Meeting of the Parliament 05 October 2017
As a member of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee, I join the convener in thanking all the stakeholders who gave evidence and the clerks, who did a great job in herding the evidence into another excellent report for the committee.
This should be a victorious moment, because banning wild animals in travelling circuses is absolutely the right thing to do on both ethical and animal welfare grounds. Emma Harper really nailed the ethical argument in her speech. Green MSPs will back the bill at stage 1.
I moved an amendment to the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Bill more than a decade ago that would have introduced a ban but, at the time, it was supported only—curiously—by SNP members. A ban is long needed and long overdue.
However, what should be a moment of celebration about the Wild Animals in Travelling Circuses (Scotland) Bill feels more like a headache because of some of the poor drafting. Many of us on the committee who started with very different positions on the bill have ended up sharing some of the same grounds for concern.
Let us take two of the most fundamental definitions. What is a “circus”? What is a “wild animal”? In evidence to the committee, the Scottish Government officials said that if it looks like a circus, walks like a circus and talks like a circus, then it is a circus. They also said that we should not expect people to “overthink” the definition of a circus—except, of course, that there are people who are paid exactly to do that, called lawyers.
We heard from a witness with a performance act with lions and tigers. He certainly talked like a circus when he gave evidence to the committee, but no one can tell him whether he would be a circus under the bill because he does not have a tent or clowns. Simply leaving it for the courts to decide is not good enough.
On the definition of “wild animal”, again, there needs to be much more clarity. The word “domesticated” is unhelpful and could be used by circus operators to argue that animals that have evolved over millions of years in the world are actually domesticated because they have lived in captive training environments for several generations. Certainly the taxonomy required to add a list of wild animals to the bill would not be too hard—a list would not have to name every individual wild animal on planet earth.
Given that more than a decade has passed since the wild animals in circuses issue was raised, I am perplexed about why the Scottish Government has not followed the Welsh Government route of updating legislation for all animal performances—of which travelling circuses are just one type—at the same time. That would have addressed the problem that the bill has in targeting the plight of wild animals in travelling circuses while simply ignoring those in static circuses.
We heard contradictory evidence from the cabinet secretary about the importance of the travelling environment being an ethical concern rather than an animal welfare issue, which had us, quite frankly, chasing our tails. Surely it would have been better to bring in a proper framework that places animal performances into categories that see them banned, regulated further or left alone.
The ethical basis for the bill was based on circuses being the top public concern, but no consultation or polling was conducted to understand the public’s view on greyhound racing, for example; yet those and many other types of animal performances raise ethical and welfare questions of varying degrees that need to be addressed.
The Government has much to do to make the bill look like a ban, walk like a ban and talk like a ban. I look forward to amendments being introduced at stage 2.
15:53