Pembrokeshire County Council has approved a family plan to raise guinea pigs, alongside rabbits and pigeons, specifically to kill and eat them at home. It sounds like a novelty story. It isn’t. It’s a test of how UK animal welfare law treats animals we’ve put in use categories such as companions and food.
We set out what happened, what the law permits, which animals fall inside and outside protection, and why a petition currently sitting at over 11,000 signatures wants Wales to close this off entirely.
The case
Dave and Mayu Phillips applied to build an off-grid, low-impact home on family land near Jeffreyston, in rural Pembrokeshire, under Wales’s One Planet Development scheme. The plan includes an existing honey business, walnut trees, and vegetable gardens, along with meat production from a pair of breeding rabbits, three pairs of breeding guinea pigs, and a flock of 20 pigeons.
Dave Phillips told the planning committee the guinea pigs involved are a larger, meat-producing breed, not the companion variety most of us grew up with. The committee approved the scheme unanimously, on the basis that it meets the sustainability and low-impact criteria the One Planet scheme was designed around.
Is it legal to eat a guinea pig in England and Wales?
Yes. There is no law in England or Wales that bans eating guinea pigs, or names a fixed list of animals people are and aren’t allowed to eat. UK law doesn’t licence species; it regulates conduct. What matters isn’t which animal is on the plate, but how they got there.
With that said, some animals that most people cannot fathom eating are treated differently under the law. For example, it’s illegal to sell dog or cat meat for human consumption in the UK, and there are no licensed abattoirs for slaughtering them, yet killing and eating your own dog or cat privately has never been explicitly banned. As for Guinea pigs, there is no sale restriction selling them for human consumption. Commercially, they’re treated similarly to rabbits.
So the question was never whether they can legally eat guinea pigs. It’s whether the council had to weigh animal welfare law when granting permission, and whether the plan can actually comply with the law.
Section 4, and who it actually covers
A relevant law is the Animal Welfare Act 2006, specifically Section 4, which creates the offence of “unnecessary suffering.”
The Act defines an animal as any vertebrate other than a human, so invertebrates fall outside it entirely, as do animals still in foetal or embryonic form. Within that, Section 4 only applies to a “protected animal,” a term defined in Section 2. An animal counts as protected if they’re of a kind commonly domesticated in the British Islands, if they’re under a person’s control (even temporarily), or if they’re not living in a wild state. Wild animals, such as a wild rabbit shot in a field, generally fall outside this protection unless they’ve been captured or are otherwise under someone’s control. The Act also explicitly excludes lawful scientific procedures carried out under separate legislation, and anything done in the normal course of fishing.
Fortunately, Guinea pigs bred and kept in a garden setup are protected animals under the Act. Unfortunately, as you will later read, this might not mean much in practice.
Section 4 itself doesn’t ban killing an animal. Killing an animal “in an appropriate and humane manner” is explicitly carved out of the offence. What it bans is causing unnecessary suffering, whether through something a person does or fails to do, where they knew or reasonably should have known it would cause suffering.
Courts weighing whether suffering was unnecessary look at a set list of factors: whether the suffering could have been avoided or reduced, whether the method complied with any relevant law, licence, or code of practice, whether there was a legitimate purpose, whether the suffering was proportionate to that purpose, and whether a reasonably competent, humane person would have acted the same way. Feeding a family isn’t automatically a defence. It has to be weighed against how the animal was actually killed.
The rules that apply here
Because the Phillipses intend to eat animals they own, on their own land, for their own household, they fall under a specific exemption: no slaughter licence is needed to kill an animal for a person’s own consumption, or that of their immediate family, as long as it happens on their property. That exemption comes with binding conditions, set out in official slaughter guidance: the animal must be stunned before being killed, using an approved method, and killed immediately after stunning, before they can regain consciousness.
Guinea pigs aren’t named in the guidance, which was written with poultry, rabbits, and larger animals in mind. That gap is part of what campaigners are pointing to: the law was never built with backyard guinea pig meat in mind, so the welfare standards for slaughter are thin at best. This is why protection under Section 4 of the Act might not mean much in practical terms for these Guinea pigs.
The petition
That gap is exactly what’s driving the Change.org petition, started by Adam Shaw of the Herbivore Club, which has now passed 8,000 signatures. It isn’t arguing the Phillipses have broken any law. Its argument is that guinea pigs occupy a strange cultural middle ground in the UK, kept, named, and grieved as companions by hundreds of thousands of households, and that a planning scheme is the wrong mechanism to wave through their use as food, however sustainably the project is framed.
The petition asks Pembrokeshire council to reverse its approval on the guinea pig element specifically, and goes further: it calls on the Welsh Government to legislate a specific ban on breeding, killing, selling, and eating guinea pigs in Wales, which would close the species-neutral gap in the Animal Welfare Act that makes this legal in the first place.
Lawyers for Animals, a registered charitable incorporated organisation in England & Wales. Principal Office: Studio 10 Hackney Downs Studios, 17 Amhurst Terrace, Lower Clapton, London E8 2BT. Registered Charity No: 1215659.
Vegan for the animals 💚🐸💚🐸💚
absolutely horrible