Positive lists and whitelists: they want to ban your pets
This is a presentation by Eurogroup for Animals. Their campaign aims to ban the ownership of thousands of pet animals by imposing a European-wide positive list.
It was delivered to the Intergroup on the Welfare and Conservation of Animals, a platform for MEPs to discuss animal-related activities in the European Parliament.
In this video, RRK's Tony Wigley corrects the disinformation and propaganda this presenter uses to promote reptile-keeping bans and positive lists.
Let's see what they have to say.
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🚨SAY NO TO POSITIVE LISTS🚨
Click here to sign our petition against positive lists:
www.change.org/p/protect-your-pets-say-no-to-harmful-positive-lists
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SCRIPT
We have absolutely no idea which species are being bred.
Many of them are unsuitable to be kept as pets.
We don't even know how many breeders there are. Anybody could be doing it.
The little information we do have does not spell good news for those poor animals.
This is a presentation by Eurogroup for Animals. Their campaign aims to ban the ownership of thousands of pet animals by imposing a European-wide positive list. The presentation was delivered to the Intergroup on the Welfare and Conservation of Animals, which discusses animal-related activities in the European Parliament.
Lets see what they have to say.
Then the presentations, I will kick off the program. And as mentioned, the first speaker, Nicholas Clark, wild animals program leader at the Eurogroup for Animals. He will tell us more about the added value and feasibility of an EU positive list for pets and why companion animal protection should go beyond dogs and cats.
Nicholas, the floor is yours. You have 10 minutes. Thanks.
Thank you very, very much.
This is Nicholas Clark from Eurogroup for Animals, one of the organisations that's been campaigning to ban reptiles and exotic pet keeping for decades.
We're just waiting for the presentation. Wonderful. Well, we're here now and we have a chance today, now, in the upcoming couple of months, to change the way pets are kept and traded in the EU, to go from a system of dominance over wild animals to one more aligned with stewardship of nature. And the way to do that is through an EU-wide positive list.
It's interesting to hear how this speaker talks about animals and it's not the way that an animal keeper would speak about them. He talks about dominance over animals and uses phraseology like that all the way through this presentation.
It's not the type of language that's based in science or uses data. And that's why it probably isn't the type of language we'd use because it simply wouldn't work in the real world.
But first, what is a positive list?
So, simply speaking, a positive list is a list of animal species that are allowed to be traded and kept as companion animals. So this would mean that if a species is not on the list, it is automatically not allowed to be kept by everyday people.
And by everyday people, he means you.
So I ought to explain a little more about what a positive list is. A positive list is often also called a whitelist. And as you might expect, a whitelist is the opposite of a blacklist. A blacklist being a list of things that aren't allowed, whereas a whitelist is a list of things that are allowed.
So a positive list, a whitelist, would be a list of animals that you're allowed to keep.
And history has shown us where these lists have been introduced. They're usually very, very short, essentially banning thousands of suitable pet species and making them extinct in captivity.
Now, I'm going to explain a couple of nuances later on that allow this to be a proportional tool. Oh, the image has shifted, but you can forgive the image.
Let's be clear. People that keep exotic pets are not bad people.
What's not correct is the current system which allows species which are not suitable to be kept in the home to be kept.
That's a really interesting statement because who decides what is and isn't a suitable species and what criteria do they use? What expertise do they have to determine what you should and shouldn't keep?
And what we found from reptile bans and exotic animal bans is that there's a really strange list of what animals you can keep and which ones are banned.
What we should be clear about here is that curating a list of suitable species isn't the aim of this list.
The aim is actually to curtail keeping and to reduce the number of keepers and the number of animals kept, regardless of whether those animals are suitable to be kept or not.
Now I have plenty of people in my life, plenty of close friends, people who I respect who either do or have kept exotic pets in the past. So for example, a friend of mine, an IT specialist, he used to tell me, he used to light up when he told me about his sugar glider, that he would come home and when he'd let the sugar glider out of the cage, it would fly across the room onto his arm. And he said, "Oh, it loves me so much."
But he never talked about the fact that this sugar glider spent 95% of its life alone in a cage and this is a social animal.
Now this was not his sugar glider, but many sugar gliders suffer from self-mutilation due to boredom and stress when they're in people's homes. Just one of many examples.
This kind of sensationalism is the typical currency of animal rights campaigners.
Yes, we know that sometimes some people don't keep their reptiles or their exotic pets as well as they could, but this is the exception rather than being the rule.
And poor welfare examples exist for all kinds of kept animals. To me, it just looks like a very duplicitous or deceptive way to do business.
This image has also shifted around, but it is a turtle. And I have another very close friend of mine who's a PhD scientist who keeps two turtles in his house. And turtles are advertised as being easy to keep.
No, they're not advertised as being easy to keep.
Even my friend who follows all the rules, he knows what he's doing, one of his turtles has escaped twice because these are curious animals. They really want to explore their environment. But of course they are not adapted for life in an apartment building and his pet has twice fallen off the balcony and broken its shell, had to have surgery.
Of course, all animals are curious. It's the same for cats and dogs, but what really matters here is how well the animals are kept. This is another example of using a sensationalist story to push their point.
Now, we all know that bad keepers do exist, but they're in the minority. And to use stories like this to push for a ban that would affect millions upon millions of good keepers seems very unfair to me.
And you can see, well, this image is also flipped around, I see, but you can see how these animals are actually sold when they're either sold online or through markets or pet shops. It's terrible conditions for these animals.
No, that's not true at all. It looks very much like they're misrepresenting what this image is.
We can only see the corner of this image, but what I can tell you is that these animals aren't kept like this, they aren't sold like this, they aren't transported in this manner either. It's quite likely that they're just being held in these enclosures temporarily.
But again, it seems like they're misrepresenting this image to make a point that doesn't really exist or hold water.
So we have the Eurobarometer. This is again from the cats and dogs proposal justification, where it says that 74% of European citizens consider that the welfare of companion animals should be better protected than it is now.
Well, in a survey of six member states with over a thousand people in each member state, 92% of people thought that the trade of exotic pets should be better regulated. And 88% of those thought this should be done by the European Union because of the free movement of goods on a common market.
To the untrained eye these statistics look really compelling, but you don't have to look too closely before you realise that they don't really stand up to scrutiny.
Exactly who did they ask? And what was the exact wording of the questions that they asked? Because that makes a difference to the answers that you elicit.
What you'll see from these questions is that they're essentially loaded questions because we know darn well that most people in Europe don't know much about the scope or the size of the animal welfare issues in question. We can be pretty sure that they don't know much about European legislation either.
So we can see from the questions that they ask that they're looking to elicit a very specific response. And if you ask people about animal welfare, then of course most people are going to answer, yes, let's make welfare better. It's an obvious answer. And that's the kind of response that they're looking to elicit to use it as propaganda in conversations like this.
And it also gets really interesting if you look closely at the questions that they asked at the wording of those questions, specifically at the second box, where you'll notice that they've lumped common pet animals such as reptiles in with monkeys and big cats.
Now, of course, if you ask people about legislation, about regulating these type of animals, everybody's going to say that monkeys and big cats should be highly regulated, but they're not putting much thought to the fact that most reptiles that are kept are leopard geckos, bearded dragons, corn snakes, you know, easy animals that aren't dangerous and in the slightest.
So it's unfair to lump those types of animals together and the only reason you would lump those animals together in a question like that is if you're looking to elicit a specific response, if you are looking to generate propaganda. And we know that few people will look beyond the headlines and that's why we feel it's important to go into the detail of these kinds of statistics so that we can set the record straight.
The memorandum speaks about the huge number of dogs and cats in the European Union. Well, in fact, trade numbers and keeping numbers of exotic pets are extremely hard to come by. As Nils mentioned at the beginning, this trade is extremely complex and it's unregulated at EU level at the moment.
No, that's not quite true. These things are regulated at an EU level.
The reptile trade is certainly regulated when it comes to conservation and invasive species. What I think he's talking about here is welfare, which isn't regulated by the EU because it's always been a competency of each member state of each country. And that's particularly important because each country has its own very specific culture, its own circumstance, its own criteria, and its own very specific welfare needs.
And for Europe to take that competency away from each member state would certainly be a mistake. We know that European citizens are already wary of bureaucratic overreach from Brussels. I'm pretty sure that people who make laws for the EU know that it would be a mistake to remove competencies from member states.
But what we do have is some FEDIAF data where they talk about 30 million small mammals, 52 million ornamental birds, 23 million aquaria, and this 12 million terraria, this doesn't mean that there's 12 million reptiles because in one terraria you can get many reptiles or many amphibians. And in fact, we are doing research right now where we're estimating around 13 million reptiles in Germany alone.
Now again, he uses these big numbers like it's a bad thing, but if trade is that large and if trade is that successful, then that sounds like a pet welfare success story to me because we know darn well that nobody can make money from sick or dead reptiles. So if a lot of animals are being kept, if a lot of animals are being traded, this obviously demonstrates that reptiles are a great pet for very many people.
And with reptiles being such a popular pet, this should be exactly the reason why the European government should run a mile from imposing a positive list because this would restrict people from keeping the pets that are suitable for them for absolutely no good reason. Do they really want to anger millions upon millions of responsible pet keepers? I don't think so.
And just one more thing, he makes the point that there have been 14 million reptiles imported into the EU over a period of 16 years. What he doesn't mention is that the vast majority of those are going to be captive bred and not taken from the wild, as seems to be implied here. So the vast majority of reptiles being kept in Europe will be captive bred and captive breeding animals is a very good thing, as I'll mention a bit later in this production.
Now we have over 2,000 species currently in trade in the European Union
I think this is a clearly misinformed statistic because by my estimation, it would be vastly more than this.
The data I used to make that statement comes from a handful of UK surveys where we know that there are at least 1,300 species of reptile and amphibians kept in the UK alone. So if we add on to that, all of the fish, all of the mammals, et cetera, and then we expand it to cover the whole of Europe, I would expect 2,000 to be a serious underestimation of the number of species being kept.
And again, this is the good reason for the EU commission to run a mile from imposing restrictions on that amount of keepers.
Each of these species has its own needs and its own motivations for behaving in certain ways. And many of them are unsuitable to be kept as pets.
To say that many of these animals shouldn't or couldn't be kept as pets is just outrageous because there's no evidence to support it. Just because the presenter here says something doesn't mean to say that it's true. And it's really frustrating to see opinions being presented as facts.
But 2,000 different species, how can we have proper guidelines for those kinds of numbers?
Quite easily, buy a book, join a website, consult an expert, go to a pet store, join a Facebook group.
There are many ways that you can get information on how to keep these. And it's also mandated in most countries that retailers and pet sellers have to give their customers information about the animals that they're going to keep.
And even if it wasn't mandated, it just made good sense to do so because the happier the customer is, the more likely they are toremain a customer. It makes no sense to send a customer away with a new animal so that they have a bad time or a bad experience because then they lose faith in animal keeping or in reptile keeping. Maybe they'll go and be a stamp collector or play fantasy football instead.
If we sell an animal, we want our customers to have a good experience with that animal. And it makes good business sense for us to help them make their experience a success. And that's why we try to give them all the information they need to keep those animals successfully.
It just makes good business sense and it's common sense as well.
So let's go back to the memorandum. The dogs and cats proposalsays that the demand for dogs and cats is met by licensed breeders, but there is still illegal trade and transportation. Well, we know that captive breeding of wild animals is a huge deal in the EU, even bigger than the imports. We are a captive breeding society at the moment and animals are captive bred and then sold all over the European Union and in fact exported across the world as well. But we have no registration or no systematic registration of the breeders. We have no systematic data collection. We have absolutely no idea which species are being bred.
Yes, we do. Just ask any reptile enthusiast or look at one of the keeper surveys or even look online on social media. He just says that because he wants it to sound alarming.
How many animals of each species are being bred by different people? Done in people's basements, in their homes, in their garages. And we have no idea of the welfare that's going on within these breeding facilities. The little information we do have does not spell good news for those poor animals.
There is absolutely no evidence to support this alarming rhetoric. He's clearly trying to make reptile keepers and captive breeders sound sordid and that's really, really unfair.
We know that most herpetological advancements and innovations and products have come from the private keeping and trade sectors, not from scientists, not from zoos, not from researchers, but from private keepers.
But more importantly, captive breeding as an endeavor is a really important part of conservation because while species are being captive bred, the demand for wild caught animals is vastly reduced. It also helps us to learn about these species. And the more people who know about these species, the more people who like and understand reptiles, the more likely they are to care about them and the more likely they are to conserve them.
So basically captive breeding is an important part of conservation and captive breeders should be applauded instead of being attacked.
I would wager that this presenter isn't informed enough or qualified enough to know what's happening with these poor animals.
Now talking about illegal trade, a fantastic paper called Stolen Wildlife demonstrates numerous examples of animals being illegally smuggled from their country of origin, where it's illegal to take them from their country of origin.
Once they arrive in the European Union, they are legally traded because we simply don't have the rules to deal with that.
Actually, we do have the rules to deal with that.
It's called CITES, the convention in trade for endangered species.
But if we are looking for a way to combat illegal trade, introducing a positive list simply isn't going to achieve that. What it will do instead is it will create more illegal trade because we know that people will routinely ignore a law that they don't think is fair. So you'll find that a lot of non-compliance occurs if a positive list was introduced, which is what we found in plenty of other European countries where they are in place.
Again, the dogs and cats memorandum explains about the document forgeries and misleading information. Well, let's hear from the experts. Europol. Well, Europol have stated that numerous exotic animals are falsely labeled as captive bred in CITES document forgeries. This is a big problem.
Again, we find the animal rights campaigners endeavoring to weaponise a very small issue and using it to implement a quite extreme piece of legislation.
An investigation from LAV a few years ago investigated 2,000 online adverts. Now these were CITES listed species and 62% of those adverts, there was no mention of any documentation at all.
Well, why should there be? What would that achieve? Why is he making this point?
We can only assume that he's making this point to infer that the trade was illegal. And that's clearly not the case.
The dogs and cats explanatory memorandum talks about the online platforms and that it's increasingly growing the selling through online platforms and social media. And many of these are not from responsible breeders. Well, I've mentioned already the issue with breeders. What does a responsible breeder mean for exotic animals when we have no guidelines, we have no idea what's going on. There's no common rules. And we don't even know how many breeders there are. Anybody could be doing it.
And online trade, we have plenty of investigations demonstrating that most exotic animals are sold online. So this is also a problem for the exotic pet trade. Now, this causes huge welfare considerations in the online trade, in the keeping of animals and throughout the trade chain.
This is interesting to me because he doesn't present any evidence that online trade is specifically a problem, after all we have legislation to look after welfare and legislation to look after conservation and invasive species and zoonoses, everything else. We have legislation to look after all of these issues. Why would a positive list make any difference to this? Why is the online trade such a specific problem that it requires a positive list? It sounds like he's padding his argument.
And by the way, the reptile species that he shows online aren't a big part of trade and there's no reason to believe that they're a specific problem when they're tradedonline either.
The memorandum talks about transmission of zoonoses. So diseases that pass from animals to humans, excuse me. Now, it's well known that wild animals are a source of zoonoses. We've had the recent pandemics to testify to that.
There's no question there.
There is rather a question because the jury is still out with regard to where COVID originated. And besides, all animals can be a source of zoonoses. In fact, dogs and cats, you can catch some pretty serious illnesses from those animals. But I don't see anyone campaigning to ban the keeping of dogs and cats.
Incidentally, there was a recent case of a woman who died following a hamster bite. So zoonoses can be a problem, but there are some very easy ways to negate that issue. And it usually involves education and basic hygiene, washing your hands, et cetera. So yes, zoonoses can be a problem, but again, to inflate that problem and use it as a reason to introduce a positive list would be something of an overreach.
We know that you can catch salmonella from reptiles, but the incidences are, at least nowadays, are very few. They do happen, they do exist, but they're very few. The solution to reptile zoonoses is usually to implement education processes and good hygiene, so washing your hands.
There was a recent campaign by an animal rights organisation that offered free legal representation to anybody who'd caught salmonella at a reptile show. Sadly, of course, for them at least, they didn't get any takers for that campaign because it's very difficult to catch salmonella from a reptile show, especially if you're knowledgeable enough to know about basic hygiene and not putting your fingers in your mouth after you've been handling a reptile.
It's common sense, really.
As I've said, if you're eager to reduce the incidences of salmonella, this is more effectively done with education rather than any ban or positive list.
But just a quick bit of evidence that Nils touched on in his opening remarks. Animal Advocacy and Protection, a very important rescue centre in the Netherlands, sampled 262 exotic pets rescued, and one in every seven exotic pets carried a zoonotic agent.
And a quick anecdote from one of these animals, this leopard cat, the owner, indicated that it had had its vaccinations. It was disease-free, but during the quarantine period, pathogen tests were done, and unbeknownst to the owner, several bacterial agents were found, some of which can be extremely harmful to humans. This is somebody that thought their pet was disease-free.
He says that this is evidence, but it isn't really. He also says that is it one in seven animals carry zoonoses? Well, it's more likely that most animals can carry some disease that's transmittable to humans, so that shouldn't be a surprise.
Well, here's a quick map. You can find this map in this white paper here. These are the current positive lists in the EU, and some positive lists that are in discussion, and some positive lists that are enshrined into law.
Yes, there are some positive lists in place in Europe, and every single one of them has been a failure for one reason or another.
Either they've been completely unconstitutional and infringing on people's civil liberties, they could be unenforceable. They're certainly unnecessary in most cases. They're bad for legitimate trade. They're bad for science and innovation, and worst of all, they're bad for welfare. And this is because we know that people, if denied their civil liberties to keep these animals legally, will go about doing so illegally. And if that's the case, then they can't take them to the vet, which is bad for welfare. They can't ask for specialist advice.
So worst of all, positive lists are bad for welfare, and this is why they have universally failed across everywhere that they've been introduced.
There's only one reason why people would think a positive list is a good idea, and that's because they have such extreme ideologies that they believe that people shouldn't keep pets.
But also you'll notice that the white member states, they have a conglomeration or a mixture of different negative lists of different lists of species,and some countries have no rules or regulations at all.
Talk about divergent national rules. It's mind-blowing.
The memorandum states that there is no EU legislation on the welfare of dogs and cats. Well, where is the EU legislation on the welfare of exotic pets? It's totally non-existent. We have plenty of pieces of regulation that touch upon exotic pets, but none that talk about their welfare. And the positive list fills that puzzle piece perfectly.
We've already discussed that welfare is not an EU competency and shouldn't be an EU competency. We've already discussed that it would be a mistake on behalf of the EU to start taking competencies away from member states. And we've already mentioned that people within the EU are very wary of EU overreach.
So perhaps the European Parliament and Commission should think twice about that.
We have some positive lists in the EU, but you can actually just go to a neighboring country where the laws are more lax. You can buy an animal there and you can bring it back, undermining the rules of member states. An EU-wide positive list would very much help in that cause.
Positive lists certainly wouldn't help here. We have plenty of evidence to say that. What it would in fact do is make illegal trade worse.
We know this because everywhere the positive lists have been introduced, as he mentions, there's just been a trade across borders. If you create an EU-wide positive list, what you do is just move that illegal trade to borders to places like Syria, Turkey, Switzerland.
So by making thousands of pet species illegal, you're essentially creating an illegal trade of people who will routinely ignore the ridiculous rule that you think is gonna curtail their keeping.
And besides, most countries will lack the resources, the expertise, or the budget to enforce these laws.
In terms of proportionality, this is what I said at the beginning. A positive list is not a blanket ban. It is a flexible proportional tool. In existing positive lists within the EU, you have possibilities for listing and delisting.
Well, that certainly hasn't happened with any of the positive lists in Europe currently. It's been very difficult to get animals and species added to the list. In fact, I can't think of any incidents.
Campaigners will invariably campaign against any additions to a positive list in much the same way that they campaign against any delisting of species from CITES. And that's true even of species when it's been proven that they can be kept.
It's simply not proportionate to propose a ban or implement a ban that would make thousands of species extinct in captivity.
You have the possibilities for certified keepers if they are able to demonstrate their true expertise that they have the time, the expertise and the equipment to be able to do it.
That will be very few people.
And there you have it, very few people will be able or qualified to keep these animals and that means you.
That means your pet species it doesn't matter if the species you keep is the perfect one for you. It doesn't matter if you've demonstrated your competency to do so over a period of decades or longer.
He simply does not believe that you should be allowed to keep the animals that you keep.
You have to wonder what gives these people the right to judge what expertise they have and it's clear that few of these people know about or even keep animals.
Their total and clear objective is to stop people like you from keeping the pets that you keep.
And there is a grandfather clause which I can go into more details later.
I'll go into detail now. Grandfathering is when your pet species gets banned but you're allowed to keep any animals that you have until they die.
You won't be able to breed them, you won't be able to sell them, you won't be able to move them into a different country if you move and you certainly won't be able to buy another one after it dies.
Even if this is the best species for you, even if it's the one that you truly want to keep and that you love dearly, you won't be able to keep that species anymore.
So I call upon you again to push for an empowerment to empower the Commission through this dogs and cats proposal to create a positive list for companion animals, the justifications speak for themselves. Thank you.
So there you have it, a proposal for a positive list that would make thousands of otherwise suitable pet species of reptile and exotic animals extinct in captivity.
We know that positive lists have proven to be unenforceable everywhere that they've been introduced.
They're unnecessary because the zoonosis and invasive species issues and welfare issues that are exaggerated by animal rights campaigners are actually very small when viewed in context.
We know that they're bad for science and innovation because if fewer people are keeping these animals, fewer people will understand them or care about them or want to conserve them.
And worst of all, we know that they're bad for welfare because people will often keep these animals illegally if they think the laws are unfair, which has been proven in places all across Europe where positive lists have been introduced. And if people are keeping them illegally, then they can't ask specialists for advice on how to care for their animals and they can't take them to a veterinarian if they need medical care.
So how can that be good for welfare?
We also know that they'll criminalise otherwise law-abiding citizens.
We know that there'll be an increase in illegal trade as animals are smuggled across common borders and people within EU member states are already quite sceptical of Europe and would view any legislative overreach from Brussels in a very bad light.
So it's up to us, the responsible pet-keeping community, to put an end to this positive list before it's too late.
Visit our website at responsiblereptilekeeping.org and keep an eye out for our anti-positive list petition which will be launched sometime soon.
🚨SAY NO TO POSITIVE LISTS🚨
Click here to sign our petition against positive lists:
www.change.org/p/protect-your-pets-say-no-to-harmful-positive-lists
