Silencing the experts:

How extremists

are twisting the

animal welfare debate

An alarming trend has taken root in today’s animal welfare debates. Despite representing a tiny minority of the population, extremist animal rights activists are dominating discussions – not because they know best – but because they have made campaigning their full-time mission.

Meanwhile, highly experienced breeders, keepers, trainers, vets, and conservationists who live and work with animals every day are being pushed to the sidelines. The result? An uneven debate where experience and knowledge are overshadowed by unqualified noise.

Tony Wigley is the founder of Responsible Reptile Keeping, an organisation advocating for responsible pet keepers and businesses around the world. He’s seen this worrying trend first-hand in many different countries.

‘Somehow, the very people who know the most and care the most about animals are excluded from the conversations, and often painted as the bad guys, when nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, we often see disproportionate, overreaching legislation enacted with serious negative consequences. And this could have been avoided if legislators had just listened more to the specialists who know first-hand what they’re talking about.’

Experts ignored

The Animal Welfare Committee (AWC) is a government advisory group working in the UK. In 2023, they proposed enclosure size guidelines that were so unnecessarily large that their implementation would have affected hundreds of stores selling reptile pets, potentially causing many to go out of business. The AWC’s consultations initially excluded the UK’s main reptile-focused advocacy organisation, REPTA. When REPTA representatives gained access to the discussions, their testimony was largely ignored. Instead, the input from known animal rights activists with anti-reptile-keeping ideologies was emphasised in the AWC’s report. Thankfully, pressure and comments from specialist reptile businesses and advocacy organisations (including RRK) sufficiently discredited the AWC report, and it sank into obscurity.

A similar situation in 2025 caused concern in Sweden. The L80 proposal, as it was known, recommended not only obscenely large enclosure sizes, but also prevented keeper interaction with nocturnal species during the daytime and recommended a ban on feeding live insects to animals – essentially banning the feeding (and therefore the keeping) of many reptiles and amphibian pets. Pressure from an outraged public forced the Swedish Government to withdraw the L80 proposal.

Who really speaks for animals?

At first glance, it’s easy to sympathise with calls for better animal welfare. But the devil is in the detail.

Extremist animal rights campaigners operate from a worrying ideology: that humans should not keep, breed, or utilise animals for any reason. For them, the aim is not welfare, but abolition. No zoos, no guide dogs, no captive breeding and no pets. In their eyes, even the most devoted and ethical animal keeping is wrong.

Yet these campaigners often have little or no real-world experience with the animals they seek to ‘protect’. Their knowledge is shaped by rhetoric, slogans and theory. They’re experts in protests, media manipulation and emotionally disingenuous campaigning – not animal care, veterinary expertise, ethology, or conservation. Compare their inexperience and ignorance to the knowledge and experience of animal-keeping specialists, and the source of the most useful expertise should be obvious. And yet, in legislative hearings, media reports and public debates, it is often the activists, not the specialists, who get the final say. The imbalance is not just frustrating. It’s dangerous. When policy is driven by emotion rather than evidence, animals end up losing.

Embarrasingly ill-informed

Eurogroup for Animals (EFA) is a well-funded and powerful lobby group advising the EU governments on reptile legislation. A recent EFA presentation to the EU Commission demonstrated how little such inexperienced activists actually know about the animals they profess to lobby for. In a presentation slide aiming to ‘educate’ lawmakers about reptile keeping, EFA claimed the world’s largest snake is the Burmese python – a glaring error in itself. (The longest species of snake is the reticulated python, while the heaviest is a green anaconda.) But, more embarrassingly, the accompanying image wasn’t a Burmese python, but a ball python – a small, commonly kept pet species.

These aren’t minor slip-ups; this is basic knowledge any reptile enthusiast would know. Yet this kind of misinformation is typical of groups like Eurogroup for Animals, which regularly claim flawed science and outright errors as fact. Despite this, these organisations advise governments and influence serious legislation that could strip millions of people of their right to keep pets. With such serious, real-world consequences at stake, one has to ask: Is this really who we want shaping our laws? Should we trust such novices with life-changing responsibilities?

Watch RRK's full breakdown of the EFA's misinformation here

Ball python

Burmese python

When lobbying

outscreams expertise

There are countless worldwide examples like those listed above, where caving to activist pressure has created animal-welfare chaos. For example, exotic pet bans and ‘positive lists’ have caused soaring levels of illegal trade, sending otherwise law-abiding pet keepers underground with restricted access to advice and veterinary care. In each of these cases, the underlying mistake was the same: campaigning activists with undeserved levels of representation and influence.

If we genuinely care about animals, we must prioritise listening to those who have extensive, practical, real-life experience. Animal-keeping specialists won’t be staging dramatic protests or flooding social media with virtual outrage. They don’t have the time or the inclination. Instead, their days are spent actually caring for animals, often guided by decades of accumulated knowledge. It’s time we asked ourselves a simple question: if the goal is to do what’s right for animals, shouldn’t we be listening to the people who know them best? Animal keepers and breeders are the very individuals who will live with any new laws, so surely they deserve a seat at the table.

‘Every time an extremist agenda takes hold, we see pet keeping driven underground,’ Wigley explains. ‘Keepers stop sharing husbandry improvements, cease mentoring newcomers, and hoard their expertise away from public view. Animal welfare doesn’t improve when the experts are ignored. It deteriorates.’

Positive list facts

A positive list (also known as a whitelist) is a list of animals a government permits you to keep. Any species not on the list is banned.

If you own a banned animal, most governments provide ‘grandfather rights’, allowing you to keep it until it dies, but usually, you cannot breed or sell the animal.
Many campaigners who favour positive lists ultimately aim to prohibit all captive pet keeping.

Restoring balance

This isn’t a call to silence the voices of activists entirely. Public debate thrives on a diversity of views, and awareness campaigns can play an important role in highlighting genuine issues. But when a tiny, radical minority hijacks the conversation and shouts down experienced voices, then we have a serious problem. Balance needs to be restored.

The injustice at play in the policymaking process is extremely concerning. Campaign-obsessed activists routinely influence legislation, creating devastating consequences for millions of dedicated pet owners and animals. If we truly want to protect and enrich the lives of companion animals, our policymakers must embrace the hard-earned expertise of those who know these creatures best. Too often, animal specialists are silenced or ignored. It’s time we listened.