given various human medicines to animals. Some of the breeding establishments do that to control the fertility of dogs and use pain relieving drugs. Some people will raid their human drug cabinet to see if those drugs will work on a dog with the consequent major risk and side effects of that for any animal. That is what I would say about those control medicines.

On raising public awareness of ear cropping, there was a very good drive to cut out ear cropping and make the public aware of it the UK in late 2021 with the Cut the Crop campaign. The word "cut" was really effective. As I said, I would almost replace the wording with "Chop the Crop" because it must be that stark. It is quite a visceral comment to make and it must be that raw that it captures people’s emotions such that they think it is not a procedure we should accept and that if we see it, it is abnormal. It comes down to education on what is normal and abnormal, and what is acceptable based on that.

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