To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs whether her Department has plans to remove the permission for tail docking of working dogs.

Section 6 of the Welfare of Animals Act (NI) 2011 (the 2011 Act) prohibits the docking of a dog’s tail other than for the purposes of its medical treatment by a veterinary surgeon or to safeguard its life. Subsection 4 provides an exemption, subject to certain conditions, for certified working dogs involved in law enforcement, lawful pest control or lawful shooting of animals.

This issue was extensively debated by the Assembly during the making of the 2011 Act. In passing the Act the Assembly agreed a clear policy that cosmetic tail docking of dogs should be banned but that there should be a veterinary certified exemption scheme for specified working dogs.

The detail of this scheme is laid down in the Welfare of Animals (Docking of Working Dogs’ Tails and Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations (NI) 2012, which set out the requirements to be observed to allow a veterinary surgeon to certify that a dog is likely to become a working dog and may be exempted from the tail docking ban. The certification process in these Regulations is robust and only dogs for which satisfactory evidence has been provided to the veterinary surgeon may have their tail legally docked.

My Department consulted the public and animal welfare stakeholders on the recently completed Review of the Implementation of the 2011 Act and did not receive any representations on this issue.

I therefore have no plans to review the exemption from the ban on tail docking for working dogs.