Meeting of the Parliament 05 October 2017
As an elected parliamentarian and councillor, I have been pleased to make links over the years with the Scottish Showmen’s Guild. On a number of occasions, I have attended their annual lunch to hear about their history, traditions and commitment to the entertainment of our communities. On one occasion, I was thrilled to discover that the grandfather of my host had been a lion tamer in London. I say “thrilled” because it conjured feelings of the unexpected, the bizarre, the amazing and the exotic. As the granddaughter of a steelworker, I was suddenly within touching distance of a romantic, dangerous, alien history and a lifestyle that I knew of only from my story books and imaginings as a child, but which was so real for the families of the Showmen’s Guild. I pictured Mucha-esque billboards with ringmasters in fabulous redder-than-red jackets, cartoon-like strongmen and exotic animal displays—images that are memories of a thankfully bygone era.
At a Showmen’s Guild fair today, someone would not even find a goldfish in a bag as a prize. That was another era, and our values have changed, as my colleague Emma Harper so eloquently outlined. Modern society no longer has a taste or tolerance for the thrills and exhibits of the past. Documentaries such as “Blackfish” have altered our views on the display, captivity and ethical use of animals.
I am not a member of the committee, but I thank it for its substantial work on the bill at stage 1 and I am delighted that it supports the general principles. I would like to drill down into one area that the committee examined, which is the meaning of “wild animal”. It is extremely important that we get that right.
My interest in the area comes from the work of Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyayev. He hypothesised that the anatomical and physiological changes seen in domesticated animals could be the result of selection based on behavioural traits. He conducted an experiment on silver foxes over 40 generations. Animals were selected for the breeding process based on temperament and there was a control group. He rated each fox’s tendency to approach an experimenter standing in front of its home pen, as well as each fox’s tendency to bite or be aggressive towards the experimenters. They were able to breed out aggressive and fearful traits and change the foxes by selecting fewer than one fifth of them for breeding.
There were changes to the appearance and behaviour of the animals that were bred to be domesticated. They wagged their tails and they were happy or excited to see people. Further, their fear response to new people or objects was reduced. The first physiological change detected was in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. That system is responsible for the control of adrenaline, which is a hormone that is produced in response to stress and controls fear-related responses. The domesticated foxes had significantly lower adrenaline levels.
I give that example to the chamber because it explains domestication and informs us about what it—as opposed to training—means. To my mind, genetic and biological changes that took hundreds of thousands of years to make in domesticated breeds such as dogs cannot possibly have been made in animals—such as those held in circuses—that have not been selectively bred from a very small group. They are wild animals, and should be considered as such.
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