The Fauna Federation has organised a campaign to collect signatures in order to achieve the withdrawal or repeal of the Law for the Protection of the Rights and Welfare of Animals.

This campaign will be active until 16 May. The Psittacus Foundation has taken on the task of centralising the collection, revision and storage of the signature sheets from all over Spain at its headquarters.

As has been reiterated on many occasions, this law, which has already been approved and will come into force at the end of September, will be extremely harmful in many areas.

Among many others, we can highlight these serious aspects of the law:

• It prohibits the breeding and keeping of most of the species of pets currently present in our homes. This is intended to be done through the implementation of extremely restricted positive lists.

• This ban will have very serious consequences for the conservation of protected species (which cannot be included in the positive lists), since their breeding in captivity is essential to eradicate the illegal capture and trafficking of wild individuals and to maintain a genetic reserve in captivity.

• It will also have catastrophic consequences mainly for the entire pet industry: breeders, veterinarians, retailers, food and accessory manufacturers, etc. Thousands of jobs will be destroyed, many activities will have to close and many hopes will be dashed.

• It prohibits non-professional breeding. Private individuals will have to prevent their animals from breeding and non-compliance with this ban will be severely punished. We will be forced to give up our hobby of keeping birds, reptiles, fish, etc.

• It consolidates a system of management and control of feral cat populations that has been shown to be completely ineffective and that results in the massive daily predation of birds, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, etc.; a continuous aggression against biodiversity and opposed to the conservation of protected species.