DEFRA’s experience is limited to securing the food chain.
- What if one of these ill-informed empty-headed fools had decided that we needed to track and record all visits and regulated our industry in line with farming?
- And local authorities were closing us down because we refused to tag the cat’s ears or paint our initials on their coats to identify which cattery they’d stayed at?
It’s not so far fetched because when DEFRA discovered that no one knew anything about our sector, it should have been a no-brainer for DEFRA to stop wasting public money, stop what they were doing and find someone who knew anything.
It’s because of this botched job that we can categorically conclude that:
- We can’t have a bunch of lobbyists taking up space on the Canine and Feline Sector Group advising the government on issues concerning a sector that they know nothing about.
- If a government advisory board knows nothing then a government institution can't write regulations without direct contact with representatives of that sector.
DEFRA can try to deflect blame onto the CFSG because DEFRA relied on this advisory board for information pertaining to our sector.
- But DEFRA can't deny that they knew that the advisory board is made up of of more than two thirds of charity sector lobbyists.
- DEFRA can't pretend that they hadn't realised that the CFSG knew less about our business sector than a dentist knows about camel herding at the north pole because the farcical "advice" DEFRA acted on was written into our regulations.
- And finally, DEFRA can’t blame the CFSG because DEFRA chose to rewrite our legislation and it was DEFRA’s responsibility to obtain the relevant advice before doing anything else.
The only conclusions we can draw is that when DEFRA discovered that the advisory board was completely full of shit, no government official should have put pen to paper without contacting anyone in the industry or without having spent a significant time working in the sector they’re writing regulations for.