What are the SNP doing to improve animal welfare in Scotland?

We will adopt the highest possible animal welfare standards, including shifting to entirely free range, woodland or barn chicken and egg production.

We will modernise and update the Animal Welfare Act from 2006 and implement the new livestock worrying legislation.

We will seek to reflect so far as we can, new EU animal welfare labelling to promote food produced to higher than EU welfare standards.

We will create a new Scottish veterinary service to ensure that we have enough people with the right qualifications in veterinary services, animal health and food safety to meet all our needs across the public and private sector for land and marine based animal health issues.

We will ban live exports of animals for fattening and slaughter and only allow live transport of livestock to and from islands and the mainland with stringent welfare standards in place.

We will legislate to close loopholes in the law protecting foxes and other wild mammals and remain committed to implementing the licensing of driven grouse shooting. We will implement the recommendations of the Deer Working Group and modernise deer management legislation.