Legislation is coming to deal with the illegal importation of pets, says Minister of Agriculture, Food and Nutritional Security, Indar Weir.
Describing recent pictures of a python in the Newton Christ Church area as evidence of “reckless behaviour” Weir insisted that legislation was necessary to tackle the business of illegally importing animals and putting lives at risk.
“Innocent people can very well find themselves in danger because persons who are prepared to beat the system will go to any length to ensure that they can bring pets into Barbados without proper declaration, without proper certificates to import.
“And when this happens and they can no longer control those pets they are released into our domestic space. I personally feel that there must be a mechanism through which these practices must be controlled and that’s the reason why we are moving with legislation to first of all protect the animals. When you have legislation that protects the animals you then have a chance of dealing with people’s behaviour,” he said.
Speaking on the Animal Health and Veterinary Public Health Bill, 2022 in Parliament on Friday, the minister disclosed that a meeting was held to discuss what must be done to strengthen the existing animal health and welfare legislation.
“This piece of legislation would take us a long way in bringing about some of the changes that were recommended for the protection and welfare of animals in Barbados.
“But there are a number of gaps that existed in previous legislation that we had to address and we are hoping that by the end of this, we should be able to address those gaps and be able to give Barbadians a chance to work with us in terms of what we do for animal welfare and animal health,” he said.
Weir also announced that authorities would be implementing surveillance programmes to track the location of migratory birds which have been found to spread bird flu.
He said Barbados’ geographic location has placed it in an ideal position for migratory birds to flock to the island at certain times of the year, leading to the possibility of the bird flu spreading locally.
“We have to stay on top of the situation so that we can do the necessary protection. This is a serious biosecurity issue. The same problem exists within the United States as well. There are migratory birds that would spread the disease,” Weir said.
In addition to bird flu, Weir said, Barbados must also put systems in place to prevent swine flu from reaching its shores.
“I recall last year we were dealing with a threatening outbreak of African swine fever. African swine fever had spread in Espaniola, starting in the Dominican Republic and then it went to Haiti and it is still rampant to this day in Hispaniola.
“The latest report that I got from my senior veterinary officer suggests to me that we now have to ramp up again our biosecurity measures to make sure that we do not run the risk of getting someone either illegally bring pork products from one of those jurisdictions that can contaminate or spread the disease here in Barbados that pose a serious threat to our biosecurity,” he said.
Noting that measures would also be put in place to prevent the importation of infected pork products, Weir indicated that he has been advised that the African Swine Flu was now out of control to the point that “they can’t keep track of the numbers”.
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