Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-02-Speech-3-191"
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"en.20010502.14.3-191"2
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"Mr President, I would like to congratulate Mrs Evans, not only on the work she has put in on this, but her very fair and lucid summation of the proposal as it left committee. What we have here is that critical balance between public health requirements and common humanity. Humanity forces us to consider the suffering of those who have to leave cherished pets behind when they travel throughout the European Union. We call this the "Whisky and Soda" reform in Britain, not because it was conceived in some drunken evening in SANCO but because those are the names of Commissioner Patten's two dogs which for many years he had to leave behind in France when came back to England and he was the principal sufferer – certainly in terms of publicity – who has brought about perhaps a change of thinking in our part of the world.
I just want to mention three critical areas: first, the time scale; Mrs Evans has accepted now that we have a time scale for the changeover of 8 years, which seems to me to be effective given the life span of most pets in moving from tattoos with all their weaknesses to a proper system of microchips. I do not personally think that in Amendment No 7 where there is a proposal that we have to have an absolutely universal system of ISO standard microchips, that you can expect all animals fitted with a chip to be of that universal variety in the early stages. We have to be a little more lenient there. Secondly, I am delighted that we have now effective proposals, which I am sure the Commissioner will accept for the quarantining of animals which come from third countries where rabies is endemic – the Indian subcontinent would be a case in point. People do move about, their animals move about and we know from other considerations, which are now taking part in another debate on vaccination which is going on with the import and export of foodstuffs, how many things come into and out of the European Community, which are putting us at hazard. We do not want that in this case and so it is very important that the quarantine provisions remain.
Finally, ferrets. The Ferret Trust have been following me around over the last few days in a state of great excitement about the provisions on ferrets. In the UK, for sure, there are still some doubt whether you can actually prove the vaccination of a ferret sufficiently to be certain that it could be vaccinated and then be safely transferred as a pet from one country to another. The Ferret Trust told me, very temperately, that they thought the determination of whether ferrets should be included in the pet passport scheme should be deferred until further research had been carried out and they quote two US authorities, Dr Bruce Williams and Dr Zack Miller, as experts in that field. I would happy to go along with that. I have nothing against ferrets, but I would think that even a small risk that rabies may be spread by even such an exotic source as this needs us to give further pause for thought and consideration, rather than simply rushing ahead with a proposal about which at least one Member State still has serious reservations."@en1
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