A cross-party committee of MPs is expected to call for the RSPCA to stop implementing private prosecutions for animal cruelty and instead hand evidence over to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
The findings from the Commons environment, food and rural affairs committee report is expected to provoke outcry from other animal welfare charities when it is published on Wednesday, according to reports. The RSPCA has been accused of becoming too eager to take people to court.
MPs are also expected to recommend a ban on pet shops selling puppies to end the “factory farming” of dogs, the Sunday Times said.
In 2014 the charity removed an elderly cat from the home of Richard and Samantha Byrnes after the couple called the charity about their pet. The cat was euthanised the following day by a vet, against the family’s wishes. The RSPCA subsequently tried to prosecute its owners for animal cruelty. It later acknowledged that its intervention in taking the pet cat and treatment of the couple was “disproportionate and insensitive and fell short of the standards of compassion the public are entitled to expect of the RSPCA”.
RSPCA’s chief executive, Jeremy Cooper, apologised for the mistakes the group had made earlier this year when he took charge of the charity. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Cooper said the organisation was “going to be a lot less political”.
“People may have had the perception we were becoming an animal rights organisation. It is not the reality now and it won’t be in the future,” Cooper said.
However, he was later accused of giving in to animal rights activists when the RSPCA said it would continue to bring prosecutions.
The committee’s report will say the RSPCA should follow the model of its Scottish sister charity, the SSPCA, which hands evidence it has gathered to the procurator fiscal which is the equivalent of the CPS, reported the Sunday Times.
“The committee is simply saying that in order for there to be no question of prosecutions being driven by any other motive than public interest, it needs to separate those activities,” one source was cited as saying. “It thinks the only way it can separate those activities is if it hands its prosecutions to the CPS.”
Labour MPs who sit on the committee have reportedly opposed the recommendations. The ban on pet shops and other “third party” sales of puppies has been proposed to counter “factory farming” of puppies which can lead to thousands of animals being housed in poor conditions.
The source said owners could see with their own eyes the conditions in which the puppies had been reared when buying directly from breeders.
