Meeting of the Parliament 20 December 2017
We will continue to engage with stakeholders including COSLA. I thank the ever-gallant John Scott for his intervention, which helped to use up some time.
I pay tribute to the travelling circus industry. This has been a difficult issue for it. The few circuses in the UK that still use wild animals are small family-run operations for which the circus is not so much a business as a way of life. They have debated and co-operated throughout the development of the bill with courtesy and openness, and I remind them that travelling circuses without wild animals will always be welcome in Scotland. Our circus sector is an example of how circus can develop as an art form and remain popular without using wild animals.
I will take a minute or two to go through some of the speeches that we have heard this afternoon. A couple of members—Donald Cameron and Finlay Carson—tried to bring some humour to the debate. I have to say that Donald Cameron carried that off a little better than Finlay Carson, whose own colleagues looked perplexed and then somewhat bemused by his attempts to inject some humour into proceedings. However, they did try, and that has been a mark of how engagement on the bill has proceeded throughout the process.
Donald Cameron rightly flagged up the role of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. If members think that the jokes that have been cracked here are funny, they should look up the proceedings of the committee and read the Holyrood magazine article that Graeme Dey mentioned.
David Stewart attempted a lesson in Roman history, which was interesting, but he also highlighted abuses and reminded us of the reason why we are here.
Graeme Dey referred helpfully to the views of young people. It is easy to forget about the extensive survey work that was undertaken and how important it was in the early stages of the bill.
I say to Mark Ruskell that there really is no list. The committee and the member himself must surely be aware of how difficult compiling a list would be, having attempted the exercise themselves. Peter Jolly’s circus had a list of wild animals that the circus was using, one of which was a zebu. I have no idea what a zebu is—I would guess that it is a hybrid of a zebra and something else—but it is an example of what would have been left off any attempted list of wild animals, which shows why there is no list.