The joy was short-lived: after the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture's preliminary draft bill for the new Animal Welfare Act stated in Section 1 that "when weighing up human interests worthy of protection against animal welfare, economic interest does not constitute a reasonable reason for impairing the life and well-being of an animal", this sentence was deleted again during the departmental vote. A scandal, comments Thomas Schröder, President of the German Animal Welfare Federation:
"Whichever federal ministry is responsible for this deletion is apparently in debt to the German Farmers' Association. In the first draft, its Secretary General had blustered about a 'ban on all forms of agricultural animal husbandry'. It is astonishing how an animal user association's wish can be implemented so immediately. We expect Federal Minister Cem Özdemir not to accept this and to fight for his first draft.
The sentence that has now been deleted merely formulates what has been applicable law since a ruling by the Federal Administrative Court on the practice of killing male chicks in 2019 at the latest. Anyone who now advocates the deletion of this addition to the Animal Welfare Act is deliberately disregarding supreme court rulings and trampling on the national objective of animal welfare. This cannot be in the interests of the traffic light coalition. The parliamentarians of the governing coalition will ultimately pass the law, and the state objective of animal protection must be strengthened instead of downgraded."
Note to editors:
With its current campaign "Now more animal welfare!", the German Animal Welfare Federation provides information on which announcements from the coalition agreement the coalition government has already tackled and where there are only empty promises so far: www.jetzt-mehr-tierschutz.de
