Reptile whitelists haven't worked in Norway

This is a story every reptile keeper should hear.

Norway had a complete ban on keeping reptiles between 1977 and 2017, but many people simply ignored it.

Then, in 2017 the Norwegian Government imposed a short whitelist of approved reptile species. We spoke to Svein Fosså of NZB to find out how the whitelist is working out in Norway. (Spoiler alert – it's not going at all well.)

Watch this video to find out why Norway's whitelist is unnecessary, unenforceable, bad for reptile science and, worst of all, causing reptile welfare issues.

Thanks to Reptile Basics for sponsoring this video.

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SCRIPT

I would certainly advise any other government who are thinking of whitelists from staying away from it. It is not an effective tool.

My name is Svein Fosså. My main job is as Secretary General for the Norwegian Pet Trade Association NZB, which has led me into international work on several arenas, including having been the President of the European Pet Organization for the last 16 years.

When I was a teenager, it was in Norway, like in most European countries, quite customary that you could keep more or less any animal that was available. Pet shops were full of exotic animals, as they are commonly referred to, and this was in part not always successful in terms of animal welfare. And therefore, in the 70s, there was

increasing pressure on the possibility for people to keep exotic animals, anything that was considered exotic. As you all know, it's a very vague definition on "exotic", as it's practically anything that looks unusual to you, and for people who don't keep animals themselves, more or less everything looks unusual and exotic.

In 1976, the government decided to introduce a ban that went into effect on January 1, 1977, which prohibits the keeping of all exotic mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

On reptiles and amphibians, everything became illegal overnight. However, with grandfathering rights for the people who already kept reptiles, they could make an application for keeping the animals they already had, as long as they didn't breed them or sell them to anyone else.

Basically, any species of exotic animals were banned from January 1st, 1977.

The ban was certainly not respected by the people who had an interest in keeping animals. Norway has always had a very relaxed border control to our neighbouring countries, which means that any species that were legal in Sweden or Denmark, or for that matter in Netherlands, Germany, were quite easy to get hold of for Norwegian hobbyists, who could import them illegally by car or ferry from the neighbouring countries.

It became very clear when we got into the 1980s that there was a pretty gigantic undercover keeping of reptiles in Norway. But no one had real knowledge of how many animals or what species. It was all black market going on in basements hidden away from the view of people who were not in the know, so to say.

When I became involved in working for the Norwegian Trade Association in the 1990s, one of the first things I started on was trying to get more accurate figures for how many illegal reptiles there were in Norway.

There were ways of estimating that based on what was sold of equipment and food for reptiles in the Norwegian pet shops. As even though we had a ban on keeping reptiles, there was no ban on selling terrariums or equipment for reptile keeping, foods for reptile keeping. So around 1993-94, I estimated from information I got from pet shops that there could be something between 80,000 and 100,000 reptiles in Norway.

Later in the 90s, the government did similar attempts on finding accurate figures and they pretty much confirmed that there had to be in the area 100,000 illegal reptiles kept in Norway.

It was a widespread hobby, but being illegal, it had a lot of negative effects on animal keeping in general, because people never dared to take the animals to a veterinarian if they were sick. And since reptiles were illegal, there were also very few veterinarians who knew anything about reptiles.

Besides, it destroyed the general public's understanding of legislation on animal keeping in general. You got a feeling that this is such a ridiculous ban that, well, let's simply forget about the legislation.

Once it was clear that there was a lot of illegal reptiles being kept in Norway, I, in my new job for the trade association, initiated a contact with government in early 1994. I think I had a very first meeting with the Ministry of Agriculture, who is responsible for animal welfare and therefore for this legislation in February 1994, where I said that this ban is not working according to its intentions. I would like to discuss with you whether this could be changed in some way.

And much to my surprise, I got positive reactions, as the government was also seeing that this was more or less destroying people's respect for animal welfare legislation.

In 1995, 1996, there was a lot of meetings between me and the animal welfare authorities where they were moving towards opening for reptile keeping in general, but with a blacklist of species that shouldn't be kept. A blacklist in this context is a list of animal species that you are not allowed to keep, while a whitelist would be the opposite, a list that specifically says that only these species are legal to keep.

In 1997, a working group was formed to actually investigate this. And I recall very well that to begin with, in the working group, there was a good understanding that a blacklist was the way to go. But then hobbyists who already were keeping reptiles illegally in Norway got involved. Hobbyists apparently thought that a whitelist instead of a blacklist would speed things up, because then the government wouldn't have to consider so many species.

They introduced this idea for a government who immediately took it and thought that, "Oh, when the pet-keeping community themselves rather would like to have a restricted whitelist, let's go for that." And since I had been arguing strongly against the use of whitelists from the very beginning, I was kicked out of the working group as I was not anymore considered constructive, because I had always said to the government that by all means avoid having a whitelist, because there are so many problems, both in making this list and making sure that people actually follow it.

Interestingly enough, much as I had expected, going for a whitelist didn't speed things up in any way. Actually, by introducing a whitelist, more or less making a guarantee that these species are suitable for being kept by the public in general. So they had to enter a pretty long process of making sure that any species that should be on a whitelist could be kept without any problems, be it in terms of animal welfare, nature conservation, species conservation, risk for humans, what have you. Anything had to be investigated for this species.

So while we, in the beginning of 1997, already could read in the press that the government is going to open up for the keeping of snakes and lizards in Norway, things came to a very sudden halt, mainly because once there is a process on making a whitelist, everyone knows about it, and the animal rights side in Norway started their campaigning to avoid a whitelist. Nevertheless, government continued the work, but it took an awful lot of years before they were anywhere near having a list to propose.

In 2013, what started out as a list of probably 30, 35 species had been reduced to 19 species, and it was presented to the Minister of Agriculture for the final approval. The response of the minister was immediately, "No, we are not going to have snakes in Norway. Snakes don't belong here," he said, "and there is no way we will have a positive list of snakes that can be kept in Norway as long as I'm in office."

In 2015, however, we had a new government, and this government had already several years earlier said that the ban on reptiles is kind of ridiculous. So they instructed animal welfare authorities to restart the process of having a positive list. And in August 2017, the new Minister of Agriculture approved that 19 species of reptiles should be legal to keep in Norway.

So it took well over 20 years from when I started the process in 1994 until we had a positive list or a whitelist on legal species. If we had stuck to the initial thoughts of having a blacklist, I still believe we would have had change in legislation already in 1997.

The 19 species on the Norwegian whitelist are the green tree python, the Amazon tree boa, the common boa, the ball python, the common king snake, the corn snake, eastern milk snake, rainbow boa, carpet python, spiny-tailed monitor, crested gecko, leopard gecko, eyed lizard, ocellated uromastyx, bearded dragon, madagascar day gecko, Hermann's tortoise, Chinese pond turtle, and red-footed tortoise.

This list of species can look extremely strange for people who know their reptiles. And unfortunately, I don't have much details on how these animals actually were selected, except that I know that it was the hobbyist community at the time who made suggestions of the animals they wanted to have on a whitelist. I would suspect that this was based in part on what they already were keeping illegally and in part on the desire to have some species from all the major groups of reptiles.

Making a whitelist puts a huge responsibility on the government that makes it, because they will be a sort of guarantee that these are suitable animals for the average keeper. And in Norway, the government commissioned huge reports on the species that they wanted to include on the whitelist. There were at least two government institutions producing hundreds of pages on all the species that were proposed for listing. And they evaluated any possible animal welfare issues. They evaluated the sourcing, if that could be a problem for species conservation. They evaluated the invasiveness risk of the species, human safety, etc.

So it was a gigantic undertaking, which, well, personally, I think I could have made a better positive list over a couple of weeks work than what the government needed 20 years for. What is left is a peculiar mix of easy to keep beginner species and rather difficult species that in part are also difficult to get hold of.

So in addition, we also see that the nomenclature is totally wrong compared to what initially was thought to be put on the lists, as government didn't think about changing nomenclature in reptiles. So there are species now on the list which have been split into new species so that the species that the one initially wanted to allow has another name than what's on the positive list.

This is, for instance, true for the Madagascar day gecko, Phelsuma madagascariensis, where it's actually Phelsuma grandis, which is common in the hobby and which was evaluated for the positive list. So the list still says Phelsuma madagascariensis, but everyone keeps the grandis.

But enforcement is still a problem on border control in Norway. You can still, if you are interested in something that is not on the whitelist, easily import it. And there is definitely illegal imports into Norway, not through the commercial trade, but through hobbyists who visit trade shows or fairs in other countries and bring home illegal animals.

When illegal animals are caught on the border, they are invariably confiscated and either given away to a zoo, exported back to the source or euthanized. I have absolutely no idea how big the problem with illegal animals are, but it's definitely ongoing.

When the total ban still was in place, there were quite a lot of cases of animals being confiscated at the border or even in people's homes. Most illegal reptile keepers at the time were very careful who they told that they had animals. But it did happen that some neighbour heard that they have the snakes in their apartment or that an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend wanted revenge and told the government about illegal keeping of reptiles. In which case, the animals were always confiscated. And since the majority were quite common species that no zoo was interested in having, they were euthanized.

There were quite a lot of reptiles being euthanized in Norway before 2017, but it was only the tip of the iceberg over all the reptiles that were in the country.

A whitelist sounds like a way to reduce the number of species to begin with, but through that also the number of specimens of animals that are kept on private hands. I think that's the main reason why governments think that whitelists are a very good idea. We reduce the total number of animals in the community and we make sure that these are animals that anyone can keep.

The Norwegian whitelist is a very good example that you certainly don't guarantee that everyone can keep them because you have made a list with some very easy to keep species and some rather complicated species. And there are hundreds of very easy to keep species that are not on this whitelist.

There are many problems in having legislation based on whitelists. For one thing, there are very few people on border controls or anywhere in government who know the species and certainly not all the many morphs that are of different species in trade and hobby.

Actually, making sure that people apply to the legislation is difficult. But the really serious keepers who have a big interest in reptiles and who are the very people who have been driving the development in husbandry on reptiles for years and years will never be satisfied with what's on a positive list. As the idea of a positive list is that it should be something that everyone can keep. And the advanced people are looking for something that demands a certain level of expertise. I fear that with a positive list, you are removing a lot of the very good reptile keepers from the public scene. They may still be keeping reptiles of illegal species, but they will not come up out in the open and tell about what they are doing. You will thus reduce the speed of new advancements in husbandry of reptiles, which should be a serious consideration if you are making a positive list to improve animal welfare.

When the animal welfare authorities first have decided that they wanted to reduce the problem that illegal keeping of reptiles caused in terms of people, for instance, not being able to go to the veterinarian if their reptile had a health issue. Once that was decided by government, they went down the route of making a positive list because it sounded so much better to have only a few species that were legal to keep.

For me, it's kind of difficult to understand why it's so important to reduce the number of species, as the only thing you achieve is actually reducing the alternatives for a person who is interested in keeping a reptile to choose the reptile species that is best suited for this very person. It would be kind of similar to if you decided that only a handful of dog breeds should be allowed, and therefore anyone who would like a small breed that is easy to care for in an apartment would have to choose a Grand Danois instead, a Great Dane, because that's the one on the whitelist.

You do sort of have the same problem with whitelists on reptiles, that you restrict the alternatives for absolutely no good reasons. You are not making animal welfare better by saying that, "Sorry, the species that is best suitable for you is not legal." The whole idea of good animal welfare should be to make sure that people get an animal that is suitable for their knowledge, their life situation, how they are living, how much space they have, the opportunities they have for getting the right food for the species, etc. Not by saying that, "Sorry, it's only these 19 species that are legal."

Personally, I'm a big believer in not having blanket bans on animal keeping. I think the biggest problem with whitelists as a regulation tool is that it takes a lot of persuasion to get people to understand why certain species are on the whitelist while others are not. If you had a blacklist regulation instead, it's a lot easier to get people to understand that, certainly, if this species is dangerous to humans, if it's impossible for most people to keep in a welfare-wise good manner, there are good reasons for restricting the keeping of this.

A blacklist is automatically seen as something that is more sensible. My experience is that people understand why something is banned, but they do not understand equally well why everything is banned unless it's on the whitelist. I think that enforcement of a blacklist would be a lot easier simply because people understand why it's on the blacklist. If you don't understand legislation, you don't follow it.

I think it will be very tough for the Norwegian government to accept that whitelists are not a functioning tool in regulating the trade. We have gone down that road in Norway and I do not see us getting out of that anytime soon, but I would certainly advise any other government who are thinking a whitelist from staying away from it. It is not an effective tool.