I was invited to visit the two Lush Cosmetics shops in the South Wales area to hear about their campaign ‘No Cop Out for Wildlife’. Lush has been doing great work in raising awareness about the Police Commissioner elections and asking customers who care about wildlife crime to tell their candidates that they want them to pay attention to animal welfare and enforcing the law on wildlife and environmental crime. I’m proud to say that I’ve championed animal welfare issues in Parliament for many years, including guiding the Hunting Act through Parliament, campaigning against the badger cull and helping to pass the most radical piece of animal welfare legislation since 1911 with the Animal Welfare Bill.

I’ve had many people of South Wales writing to me about it too, so I put together a leaflet on my record on animal crime (available here) and listened to customers at Lush Swansea telling me what they think about these issues. Then I went down to Lush Cardiff to talk to Aimee – who’s leading the campaign in their store – about issues of animal welfare. In both stores it was encouraging to see staff and customers engaged with the election especially as there has been such a lack of interest in many quarters and the Government has simply failed to tell people what this election is all about. Below is what the managers of each store had to say.

Sian Thomas, Manager of Lush Swansea: “Alun came down on a busy day to talk about his policies and we were pleased to see how engaged and how involved he has been for years with animal welfare. He came to talk to customers in and outside the shop for over an hour. I was quite thrilled about how informed he was about the issue and very impressed with his stance.”

Gemma Trevan, Manager of Lush Cardiff: “It was great to have someone as passionate about our ethics at Lush and really lovely to get someone who is so aware and informed. Having Alun in store was a great opportunity to let other people know about these over-looked issues.”

On a related note, I heard the CEO of Lush – Mark Constantine – talking about the importance of the living wage on the Today programme on Radio 4. He gave an excellent response and well-informed response form a business perspective and there was a very interesting discussion:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9764000/9764350.stm