Slimy, Horrible Creatures | A documentary about reptile laws
Slimy, Horrible Creatures tells the story of how a tiny minority of extremists hijacked the law-making process, and how the result can affect every reptile keeper on the planet.
This short documentary film pulls back the curtain and highlights the methods and missions of those who want to put an end to reptile keeping – even if that means reptiles could suffer poor welfare as a result.
If you love reptiles you need to watch this film.
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SCRIPT
The drive was to actually ban the keeping of reptiles in captivity entirely, and I could really see if we didn’t start to address some of this, we would not have that next generation of herpetologists. We would become extinct.
These people are zealots, they’re extremists. They just want to completely eradicate all of the pet-keeping hobbies.
We’re all wanting the same thing for animals, we’re all wanting improved welfare.
We have to ask how did this process get hijacked and what can we do to make sure this never happens again?
I think it’s one of the poorest reports I’ve seen from Government.
Reptile keepers really need to wake up to the threats that exist.
People have been keeping reptiles as pets for centuries, and why not? They’re fascinating creatures, and many reptiles are so easy to keep that they’re often a better choice than a typical pet such as a dog or a cat.
The first record of a reptile being kept as a pet is in 1625, when the then Bishop of London, William Laud, acquired a spur-thighed tortoise. When he became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, the tortoise moved with him to Lambeth Palace, and you can still see that tortoise’s shell on display at the palace today.
Keeping reptiles as pets didn’t really become popular until the 1980s. Before then, the only people who kept reptiles were a handful of nerdy enthusiasts, but by the 80s, those nerdy enthusiasts had learned a lot about how these animals live. Breeding snakes, lizards and tortoises became commonplace. And because captive-bred reptiles are far easier to care for than those imported from the wild, these fascinating creatures became increasingly popular pets.
Soon, pet shops all over the world were selling reptiles to people who weren’t nerds. They were regular, everyday people who wanted an interesting and convenient pet. By the time the noughties came around, reptiles were mainstream. Not only that, they were one of the most popular pet animals, with some surveys estimating that there were as many pet reptiles being kept as pets, as there were pet dogs. So, everyone was happy, right?
Well, not quite.
What we need to be aware of is the end game for these animal rights activists. This is not about animal welfare. This is about segregation. This is stopping humans interacting with animals.
My name is Chris Newman and I am the Chief Executive of the Reptile and Exotic Pet Trade Association, REPTA. REPTA was formed back in 2004. So I was aware that there was lots of political issues and that we had, as an industry, no representation, and that was really the driving force to create REPTA, to actually get a seat at the table, to actually be able to put forward the argument why the reptile industry is what it is today. It’s important. Lots of people keep reptiles as pets and it’s a major source of funding for Government.
The animal rights movement has always been very proactive. There were lots of organisations, for example, the RSPCA, who were very opposed to the keeping of reptiles, and at that point in history, we were going through the animal welfare bill, which became law in 2006, and they were looking to seek to ban reptile keeping. The arguments at the time were, reptiles do not thrive in captivity, they live very short miserable lives, and they’re all collected from the wild, snatched from the wild, stolen from the wild. Now, as any keeper knows, that absolutely is not the case. In this modern day and age, virtually all reptiles are captive-bred and many species absolutely thrive in captivity and will have a lifespan two or three times that of the wild counterparts, but that was not a message that Government was aware of. If you listen to one side of that argument, it can be very compelling. As a keeper, and I have always been a keeper, I was deeply offended at lots of these arguments that were being made and having been involved in the reptile industry and a keeper for such a long time, I was well aware most of these facts and allegations they were making were simply not true. And it was very frustrating that nobody was stepping forward to actually try and counter those arguments. So for me, it became a very personal matter. I’ve got four children and, you know, my kids enjoy keeping reptiles, and I could really see if we didn’t start to address some of this, we would not have that next generation of herpetologists. We would become extinct.
The drive was to actually ban the keeping of reptiles in captivity entirely. While thousands of reptile keepers were busy quietly enjoying their reptiles, Chris and a handful of others around the world were advising their governments, working to counter the misinformation being peddled by animal rights extremists. And one of the most active extremists who was working to end reptile keeping, was a man by the name of Clifford Warwick.
So the main antagonist at that time remains the case today, was Clifford Warwick, somebody who I know very well. He was a reptile dealer back in the mid 1970s and I well remember visiting Clifford and buying reptiles from him. And he kind of disappeared in the mid to late 1970s, he just disappeared off the scene and then reappeared in the late 1980s as Dr. Clifford Warwick with a PhD from Copenhagen University in Reptile Biology.
However, a group of us were somewhat circumspect about whether he’d actually got a PhD. So we spent quite some time in dialogue with Copenhagen University to actually determine if that was true. And it took a while, but eventually they confirmed they had not awarded him a PhD, he had applied to be a student, but he’d actually never taken up that position. It is very easy to make claims that you have qualifications, and lots of these qualifications are not actually qualifications, you can get these letters after your name by buying memberships to various institutions. In a Government meeting we had at the House of Lords where we were debating welfare issues, Clifford was challenged about his academic credentials and he volunteered that he would actually supply those for people to validate and interestingly, he never did.
Since his reappearance in the late 1980s Warwick has actively campaigned against the keeping of reptiles in captivity and he’s been associated with many leading animal rights organisations such as Animal Aid, the Animal Protection Agency, Freedom for Animals, when it was known as the Captive Animal Protection Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and World Animal Protection. Warwick has published countless scientific papers upon which he has based his campaign to ban reptile keeping, but the research presented in these papers has often been found to be scientifically lacking when examined. Nevertheless, Clifford Warwick’s sustained campaign to end reptile keeping has prevailed for well over 30 years, and his questionable influence has been spread around the world.
We are very fortunate in the UK in that we have open government, so Government actively wants to engage with key stakeholders. Government is driven by data, facts, figures, that is what they need in order to be able to assess and make appropriate regulations. If they only have information from one side, that will not produce a balanced legislation, so it’s absolutely critical the industry has a seat at that table to actually provide facts and figures and data.
Since the early 2000s, REPTA has been liaising with Government and has been involved in every single governmental working group under the Animal Welfare Bill and subsequent act that had any direct impact on the reptile industry. And that worked very well for a long period of time. But then something strange happened, fast forward to June 2023 when a report document appeared on the UK Government website. It was produced by the Animal Welfare Committee, a group that advises the English, Scottish and Welsh governments on the welfare of animals. And if the recommendations in the AWC’s reports were adopted, it would legally regulate the size of enclosures allowed in UK pet stores. The report and its recommendations took almost everyone by surprise. But not quite everyone.
The Animal Welfare Committee investigation into snake enclosure sizes was really strange right from the very beginning because REPTA was not involved, was not consulted. Why were we not consulted? I could only speculate, I have no idea and it was incredibly bizarre, It had never happened before. I became aware of work being done by this committee through a third party who sort of fed me a tip that you need to be aware of this. I then went through the normal Government contacts to find out what was happening. I was indeed told that a governmental working group had been formed to look at reptile enclosure sizes, principally snake enclosure sizes, and the group work had already started. I wrote to the chair, who I knew very well, who I knew was not supportive of exotic pets and a consequent dialogue started there and subsequently, I was then invited to actually be part of that working group.
The AWC or the Animal Welfare Committee has had an interesting history and it’s interesting because historically the committee has had nothing to do with pet animals, least of all so-called exotic animals. Until 2019, the Animal Welfare Committee was known as the Farm Animal Welfare Committee and was responsible for welfare of, well you guessed it, farm animals.
The AWC working group that Chris Newman was eventually invited to join included numerous stakeholders with animal care and welfare experience, mostly relating to farm animals but few had any experience of working with or keeping reptiles. However, several members of the working group did have an overt agenda where reptiles were concerned.
The group’s chairperson, Peter Jinman, was a farm specialist vet and he was well known to be against reptile keeping. Also invited to be part of the working group was Tariq Abou-Zahr, a specialist exotics vet and experienced reptile keeper. We’ve already met Chris Newman, the chair of the Reptile and Exotic Pet Trade Association and we’re familiar with Clifford Warwick’s decades-long campaign to end reptile keeping. And alongside Clifford was Martin Whitehead, a veterinarian who, despite having no specialist postgraduate exotics animal training, has a stated agenda to stop people from keeping exotic animals and reptiles in particular.
My top tip for the public would be don’t keep exotic pets. Don’t keep birds in small cages, and don’t keep reptiles at all if possible.
Still, once Chris was on board, it should have been another day at the office for the REPTA team, debating animal rights campaigners and correcting the misinformation they peddle. However, something seemed amiss right from the start.
Having been involved in working with many governmental working groups, it was really quite bizarre right from the very off. It was very different to any other experience I had. What was interesting when the working group first commenced was the circulation of a recommended reading list. And when I looked at that document it was driven by papers that Clifford and Martin had actually written or their cohorts who had been working the last two to three years suddenly producing a whole bunch of papers on enclosure sizes for reptiles. The balance of the working group was actually very skewed. It very quickly became the Clifford and Martin Roadshow and everything was skewed in their favour of being able to make allegations and then any attempt to actually draw out and question that, was actually derailed by the chair.
My argument is we should be driven by data facts. So if a statement is made, what evidence is available to support that? And none was ever provided and when challenged to say, okay, a statement has been made here, let’s look for the evidence to support that and that was just closed down as any line of discussion. Trying to push to get evidence to support statements was met with a brick wall.
Very early on, it became very clear to me this was absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with animal welfare, this was purely about disrupting trade. That was the objective, that was very clear to me. And I made that point in writing to the chair that this was clearly the objective of this working group, nothing to do with the welfare of animals It’s all about disrupting trade.
But then the AWC chairman, Peter Jinman, did something completely out of the ordinary. He asked that documents be sent to him specifically and not circulated to the whole group.
And that was just extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like that before.
After several months of meetings and back and forth emails, the AWC enclosure sizes consultation finally ended in August 2021. But there was yet another surprise in store.
The final draft of the document was circulated to us. It was really quite shocking for some of the recommendations and conclusions that were being made, because they were completely contrary to the discussions we’d actually had during the working group meetings. I made extensive comments to that final document, which I circulated back to the entire group so everybody was aware, because at this point in time we had been instructed not to circulate unnecessary documents to other people, just to circulate them to the chair. So I sent them to other members of the working group. I also wrote to Peter directly with another separate letter, as well as the comments made to that document. All of that was ignored.
Once we’d submitted the comments and we’d actually not received any feedback from the chair about the comments made, I asked to see a final copy of the document before it was published. And for reasons which I cannot begin to comprehend, that was denied. And in 20 years of working in governmental working groups this is the first time I’d ever been denied sight of a final report of which I’d put my name to.
At that point, I asked that my name be removed from the report, because I was not prepared to have my name put to the report if I did not know the contents of what that report was going to actually say.
Whilst we didn’t know exactly what the report was going to say, we were bracing ourselves because it clearly was not going to be constructive towards welfare or the reptile trade. Usually once a working group has completed its work we would expect to see that report published within a few months. I had become very disenchanted with the whole process, so I didn’t chase the report. But after 12 months, I’d finally come to the conclusion this is probably a report we’re never going to see published and to be quite honest, I was quite content to let sleeping dogs lie.
Then out of nowhere, two years after the AWC’s discussions ended, a report appeared on the Government website and its contents were horrifying. Not only were none of REPTA’s emergency amendments implemented or acknowledged, the report retained all of the most extreme recommendations that Warwick and Whitehead had proposed.
We were not informed when the report was published. We only found out because one or two other people had actually noticed it and drew my attention to it. So when I downloaded the document and read through it, it was pretty horrific. I guess it’s what we expected, that it was going to be nothing to do based on science or welfare. It was all just typical emotive rhetoric. I don’t think either Tariq and myself played any role in this document, other than providing some basic data on numbers of snakes sold, the rest of our input was simply ignored. To say that I was a little shocked and disappointed, but not actually entirely surprised they left my name in on it.
I would need to make it very clear, I absolutely do not support the contents of this report. I think it was a sham from start to finish.
The document made countless outrageous statements of opinion and presented them as if they were established facts. It claimed that snakes suffered poor welfare under the current pet store regulations resulting in not only physical health issues but also mental health issues as well. UK regulations state that snakes housed temporarily in pet stores should be accommodated in enclosures which have a footprint two-thirds the length of the snake by one-third the length of the snake. The AWC report called for those enclosures to be far larger, one times the length of the snake by two-thirds the length of the snake. To find out why the recommendations would be so problematic, we visited one of the UK’s leading specialist reptile pet stores.
I’m Pete Milligan, the owner of Evolution Reptiles in Kiddlington, Oxford and we’ve been here since 2007. AAL enclosure sizes regulations came in in 2018 and there was quite a bit of work to do in the beginning. We had to add a few more thermometers and move a few animals around, but it wasn’t as bad for us as it might have been for some of the other shops.
We had to move some animals around to make sure that the enclosures were suitable for the size of the animal to meet the minimum requirements as we’re going for a five-star license we had slightly different requirements than some shops. Other shops may have had more trouble if they had a lot more livestock than us, particularly if they had larger pythons or larger lizards.
We’ve been compliant with these regulations for five years and we haven’t had any issues with the animals in these enclosures in that time. Snakes are normally resident with us in store for between four weeks and maybe six months. We like to give them time to settle in so we wouldn’t let them go before four weeks and in extreme cases they might be with us for a year. We like snakes to feed with us at least three times before they go and they must be consistent with their feeding, so three weeks in a row they must feed. Sometimes it will take three weeks to get them all to feed before we can allow them to go, other times it may take a little longer.
We haven’t seen any health issues caused by the vivarium sizes as they currently are with the AAL requirements. We keep records of the snake feedings and any notes of any animals that are not feeding well. We also record the temperatures on a regular basis and the UV index, but we haven’t seen any issues caused by these enclosures. If there were issues we would have records that would demonstrate it. For permanent accommodation for pet keepers we recommend a generously sized vivarium which will reach or exceed the AAL requirements. So for a corn snake it would be a four foot by two foot by two foot vivarium or larger and the same for a royal python.
The typical behaviour for a snake is to be coiled under a hide, they spend a lot of time hiding. When they’re out investigating they usually have a few loops in the body or a few bends. We rarely see them outstretched.
But what do reptile experts say about snake enclosure sizes? Interestingly while the AWC committee was making plans which would close down most of the UK specialist reptile stores, another organisation was working on guidelines for recommended snake enclosure sizes. The Federation of British Herpetologists has members from some of the most respected reptile societies in the world. Sid James was part of the team that created the FBH’s definitive guide to reptile enclosure sizes.
I’m Sid James, I’ve been keeping reptiles for nearly 30 years now. By trade I’m a statistician, so I’m trained to deal with, analyse and draw meaningful conclusions from data. The FBH is an umbrella organisation that represents the local and regional national clubs and societies for amphibian and reptile keeping.
Enclosure sizes were important to the FBH. Animal licensing came in in 2018 and there was guidance associated with that and then the FBH were sort of pressurised and coming under all sorts of scrutiny for why isn’t there standards for private keeping in the UK to go alongside effectively commercial standards in the UK.
The document sets out enclosure size guidances for a minimum standard of welfare broken down by taxa groups, and then within the taxa groups so snakes there’s a colubrid section, python section, so on and so forth. On the surface it sounded quite a simple task to write guidelines for enclosure sizes for different animals and the further you sort of looked into it it became really apparent that there’s lots of subtleties, nuances, so many
different sort of species.
The document contained so much detail because when a group of experts like those in the FBH come together it’s really clear that all the animals that we’re covering are so different and that there’s no one size fits all. There’s different nuances and subtleties to many of the different species and you can’t just treat one snake like the next snake or one lizard like the next lizard for example.
We got endorsement from the British Small Animal Veterinary Association which is the BSAVA and the British Veterinary Zoological Society, the BVZS as well as endorsement from the Companion Animal Sector Council which is CASC.
The FBH document is very much aimed at private keepers where we’re on the most part expecting at people to keep animals as pets If you were to adapt it you would need to try and account for as many of the nuances and subtleties and the detail that we’ve gone through for the FBH process into a commercial setting.
Clearly the experts and specialists at the Federation of British Herpetologists will have a pretty good idea of how big a snake’s enclosure should be. Their document was detailed and nuanced to account for the many different types of snake species and their natural habitats and behaviours. So why was the FBH’s ground-breaking work on enclosure sizes not considered in the AWC’s discussions?
I have no idea. I don’t know. To my knowledge there was no outreach from the AWC to contact the FBH to either include them or get information that we were using. They might not have contacted the FBH purely because they didn’t know on a very innocent level or there was a more cynical they already had in their minds what they were going to find and they deliberately didn’t contact them.
I was aware that the FBH were also drafting a guidance document on enclosure sizes. Now I was not involved in that process but I was aware that it was going on and I drew the Chair’s attention to that and said I would be willing to approach the FBH to see whether they were willing to share with the working group the deliberations that they were doing and that request was just ignored.
Throughout the development of the AWC report they have shown complete contempt for people that know what they’re talking about. The standards of UK reptile centres are some of the highest in the world and this is controlled through regulation. We are mandated to record a variety of different data with the animals that arrive in store and this helps paint a picture. Every one of these animals has got to have a record kept of all food intake, shedding and any other items of note as well as temperature checks being maintained daily, UVI checks if pertinent to the animal being kept. All of this has to be recorded and written down as mandated by Government. If there was an issue it would show itself.
Having worked in a shop for 23 years and owned one for 20 this year. To the best of my knowledge with the snakes kept within the current framework set down by Government I’ve never seen anything that I would think is a physiological cost to the snakes being maintained in that manner. By virtue of the records that we keep in store we have got a written data set that allows us to track how the animal has been behaving within our care.
If there was a mental cost, a physical cost, this would manifest itself. There are key indicators to show us when an animal is stressed. The truth is that snakes are hardy, robust, easily cared for animals that adapt well to captivity. If there was some sort of serious welfare implication from keeping them in vivariums that are under one times body length in one dimension we would have seen a huge proliferation in physiological costs.
So one times snake length is fairly arbitrary. In snakes for example if you consider a five-foot snake you could have a five-foot corn snake, a five-foot royal python, five-foot blood python, five-foot green tree python or a coach whip something like that and just setting up the same size enclosure, you’re going to lose some of the subtlety in the detail of what actually these snakes require, that would affect their natural behaviour.
It would not be what they would see in the wild necessarily and you would then need to set each of those enclosures up very differently on top of just the size. Enrichment comes into it just as much as the size, so if you have a three foot tank with two hides and a water bowl just by making that a four foot tank using the same two hides and water bowl doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve improved the environment.
Reptile specialists across the UK have identified serious flaws in the AWC’s report about enclosure sizes in pet stores. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. We can see that most of the people involved in developing the AWC’s recommendations have no expertise in this area and we can see that there seems to have been a purposeful bias in the AWC’s consultation process and we know that information from reptile specialists and experts was seemingly excluded from the report’s development. It’s obvious that there is no evidence to suggest that using the Government’s current enclosure sizes guidance causes any welfare issues. But is there any relevant scientific research to indicate how big a snake’s enclosure should be?
One of the papers used in the report was a study that was done by Lincoln University. Whilst the paper was very valid it was much more looking at enclosure usage in terms of enrichment, how important enrichment was for the enclosures. The report was not quite as portrayed, they were talking about snakes laying outstretched but they never actually defined what they meant by a snake laying ‘outstretched’. I think it’s you know, most people who will keep snakes, how many people see your snake laying out completely outstretched as a pole that’s not a natural position for a snake to be in. It’s important to note that that study was also of a relatively short duration it was only for a couple of weeks and there were relatively small numbers of animals, so whilst it’s a very interesting paper and contains some valid conclusions on enrichment, I think the benefit to this paper in terms of snakes enclosure sizes is it bore no relevance at all.
There have been a lot of papers out at the moment saying if you give a snake a small space or a large space, it will prefer the big space. So these sort of preference tests are very good for saying the snake would do this and then it’s for us to decide is that good for the snake, is it necessary for the snake, is it proportional for the snake. The examples I’m going to give here for preference testing, if you take a dog to the beach it might play in the
sea and have a great time and the conclusion isn’t that the sea is a requirement for dogs to have good welfare. The conclusion is dogs will choose to go in the sea and it might be something you can do to improve their welfare. It’s not proportional to say dogs need the sea for high welfare.
A second example for a preference test is if you’re asking kids preferences between vegetables and sweets in, I’m going to guess most cases children prefer sweets actually physically this is not good for them long term even if we can conclude it improves their welfare short term again the conclusion isn’t sweets are necessary for kids because they prefer them to vegetables. It’s not even the conclusion that sweets are better for kids than vegetables because they prefer them.
In scientific literature preference testing was developed for a market research tool so when you’re talking about market research it’s fairly simple, you give people two things, what do they prefer? And you can market towards what people prefer. So when you apply this preference test to snake behaviour you can’t conclude that it’s a requirement for them to stretch out, you can conclude that they might do it and you ask yourself why wouldn’t you offer them that chance? But you can’t conclude they need it and if you don’t have
it they suffer because of it.
We’re all interested in the welfare of animals so we’re paying attention to this research and we’re seeing it come through but from one study that says we saw these snakes here’s our results and then to draw that really strong conclusion I think is inaccurate science because it doesn’t say, without that ability then they suffer.
To the question do snakes need to lay out stretched? I would argue there isn’t the evidence to support that. It is not normal natural behaviour for a snake to lay completely outstretched like a pole, the simple reason for that is it makes them so much more vulnerable to predators. So snakes may use a linear, rectilinear motion for moving quickly across larger areas but they don’t rest stretched out like a beanpole. I would argue that unlike a dog or a cat or a rabbit that it is not natural behaviour for a snake to lay fully outstretched like a pole, that is not their normal behaviour, they may do it infrequently but it isn’t a natural behaviour that they would do on a daily basis so therefore their ability
not to be able to do that in an enclosure does not impact their welfare or can I say that there is no evidence been provided that it does and we’ve been keeping these animals for a long period of time, if there was evidence available that restricting their ability to lay outstretched causes welfare issues I would have thought we would have had that information available by now and we don’t.
I haven’t seen any evidence that shows that if a snake isn’t allowed to fully stretch out over a long period of time that this does cause physical harm or even poor welfare and at this point in time we’re seeing record levels of snake longevity that’s never been seen before.
My first corn snake is 28 years old now and that far exceeds the life expectancy of a wild corn snake and over those 28 years she’s been in many different enclosures of differing sizes. Improvements in reptile keeping in this country have absolutely accelerated as reptiles have become more popular as pets. I think back in the 70s and 80s husbandry was a little bit trial and error there wasn’t the technology, there wasn’t the industry and the market behind it. As they’ve become popular commercial settings have gone we can develop better things we can sell better husbandry to keepers and now we’re at a point where reptile keeping has never been better in captivity but the animal rights groups have had the same aim and agenda for the last 30/40 years and I don’t think they’ve seen all of these improvements that we’re making on a day-to-day basis.
All of this begs the question if excessively large enclosures aren’t necessary for good welfare and if snakes in stores do well in the enclosures currently recommended by Government then why is the AWC making such outlandish demands?
The AWC report had people involved that have a clear mandate and that mandate is the outright ban of reptile keeping and they’ve gone to great lengths to suggest that there’s a huge proportion of distressed animals within the UK which is just total codswallop and that for me is probably what got me the most fired up just the sheer seeming stupidity of what was being suggested. The AWC report is a weak, flawed, deeply scientifically depleted document.
News of the AWC’s proposals spread like wildfire among the reptile community and there was outrage. For the first time in years organisations, businesses and keepers came together in opposition to produce rebuttal documents focusing on the report’s obvious bias and the potential severe impact on stores and educational facilities.
Is there a positive we can take from this report? Well I think there is a silver lining and that is we can thank Warwick and Whitehead for actually uniting the reptile trade and the reptile hobby and the reptile scientists for the first time in decades.
We all agree that animal welfare is important and all pets deserve to live and thrive in harmony with humans and you’ll find few people more invested in this principle than reptile keepers and breeders. Apart from a few bad actors reptile keepers are a passionate community who care deeply about welfare and at the very pinnacle of this community pyramid are those who have taken their passion and made a career of it. That’s why it makes such obvious sense to value the input these knowledgeable specialists can provide.
So in my 20-25 years typically these working groups work very well. We always come to a reasonable conclusion that most reasonable people can support. This is the first time I’ve experienced where a tiny minority of extremists are allowed to dominate and it makes me incredibly angry because this is very detrimental to welfare.
Within the report there is lots of explanations of what stress is and how it manifests itself. There is lots of explanations of what welfare is and how it should be used or inferred but there is zero demonstration of an issue. There’s got to be proportionality to this and the AWC report was prejudicial, it was absolutely prejudicial and deleterious to the entire industry but do not lose sight of the fact that that’s what they always wanted. That’s what they always wanted. This is prohibition through the back door. This report has absolutely nothing to do about animal welfare. It’s sole objective is to disrupt legitimate trade.
Our recommendation is the AWC should withdraw this report that is what we have said to the AWC and to Government. The consequences of this report being adopted by Government would be catastrophic to the reptile trade in the United Kingdom. If this report is not challenged, if this becomes the norm of how government working groups go in the future that extremists can actually dominate it by shouting the loudest, then that serves a very bleak future for animal welfare in the United Kingdom. I think we also need to be clear that this does not just affect trade. There are implications for private keepers if these recommendations are implemented for shops they would have a knock-on effect for the private hobbyist as well.
They really need to go back to the drawing board with this. The AWC committee are farm specialists trying to tell reptile keepers how to keep reptiles. Obviously there has to be an invite extended to the AWC and any other working groups that subsequently might be invented or come out of the reworking of the AWC, which has to happen because they can’t continue in their current guise, all of their credibility has been smashed to pieces.
There has to be a reinvention and there has to be an open door. Going forward, if you want balanced, fair, sensible, mature conversations about welfare, about moving forward in a pragmatic manner that both enshrines regulated business and enshrines welfare at the same time, hand in hand, the door is always open.
We do need to be aware that for Government this is a really difficult job. For us either involved as a trade or as a hobby, it’s our interest, it’s our passion, we have that knowledge. You have to remember for Government point of view this is just another day in the office that issues have been raised and they are just legitimately trying to look at them. What we have to ask is how has this all gone so badly wrong?
I like the way that Government works where they get stakeholders together and it’s a fair and open discussion and I think there is absolutely a place for all parties to have a seat at that table, but it has to be balanced. I think on one hand the FBH is nearly always going to say reptiles are fine to keep and good to keep, there’s lots of benefits, and on the other hand the extreme animal rights groups are always going to say reptiles are wild creatures, shouldn’t be kept in captivity and I think as long as there’s balance there and that whatever’s discussed is based in science and evidence, I think that’s absolutely got a place.
We have to ask how did this process get hijacked and what can we do to make sure this never happens again? What we need to be aware of is the end game for these animal rights activists. This is not about animal welfare, this is about segregation, this is stopping humans interacting with animals. Whether we’re keeping that as a pet, using it for a utilitarian purpose like a guide dog or indeed for farmed animals, their opposition is to humans interacting with animals. That is what they want to stop, full stop.
Keeping reptiles has been a mainstream pet choice for decades. A recent survey estimated that there are up to 8.8 million reptiles kept in the UK and it’s easy to see why they’re so popular. After all reptiles are fascinating animals and the most popular species kept as pets are relatively easy to keep and low maintenance compared with traditional pet animals such as cats and dogs. They’re also safer to keep and cause fewer health risks than your dog or cat might which is why it’s so frustrating and unfair for such a vocal minority to be campaigning to curtail and ban reptile keeping and this is just one example of how animal rights campaigners with extremist views can influence governments to create laws and bans that affect responsible reptile keepers like you. But what can you or I do about this problem?
Reptile keepers really need to wake up like to the threats that exist. I think that sometimes the population of reptile keepers are cosseted, they’re hidden away from the true harsh reality of what the political lobby within the reptile hobby faces at the sharp end and it’s truly frightening what these absolute madmen will come up with as a means to stop us doing what we do. If you take seriously your right to keep reptiles and you believe that you’re doing it in a responsible respectful way to the animals that you keep, the organisations that exist such as Responsible Reptile Keeping or USARK are there for you to join, for you to be able to help support so that the information that they can provide to you, these educational videos, the dispelling of myths, the debunking of ideas, the rubbishing of reports that have got no basis in science, this is precisely how you’re going to help them. The cost of inaction inevitably is the curtailment of this hobby, or it’s total eradication.
Do not be fooled. These people that purport to be welfarists and only have the animals at heart who are doing the AWC report and otherwise are antagonists of this hobby. They do not want you keeping, in fact they don’t want you keeping any taxa of pet. They know all too well it would be folly to go after dogs and cats and horses. So let’s pick off the satellite hobbies instead. These are easier prey. If you love your animals, you adore them, they’re the earth, moon and stars to you, you need to be able to fight for your right to be able to keep them and we will continue to try and defend every element of this hobby for as long as we can, for as long as we can draw breath we’re not going anywhere.
