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Total ban on electric cat collars will not be introduced, Michael Gove indicates

Michael Gove indicated the ban would not extend to cat collars designed to prevent pets straying into dangerous territory - Getty Images Europe
Michael Gove indicated the ban would not extend to cat collars designed to prevent pets straying into dangerous territory - Getty Images Europe

A total ban on the use of electric shock collars for pets will not be introduced, Michael Gove has indicated, after fears the policy would lead to more cats dying on roads.

In response to a question in the Commons on Thursday, the Environment Secretary suggested the ban would only apply to those that are used to train animals into good behaviour, and not to devices designed to prevent pets straying into dangerous territory.

Electronic collars allow shocks to be applied to cats and dogs by their owners. Containment collars work alongside underground 'fences', which can be installed along the edge of a property to prevent a cat wandering out into the road and being run over. The collars beep at a cat when they approach a cable buried in the ground, and if the cat continues it is given a shock.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs launched a consultation on a proposal to ban electronic training collars last month. 

Mr Gove's support for the measure is said to have caused friction at the Cabinet table, with reports that transport secretary Chris Grayling uses the containment fence system to protect his cats. 

Electric collar - Credit: Les Wilson 
Campaigners say electric collars are cruel Credit: Les Wilson

Alluding to TS Eliot's collection of poems Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, John Hayes, a former transport minister said to Mr Gove yesterday: "TS Eliot said that when a cat adopts you, you just have to put up with it until the wind changes.

"Well, a cruel wind may be blowing for thousands of cat owners who put protective fencing in place to stop their much-loved pets joining the hundreds of thousands who are killed on our roads each year. 

"Will the Secretary of State, a noted cat owner, stand alongside those friends of felines or will he send TS Eliot spinning in his grave and many cats to theirs too?”

Mr Gove responded: "TS Eliot once wrote at the beginning of The Waste Land that April is the cruellest month. 

"But this April will not be a month in which cruelty towards any living thing will be tolerated towards any living thing. We want to bring forward legislation in order to ensure that the use of shock collars as a means of restraining animals in a way that causes them pain is dealt with adequately. 

"But [Mr Hayes] does raise an important point as well. Containment fences can play a valuable part in making sure that individual animals, dogs and cats, can roam free in the domestic environment in which they are loved and cared for."

Mr Gove said "a number of submissions" had been made to the consultation about containment collars, and they were "being reflected on very carefully".

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph on Thursday,Professor Timothy Gruffydd-Jones, of the University of Bristol, who specialises in feline medicine, warned that electronic containment fences used in combination with electric collars "are entirely different from dog training collars".

To ban them would "condemn many cats to unnecessary suffering and death" because they prevent cats straying out from their gardens onto their streets, he wrote.  

The RSPCA argues that all electronic collars should be banned because they can cause pain and fear. The collars are illegal in Wales. 

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been approached for comment.