Well, folk, it looks like January is the month for elephant politics. A couple of weeks ago, someone wrote in with a question about if anything had happened in regards to Billy, the male elephant at the LA Zoo, whom activists are trying to convince the city government to seize from the zoo and transfer to a sanctuary. For a long time, there hasn’t been any movement on the topic – aside from frequent protests at the entrance of the LA Zoo – but now things are ramping up again.
On January 24th – Wednesday of this week – the The Arts, Entertainment, Parks & River Committee of the City Council will be hearing Council Member Koretz’ motion. While it’s mostly been presented to the public as a motion to move Billy to an “accredited sanctuary”, there’s actually other aspects to the motion that are equally if not more alarming. In addition to forcing the zoo to transfer Billy to PAWS (the only elephant sanctuary in the country that accepts bulls), it also asks the city to force the LA Zoo to cancel all current or future breeding plans for their elephants and to turn the exhibit into a sanctuary for abused female elephants. This whole situation is far more than concerned citizens advocating for the welfare of a single bull. This is about zoos and sanctuaries and animal rights and industry politics, for all that it focuses on a single animal as a figurehead.
What’s really distressing is that while the LA Zoo has been running a letter writing campaign to encourage constituents to rally against this motion, only a single person from the zoo’s animal care staff has made public comment to the city council about the proposal. Neither the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, nor the California Association of Zoos or Aquariums – both associations of which the LA Zoo is a member – has made any public comment on the motion. As of the time of writing this, there was also no posted public comment by the Elephant Manager’s Association. In short: almost nobody with zoo animal management experience, much less elephant management experience, nor even the “gold standard” accrediting body has contributed anything to the committee’s understanding of Billy’s current welfare at the LA Zoo. It’s not even clear if any of the committee members have visited the zoo and seen Billy and his living conditions, despite the urging of Council Member David Ryu. The committee will be hearing the motion and interpreting it based on hundreds of comments from the well-meaning public, most of which are form letters written by anti-zoo associations. That’s really not how government officials responsible for ordinances that effect animal welfare should be educated on the topic.
WADTT has covered why this whole motion is a whole barrel of politics in detail previously, but here’s a recap:
It would massively damage the LA Zoo:
If the city of LA decides to seize Billy from the zoo (which they can legally do, as it is a municipally funded facility) the LA Zoo will lose their AZA accreditation. AZA facilities are not allowed to have their management choices for their animals overruled by governmental authorities, because a requirement for AZA accreditation is that the facility and it’s staff are seen as the experts by in determining appropriate care for all of the zoo residents.
If the zoo loses AZA accreditation, it will be forced to pull out of multiple major Species Survival Programs (SSP) (because only AZA institutions are allowed to participate in the Green level programs) and will no longer be able to exhibit or breed Western Lowland gorillas, lions, and Andean condors to name a few; they would likely be prohibited from doing any sort of animal demos either on-site or as part of outreach programming, as LA’s new ordinance banning the use of wild animals in entertainment only exempts zoos accredited by the AZA.
There is precedent for this occurring – animal rights advocates decided they wanted the Toronto Zoo’s elephants to go to a sanctuary instead of being transferred to another zoo, and they convinced the city to overrule the zoo CEO. The Toronto Zoo elephants went to PAWS, and the zoo lost their AZA accreditation.
They’re only advocating for one of the four elephants:
Animal rights groups and Council Member Koretz are advocating for Billy to be removed from the zoo because the conditions he lives in are inhumane and inappropriate for any elephant – and yet are simultaneously ignoring the three elephant cows who also live at the LA Zoo and would be subject to the same living conditions.
Two of the three females at the LA Zoo would be far better candidates to be sent to a sanctuary if the concern was truly allowing elephants to retire to a less stressful life- they both have chronic medical conditions, and are old enough that they are no longer be participants in conservation breeding programs.
Billy is the only elephant living at the LA Zoo who is actually owned by the city of LA. The other three females are on loan from other institutions. The city of LA, therefore, can only seize Billy for a transfer – they have no authority over the movements of the other three females.
The sanctuary Billy would have to be moved to (the only other elephant sanctuary in the country does not accept males) is run by the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). The founder of PAWS openly advocated against AZA zoos, and the organization has previously unsuccessfully campaigned for the removal of Billy from the LA Zoo to their facility.
This motion is likely the start of the animal rights groups pushing for all zoos to become sanctuaries and stop breeding animals for conservation
The proposal is supported by: the Voices for the Animals Foundation, Humane Society of the United States, the Performing Animal Welfare Society, Last Chance for Animals and Elephant Guardians of L.A.
HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle has written multiple times about how he wants to see zoos cease breeding animals entirely and become sanctuaries for abused animals. He has also stated that he wants to see elephants phased out of zoos entirely, and congratulated Detroit Zoo CEO Ron Kagan on his groundbreaking decision to send his zoo’s elephants to PAWS. (Kagan was also in favor of the Toronto City Council’s choice to seize the Toronto Zoo’s elephants and send them to PAWS).
Prominent animal rights speakers such as Marc Bekoff have left zoo animal welfare seminars held at the Detroit Zoo in recent years espousing the need for zoos to turn into sanctuaries; Detroit Zoo CEO Ron Kagan wrote a chapter entitled “Sanctuaries: Zoos of the Future?” for an animal law textbook published in 2017.
It is typical of HSUS advocacy to encourage the surreptitious addition of broader language than the public is aware of into pieces of legislation – while the public is simply concerned with with the fate of one elephant, this motion goes to further much longer term goals for the animal rights movement in regards to zoos.
How you can help:
Write the committee! Send them a message – not a form letter, but even just a couple sentences – expressing your support for the LA Zoo’s animal care. You can also say that you think they should have actual experts on elephant welfare who are unaffiliated with either political faction weigh in before they decide!
You can email your comments to clerk.cps@lacity.org – make sure to reference Council File #17-0453 and what you want to see happen (the motion needs to be dismissed) either in the subject line or the first sentence! You can absolutely email them if you’re not an LA resident, but if you are local it’s important information – they’ll pay more attention to your opinion.
I know sending letters is hard, but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that zoo industry politics often keep zoo staff from being able to advocate for their own jobs – no matter how much they want to – and so it’s really up to us to help support them considering how few comments have been submitted from the animal care sector.
If you live in LA, go to the committee meeting on the 24th! You can either listen or submit a “speaker card” so you can speak publicly. The hearing will be at 2:30 PM, January 24th in the City Council chambers, room 340.
And, as always, reblog this if you think the content is important.
Progress of Day 258 since it was a lil more involved. I flip back and forth a lot on images and usually throw down the main colors just for reference before I block out. The more colorful the bird, the harder it is to make the colors seem uniform, but I try my best!
This year, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Migratory
Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), our most important bird protection law is under
attack. Legislation in Congress (HR 4239), and a new interpretation of
the law by the administration, would end the ability to hold industries
accountable for bird deaths.
These proposals would prevent enforcement of “incidental” bird
deaths, removing incentives for companies to adopt practices that
protect birds from threats such as oil waste pits, and eliminating
penalties for companies that kill substantial numbers of birds,
including from large oil spills.
Nosey’s Law – the new “elephant protection”
law that was just passed in the New Jersey Senate and sits on Governor Chris
Christie’s desk, awaiting his signature – has turned out to be a complete mess,
both with regard to what it actually effects as well as the political
motivations of the various advocacy groups that pushed it through. Named after
an infamous privately owned circus elephant, the Nosey’s Law
the public thought they were supporting would have simply protected elephants
from being used in traveling entertainment acts; but instead, it effectively outlaws
all mobile animal education programs in the state.
In its first incarnation, Nosey’s Law emulated
anti-circus bills previously enacted in New York and Illinois that prohibit the
use of elephants in traveling animal acts (or even any type of entertainment at
all). Instead, imprecise language about what constitutes a “traveling act” and
a “performance” in the original bill allowed an overly broad amendment to
expand the scope of the ban from just elephants to all wild and exotic animals.
The combination of the two means that
not only is using elephants in any sort of travelling exhibition illegal, but that
any mobile business utilizing exotic or wild animals for any type of
exhibition, in any way, is also in violation of the new law. While this may
seem like good news to those readers who want to see all animals removed from
traveling entertainment, this actually has much further reaching effects: any
businesses doing wildlife outreach and conservation education programs with a
live wild animal collection will be completely eliminated by the passage of
this law. These highly valuable services and
exhibitions are not the type of animal entertainment that the public expected
Nosey’s Law to prohibit. Not only do they often serve to support the continued
existence of wildlife rehabilitation facilities and exotic animal rescues, they
are also often the only access underprivileged communities have to education
about the natural world.
“Be It
Enacted by the
Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:
1. a. Notwithstanding any other law, or any rule or
regulation adopted pursuant thereto, to the contrary, no person shall use an
elephant 1or other
wild or exotic animal1 in
a traveling animal act.
b. Any person who violates this section shall be subject to
the penalties provided in section 10 of P.L.1973, c.309 (C.23:2A-10), except
that the criminal penalties provided in subsection f. of that section shall not
apply.
c. As used in this section:
“Mobile or traveling housing facility” means a vehicle, including a
truck, trailer, or railway car, used to transport or house an animal used for
performance.
“Performance” means any animal act, carnival, circus, display,
exhibition, exposition, fair, parade, petting zoo, presentation, public
showing, race, ride, trade show, or similar undertaking in which animals
perform tricks, give rides, or participate as accompaniments for the
entertainment, amusement, or benefit of a live audience.
“Traveling animal act” means any performance which requires an animal
to be transported to or from the location of the performance in a mobile or
traveling housing facility.
2. This act shall take effect immediately.”
The important parts to note are that it
applies to all wild or exotic animals in addition to elephants, and that it
prohibits any public showing of these animals for the benefit of the public. Even
when this bill just dealt with elephants, this wording still would have been
overly broad in comparison with similar extant legislation. Both the New York
and Illinois elephant-specific laws were carefully written to make sure they
didn’t accidentally prohibit legitimate educational presentations: New York
banned the use of elephants in any type of entertainment, travelling or not,
but they emphasized the entertainment part of the definition and included an
exemption for programs run by zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and
Aquariums (AZA) and wildlife sanctuaries; Illinois (the existing law most
similar to what Nosey’s Law purported to be) chose to emphasize that they were
banning travelling elephant acts and
made sure they exempted any “non-mobile, permanent institution, or other
facility.”
If this legislation has passed as it was
originally written, the vagaries of the wording wouldn’t have affected the
actual implementation – there aren’t any facilities in the state of New Jersey
taking their elephants off-site for educational programs. So how did this bill
go from specifically restricting elephants to a disaster for educational
businesses? On 12/18/2017, the Assembly Appropriations Committee amended the
text of the bill, adding six words that changed the fundamental purpose of the
law: “or other wild or exotic animals.”
The term “exotic animal” is far broader than many people
realize, and “wild animal” is even more so. In general, both terms not only
encompass the iconic megafauna like bears and tigers, but also many species the
general public encounters regularly, such as guinea pigs and canaries. Nosey’s
Law does not define what is considered a wild or an exotic animal, and it does
not reference any other extant definitions (the text is marked as if the definition will be in a footnote, but no such footnote exists at the time of this writing). The bill, if passed, will be an
addition to Title 23 of the New Jersey State statutes.
According to the definitions found in that document, an exotic animal is “any
nongame species or mammal, bird, reptile or amphibian not indigenous to New
Jersey”. There appears to be no extant definition of a wild animal – the
closest is the definition of “wildlife,” which is “any wild mammal, bird,
reptile, amphibian, fish, mollusk, crustacean or other wild animal.” These
definitions are, in keeping with the rest of the bill, incredibly broad, but it
appears that the most likely interpretation of the bill is that it will outlaw
use of all non-domestic species of animals in any sort of mobile exhibition or
outreach.
This means that if Governor Christie signs
this bill into law, the addition of those six words will make it illegal for educational
outreach companies to help children fall in love with wild animals through
entertaining – but informative – events. It will make it illegal for wildlife
rescues to raise funding for their rehabilitation programs by doing
presentations about raptor conservation with the unreleasable animals in their
care. And, because the bill was not written with any of the normal exemptions,
there are six zoos – three of which are accredited by the “gold standard”
Associations of Zoos and Aquariums (a group that almost always has exemptions
from restrictive animal management laws) – it will also make it illegal for facilities
like the Turtleback Zoo to run the classroom programs where they teach
first-graders about the astounding diversity found in nature with the help of
specially trained ambassador animals.
While this may seem like a mistake – surely,
nobody who loves animals could purposefully attempt to do such damage to
educational programs – some of the biggest proponents of the bill indicated in
their comments this is /exactly/ what was intended to occur. The headline of
PETA’s celebratory blog post applauds New Jersey for banning “all wild-animal
acts.” PETA, an organization known for their animal liberation ethos, truly
wants to end all use of animals by humans in any capacity – even for
educational purposes that might encourage people to care about animals. They
even openly celebrated the passing of Nosey’s Law as the first step in closing
all zoos (although the reference to zoos was quickly and quietly removed from
the blog post, likely to avoid cluing in the duped supporters of Nosey’s Law to
their true intentions).
The oddest thing about all of this is that Nosey’s
Law is damaging the business practices of multiple facilities accredited by the
AZA less than six months after they very publicly teamed up with PETA’s legislation-focused
counterpart, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The CEO of HSUS,
Wayne Pacelle, wrote publicly about the need for the two organizations “to unite to fight cruelty and promote conservation,” and yet both Pacelle and the HSUS New
Jersey State Director both widely praised the passing of a law that actively
damages the conservation efforts of multiple AZA zoos. HSUS and PETA do not frequently
present themselves to the public as flip sides of the same coin, but their VP
of wildlife affairs, Nicole Paquette, has stated publicly that the two
organizations have the same goals, simply different methods of achieving them; in
light of that, it might seem that Nosey’s Law is the first stumbling block for
the overly optimistic partnership between a zoological organization and an
animal rights advocacy group. However, the comments made by both the HSUS New
Jersey State Director and Pacelle about the law passing indicated that they believed the bill to be
entirely focused on ending circus acts using wild animals. Pacelle,
specifically, opened his blog post on the topic with a statement that the law
bans “almost all wild-animal acts” when the bill as written in fact bans every exotic animal act.
While this
slight discrepancy might not be a big deal from most authors, the HSUS CEO is a
man whose books are written in collaboration with former White House speech
writers and whose blog posts frequently include vocabulary that even well-educated
readers occasionally have to look up in a dictionary – it is utterly
uncharacteristic of him to allow anything to be published under his name to
include a mischaracterization of what he himself dubbed the “biggest win yet”
for ending the use of wild animals in circuses. So what happened – how did HSUS
end up enthusiastically supporting a bill that is so blatantly damaging to
their newest collaborator?
Given that PETA actively celebrated the damage
Nosey’s Law will do to New Jersey zoos, and both HSUS people speaking publicly
about the bill didn’t seem to realize the true scope of the bill – the HSUS New
Jersey State Director didn’t even seem to be sure about what species of animals
would be covered by the ban – maybe HSUS was caught as unaware as the general
public was by the “wild and exotic animal” language amendment. The bill was
amended very late in the legislative process – more than a year after the bill
was originally introduced to the Senate floor – and it’s possible the
additional language could have gone unnoticed by animal advocacy organizations
until it was too late.
And that’s really the take-home lessons we’ve
all learned from this Nosey’s Law debacle – whether
you’re a member of interested public or a public figure heavily involved in
animal advocacy, it’s crucial to keep a close watch on the evolution of
proposed legislation. Even the smallest changes to the wording of a bill can
have big consequences, and in this case, six little words that went unnoticed
in what was intended to be a fairly targeted piece of animal protection
legislation might destroy the majority of conservation and wildlife education
opportunities for New Jersey residents.
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There’s still a chance to keep this overly broad, massively damaging law from being passed as written – Governor Chris Christie has to be convinced to veto it.
The best way to make that happen is to call his office at 609-292-6000 and tell them that Governor Christie needs to veto Senate Bill 2508 (Nosey’s Law). You don’t want to say too much – I suggest saying you want it vetoed because it will outlaw vital outreach and conservation programs as well as the intended targets, eliminating educational opportunities for residents and destroying local businesses. If you are a NJ resident, say so first. If you’re not, call anyways – the opinions of NJ constituents will have the most weight, but you’ll still help get the Governor’s attention.
If you’re not able to make a phone call, you can tweet your message to @ChrisChristie. Use the hastag #vetonoseyslaw. If you feel like doing multiple tweets, use your subsequent ones to tell the Governor about the impact mobile animal outreach programs have had on your life (for example: when educators brought snakes to your classroom and you fell in love with reptiles).
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I’m so sick of having to prove “usefulness”. Living things don’t exist for you. A species of ugly inedible bug living under a rock has as much right to keep existing as a pretty deer.
Meanwhile, at the Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary, due to an excessive amount of old pup floof covering… well… everything, they decided to do a deep clean of the house. All of the aging canines were cast outside from their comfy beds and favorite napping spots. While vacuums clogged and previously undisturbed dog dander filled the air, they looked upon the process impatiently. Clearly they were anxious to get back to the very important job of laying about and being adorable old coots.
PiraticOctopus 