PET THEFT
I have now co-signed a letter to the Lord Chancellor with the Chair of the Petitions Committee about the pressing need for pet theft reform. This follows my virtual meeting with the Stolen and Missing Pets Alliance earlier this month where we presented their petition calling for pet theft to be made a specific offence with tougher sentencing.
The full video of our discussion is also now available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOKQOIPVIpM
Despite pet theft being raised a number of times through petitions and in Parliament over recent years, the Government hasn’t yet moved to make the necessary changes to the Theft Act which would make sentences of up to 2 years more readily available to our courts to punish this particularly cruel crime. I hope this letter will cause the Government to look again at changing the law because, as you can hear in our discussion, the law as it stands often results in pitiful sentences which only take into account the monetary value of the pet and not the emotional cost to the owners and the harm caused to the pet.
In the letter we have also stressed how the lack of a specific pet theft offence makes it harder to record pet theft cases and focus the full scale of this growing crime. Sadly we know that pet theft has increased during the Covid-19 lockdown, robbing many an important source of companionship during this difficult time, but many cases won’t even get a crime reference number and this issue isn’t attracting the attention it should.
The sentencing law on pet theft must be changed to deter this abhorrent crime and provide an incentive to our police to track down those responsible, and I hope the Government recognise this in their response. I do not plan on leaving this issue here though and I am reaching out to pet theft campaigners to look how we can continue to raise this issue in Parliament and make further direct representations to Government ministers. Watch this space.
Leave a Reply