Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520-539)
MARTIN BURTON,
JAMES CLUBB,
MALCOLM CLAY,
RONA BROWN
AND PETER
SCOTT
16 SEPTEMBER 2004
Q520 Mr Mitchell: Okay. Is the position,
take this one as well, is the position that you would prefer national
regulations, which you can obey and which will stop the worst
practices, to a patchwork quilt of local authority bans, where
some areas you can go to and some areas you cannot. Is that your
position?
Malcolm Clay: I want to pick up
the point about local authority bans. These are not byelaw bans.
They are landlord and tenant policies because we are renting our
sites from the councils, so they are saying, "No, we will
not provide a site for a circus if it has animals or non-domestic
animals". It does not stop circuses going into that same
own and going to a privately owned site because there are no planning
restrictions either. The problem is that the ideal circus sites
are parks because they are grassed, they are a large area and
they provide very good exercise facilities. Unfortunately, circuses
are being moved on to the car boot sites and all these sundry
sites on the outskirts of town, some of which are probably better
now than the traditional parks, but it is not a byelaw that bans
them from the town, say if we wanted to go Grimsby we probably
could not go in the council park but we can go on to a private
site.
Mr Mitchell: By the time you get there
the council will have sold off the parks at the rate they are
going.
Chairman: We do have a very good town
waiting in Grimsby.
Q521 Mr Mitchell: For my next act!
Malcolm Clay: The juggling club,
just so that you understood where the problems were with local
authorities.
Q522 Mr Mitchell: How many do ban animals?
Malcolm Clay: Certainly a vast
number, but there are very few towns that do not get visits from
circuses. If you go onto a privately owned site then the criteria
really is how much rent are you prepared to pay. If you go onto
a local authority owned site there is usually provision for veterinary
inspection, whether it is particularly informed veterinary inspection
or not, but at least there is some control. To go back again to
the point you were making that I from time to time sit in circus
box offices talking to people and the people come to the window
and say, "What animals have you got, mister". That is
still what they want to see, but I think the people want to see
simple routines. They want to see animals. They do not want to
see clever tricks from animals that particularly we see coming
out of Eastern Europe and Russia. They just want to see happy
animals performing simple routines or an interpretation of what
they do naturally, but not clever routines. There is this demand
for animals.
Chairman: Before I get any wetter I think
we will move on to David Taylor.
Q523 David Taylor: Are you familiar with
the five freedoms in the draft bill?
Malcolm Clay: Yes.
Q524 David Taylor: It has been asserted
by some of the organisations that have submitted evidence to us
that none of these can be met in circuses and the large wild animals
in particular have a dreadful life by any standard. Secondly and
finally in the view we have heard of Born Free a moment or two
ago that the trainers in temporary enclosures do not and cannot
provide wild animals with their needs. For example, the majority
of wild animals remain chained up and confined to their trailers,
only leaving this restricted environments to perform. How do you
respond to that?
Malcolm Clay: I do not think that
is right. There is no reason why you cannot have adequate exercise
areas for wild animals. I think there is a concept that lions
are running round all day and in reality they do not because they
run around to kill, to eat. If you feed lions they tend to lie
in a heap on top of each other, very much like a domestic cat,
but you have got immense practical experience.
James Clubb: Yes. Lions sleep
20 hours out of 24. Out of all the big cats the lion is probably,
if we were to single out an animal suitable for a circus I would
say lions are better suited than any of the other big cats. They
live as a group, as a pride. That can be maintained in the circus
environment. They do not require vast areas to roam in but, of
course, by training them, simulating their brain, like I was saying
before, substitutes for some of the other activities they might
get up to. Do not forget, of course, that these animals are not
wild animals captured. Lots of people like to portray the fact
that these animals have been captured in the wild and brought
to this country. They have probably been bred over 20 to 25 generations
of captive breeding; definitely some of the lions we have I could
trace back to further than that. Certain animals can be accommodated.
I cannot say all can be accommodated on circuses, but I would
hope by regulation it would eliminate those particular animals,
but clearly some animals could be accommodated.
Q525 David Taylor: Mr Clubb and Mr Clay
both use the same construct there. Mr Clay said there is no reason
why an adequate environment cannot be provided. That is not really
the question is it? It is: what is the experience, what is the
evidence of the existing small number of circuses that use performing
wild animals. How do they treat them at the moment, not whether
they could if they wanted to? It is how do they treat them at
the moment, not Mr Burton but other less reputable circus proprietors?
James Clubb: The difficulty is
there are not any in this country, if we are only talking about
the UK there are not any examples. I only know of one circus.
Martin Burton: I think the point
is, with our horses for example, they are out in a field, an exercise
area, for a large part of the day. I agree with Jim that lions
are a very good circus animal, very useful for the circus. I would
not have them unless I was satisfied that we could build outdoor
exercise pens and not keep them in small cages all day long, not
for any other reason than that will satisfy the public. I feel
this bill will be very useful if it could regulate that that should
happen. I still will not go ahead and have that kind of wild animal
until the technology is there for me to build the enclosures in
a way that I can move them and do the things I need to do.
Malcolm Clay: I think it is not
necessary to keep wild animals in travelling cage trailers, that
you can build large exercise areas and let them out. The problem
is particularly with lions however big the exercise area is they
tend to lie in the heat in the corner.
Q526 David Taylor: Mr Clubb, I am happy
to pass back.
James Clubb: There are examples.
I was in Switzerland last year and saw a travelling show with
enormous enclosures with artificial rock work and trees and even
a waterfall. This was with a travelling show. It is very clear,
if those animals are very important to the circus then they should
be able to make the right provision for the animals or not have
them at all. They are only important to that circus if they are
going to bring the right revenue back into the circus. Really
it answers the question. If we make the regulations in such a
way that if the circus thinks they are really worthwhile and we
are going to earn a lot of money from the fact that we are having
lions then they will build the right accommodation for the lions
or whatever; I am only using lions as an example. If they cannot
do that, they should not have them at all. That is how I look
at it.
Q527 David Taylor: It depends on commercial
success and in your view the handling, grooming, training and
exhibiting of animals is in their own good as well; it is for
their own good as well?
James Clubb: Yes.
Chairman: Just before I move on to two
more of my colleagues who caught my eye, can I say to Rona Brown
and Peter Scott: we will come to you. I do have number of questions
to ask. It tends to be that if colleagues get attracted to one
area it is as well to finish off that line of inquiry before we
move to you. Thank you for your patience but we will be coming
to you.
Q528 Alan Simpson: Chairman, I can perhaps
bring both groups in because I wanted to explore the issue of
licensing and the question of what it is that you feel should
be licensed. Perhaps if I could begin from the circuses: I have
to say I can understand the point you make that if there is a
case for the use of animals in circuses then it has to be a licensed
case. There is certainly a compelling case for me to say that
circuses, given the choice, ought to be under the public domain
rather than just doing a landlord and tenant relationship with
a private landowner. That is almost the worst of all circumstances.
The question is: what is it you want licensed? Do you want the
circus licensed? Do you want the trainer licensed? Do you want
the quarters licensed?
Malcolm Clay: At present we have
a system—
Q529 Chairman: I want to add to what
Mr Simpson said for Rona Brown and Mr Scott. In your evidence
you are very clear when you say: PAWSI would like to see all personnel
who train, work with and supply and/or are responsible for supplying
animals to the audio visual industry. That is a very long supply
chain in terms of the people who are involved. Perhaps you could
tease out what that would mean and who would be the body who would,
in your judgment, be best placed to oversee and determine what
the standards were for the licensing. What actually would be these
standards? What would be the requirements, to follow Mr Simpson's
line of inquiry, before you put a tick in the box to say: all
these people have now passed a certain standard to get what you
term as the licence?
Rona Brown: We have been working,
PAWSI and another group called Actor and another group called
AFTC.
Q530 Chairman: What does AFTC stand for?
Rona Brown: I am sorry: it is
the Animal Filming and Training Commission. In 1989 Peter and
I were both part of that; we started it in fact. We with our skill
sector, which is skill set for the film audio visual industry,
we started working on NVQs for people who wished to work with
animals in the movie industry. We have now completed up to level
3 and we have drawn up a list of levels for people to complete
with. We would like everybody who supplies an animal, who is responsible
for an animal on the workplace floor, ie the film and television
studios, to be licensed. At the moment we are registered under
the Performing Animals Regulations 1925 Act. We would like everybody
to be licensed who is the responsible person. We would also like
those licences to be levelled to fit the standard that the people
have achieved. We are actually looking at—
Q531 Chairman: Can I just stop you there.
I do not want to be discourteous to my colleague Mr Simpson, but
I am anxious to understand this business about the chain of supply
of animals. If I am an owner of a dog or cat or some animal that
has tele-genic qualities and people say, "Yes, we want that
animal", who actually is responsible for supply: is it an
agency or is it the individual who is the owner? Who takes the
animal along to the television commercial and puts it through
its paces? Just give us a flavour of who are all the people in
the supply chain?
Rona Brown: There are several
people who work full-time in the industry supplying animals and
training animals for TV. What happens is you get a phone call
from a TV company: "We want a dog, two weeks' time, has to
do this". They want a specific dog. They do not want one
that looks like the Dulux dog or the Andrex puppy. They want something
new. All of us trainers: if I have a black dog, they want a white
dog, if I have a grey dog they want a blue dog. It does not matter
what you have, they do not want it. They want something different.
On my lists we have thousands of people with animals because not
only say, for instance, if you have a Cocker Spaniel, there are
Cocker Spaniels that work well with children, there are Cocker
Spaniels that hate working in the rain, will not work at night,
or they are all suited to their own specific thing. I have lists
of Cocker Spaniels that are good: one will do this and one will
not do that, one will lie down and one will not do that. I have
hundreds of them on the books. When I get the call for a Cocker
Spaniel I will then go to that specific owner. However, that owner
is not—because the contract between the production company
and myself, I am then responsible for that dog. I reserve the
right to be the voice of that dog, which is written into my contract.
It is not the person who owns the animal unless it is obviously
yourself if you own it. It is the person who actually takes that
animal on to the floor in the television studios and is responsible
for the day-to-day care of it and also the prep: the training
you need to do prior to it. Everything about that job and that
animal, the person who supplies it is responsible, in our opinion.
With regards to how we want to regulate it perhaps I will let
Peter tell you more about the way forward. We would like it to
be monitored and Peter has actually drawn up a blue chip for that.
Peter Scott: We feel that there
is a model, if you like, that has been operating for some time.
That is the Zoo Licensing Act Inspectorate, which is operated
by Defra, Defra maintain a list of zoo inspectors, they organise
training of inspectors. They recommend or nominate inspectors
to a local authority to inspectors who are in their area. There
is a group of veterinary surgeons, some of who are already zoo
inspectors, others who are not but are very experienced at working
in the media industries which can be drawn on to produce such
a list. They could be your nucleus of inspectors. That was the
way we felt it could operate. They would inspect, say, the trainer,
see how she operates, how she controls her business, how she liaises
with the animals that she brings in, the training methods, et
cetera, she would then be approved. Similarly, we felt that through
the animal chain the producer of or the person procuring the performance
should also have a responsibility and have a type of licence.
That is open to some degree of discussion, but at the moment if
you are even a zoo the majority of zoos have trained animals.
Q532 Chairman: Who would be your licensing
authority?
Peter Scott: The local authority
in which the trainer resided.
Q533 Chairman: Your minimum qualifications,
if I have understood you correctly, would be NVQ3, would it, within
the training regime which you also described?
Rona Brown: Yes. There is level
1, 2 and 3. Level 1 would be a trainee who would come and watch.
They would be expected to perform certain duties but would not
be responsible for training. One of our biggest problems is that—
Q534 Alan Simpson: Sorry, we are going
off into training. I would like to clear up the licensing bit
first. I am still not entirely clear on this in terms of what
you are suggesting is a license for a trainer. Would that be a
licence that is animal specific or not animal specific?
Rona Brown: I was just going to
get to that. For instance, we have people who just have dogs.
However, as it stands at the moment, if they get a phone call
from a producer and says, "I want a lion", and they
say, "Oh yes, I can do that for you", and then they
will phone Jim. However, because that dog lady has signed the
contract with the producer to produce that lion, they are responsible
for it. When you go on the floor, obviously Jim and his people
would not allow anything to go wrong with that lion, but where
things go wrong is that you get on the floor with the lion and
this dog person has told the producer: "Oh yes, the lion
can do this, can work with children", or whatever, and you
get there and you find this is just not so. We would like the
licences tiered until people can prove that they do, even if they
never work with them, they do have specific species knowledge
for the job they are about to undertake because another thing
that happens, also, is that when people are planning a production
they say, and it has happened quite recently in a very famous
soap that is on, they wanted a horse. They were short in the budget
so the make-up lady had a horse. They procured this horse from
the make-up lady, it went on and it fidgeted all the way through
the thing and did not do the job properly. We believe that is
unfair to the animal because if the professionals provide a horse
it is a horse that has been trained specifically to work with
lights, to work with lots of people, to work in a stressful situation,
which filming can be from time to time. If people were licensed
and had to prove that they, indeed, were responsible, they knew
how to do a risk assessment, they knew how to cope with the PR,
they knew how to transport the animal, they knew about how to
keep it at the film studios and they knew everything about that
behavioural pattern of that animal within that specific role,
the welfare has to improve. This is what we would like to see.
Malcolm Clay: Would it help if
I just explain what our supply chain is as well?
Q535 Chairman: Briefly.
Malcolm Clay: Our supply chain
is that circus animals are either owned by the circus where they
appear or they are an independent act which is hired for the season
with the trainer. The animals which are owned by the circus are
either trained by the circus owner or are trained by an employee
trainer. As far as licensing is concerned, the present system,
as you are probably aware, of licensing trainers has no qualification
at all. Anyone in this room could apply for a licence to be a
lion trainer. The records are in chaos because they are not renewed
licences. Trainers have either retired or died and they are still
on the old list. I think we are looking for a combination of certainly
licensing the trainer. It is going to have to involve qualification.
I have to say that I find a lot of animal trainers are absolutely
superb at looking after animals and caring for them but are probably
not terribly academic people when it comes to formal qualifications,
but we have to go the way that society is going. The licensing
of winter quarters is not a problem. Circuses return to winter
quarters for comparatively short periods where they are exercising,
training and rehearsing animals. The licensing of circuses; I
think it depends which way the Government wants to go. Either
we have the formal code of practice against which circuses are
inspected, and those are the rules, or we have a form of licensing
of the circus which licences the circus to have specific animals
and a specific number of them, not just the species, having had
the accommodation inspected that there is a similar system as
operates under zoo licensing. We would quite happily consider
either of those qualifications where there is specific licensing
of the accommodation of the circus or there are rules with which
the circus must comply.
Q536 Alan Simpson: Can I just say, Chairman,
that this was the point that I wanted to head towards. Both of
you in different ways have mentioned either the circus owners
or the producer that does the hiring of the animal, through whoever.
In a way, the example that you gave about the producer who wanted
a horse, could not get one, someone on the staff who had one:
"Can we use yours", in a sense, if we are going to go
down a path of licensing (a) it has be all-encompassing and (b)
it has to have some punitive bite in its sanctions. In the example
that you gave it would be very easy to say: this was just a
friendship thing, it was not a commercial transaction, so the
licensing potentially would just fall apart, unless the producer
who sought the use of the animal in the TV or film also was part
of the liability chain. I just wanted to check with you both that
neither sets of organisations would object to the proprietor having
a licence liability of opportunity?
Malcolm Clay: We would have no
problem. To use the old-fashioned expression: the circus proprietor
is the exhibitor, but the proprietor is responsible for what goes
on within that business. It is the end of the day the compliance
must fall on the proprietor.
Chairman: David.
Q537 Mr Lepper: I will go back a bit
further than Uncle Mac. There used to be a pop group called (inaudible)
and at the end of working life Roy Rogers had Trigger stuffed
and used to take him around as part of his act. I do not know
if that is true or not. My question generally is: performing animals,
whether in circuses or films, TV or whatever, there comes a point
presumably when their working life is at an end in most cases.
What in general happens to those animals then?
Peter Scott: Who do you want to
deal with that?
Q538 Chairman: Mr Clubb and Rona Brown,
in that order. Mr Clubb, you can tell us what happens at the end?
James Clubb: We retire the lion
at 18 years old, remembering lions live in the wild probably only
until about 8 years old. After 18, they become arthritic and we
then retire them to the zoo-type enclosures that we have on our
premises. When our veterinary surgeon that you were governed under
or our veterinary consultants are International Zoo Veterinary
Group, if they feel that the animal is no longer happy then it
has to be euthanased. It is whatever is best for the animal. We
found that once you stop working with them they usually fade away
within four to six months because they do not have that stimulation.
Q539 Mr Lepper: That is wild animals.
Would that apply generally to horses and dogs in circuses as well?
James Clubb: We do an enormous
amount of domestic animal work but I think Rona could answer that
probably better.
Rona Brown: As I said before,
most of the animals that are used belong to specific owners. There
are people who keep lots of horses and people who keep Golden
Retrievers. They live as normal pets when they retire. They have
a very short working life, but they live their normal life as
they would do if they had never be in the film industry. However,
there is in the United States an agreement with the animal compounds
and the animal owners and the animal trainers that the production
pays a percentage which goes to the retirement of animals such
as the great apes and elephants and large cats that can no longer
be kept at the compound. They have now retirement centres for
them where they go and live in groups in zoo-like conditions.
All the big production companies subscribe to this, Warner Brothers
and Disney, and they all pay their percentage. If they use a chimpanzee
in a movie they will all pay the percentage of that fee for the
retirement of that chimpanzee eventually.
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