Mr. Michael Sheahan:

They were welfare complaints but they were not complaints that were upheld. They were things along the lines of somebody saying there is a lame horse in a field. We get over 1,000 complaints on our animal welfare helpline. We investigate every single one of them every year and 300 or 400 of them tend to be related to horses because horses are quite visible as they are out in a field. We examine them. We go out and look at every single complaint we get. To be fair, in the case of all of the five complaints we got, we did not find something that merited prosecution or even the serving of a notice. A complaint is one thing. Horses can be very visible if they are standing out in a muddy field and it can look bad to somebody. That does not mean that somebody is breaking the law or that they have done something wrong. Just because somebody makes a complaint about horses in a very visible place does not mean we will find something wrong. If we had found something wrong, of course, we would have acted.