Zoos

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 8th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Harrison on securing this interesting debate, and I hope that the visitor numbers for Chester Zoo and London zoo rise as a result of the attention that they will no doubt receive. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on his new position, and warmly welcome him to the Dispatch Box. I am sure that he is relieved to have moved on from the sort of “super-sub” role that he was performing there and which is now being performed by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. He has a hard act to follow in the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who I really enjoyed working with, and I wish him in turn all the best at the Home Office.

We have heard praise for the great work that Chester Zoo and London zoo perform. We were privileged to listen to a particularly moving speech by the noble Lord, Lord Paul, regarding his involvement in London zoo. My own experience, more personally, is with Monkey World in Dorset, which is licensed as a zoo but is actually a sanctuary. Effectively, it is the largest rescue centre for primates in Europe; it is also the nursery for orang-utans for Europe and is about the only place in the world successfully breeding woolly monkeys at the moment. Not that it wants to treat many of the species of primate there—it has more than enough chimpanzees, for example; I think that it is on its third or fourth troupe of chimps—but, sadly, that is a demonstration of the need for a rescue centre.

Monkey World started by rescuing chimps from the beaches of Spain and has now grown to encompass all manner of primates. It is not a collection, though, and that is an important thing to say in the context of the debate about zoos. A lot of zoos look to collect a couple of each species so that they can show everyone what they all look like. Clearly that does not apply to all zoos, nor to all species, but we should move welfare standards so that animals live as closely to how they live in the wild as possible. My noble friend Lady Rendell talked about the Jaguar being a solitary animal. Clearly you would not want to put a bunch of Jaguars in an enclosure together, but there are other species that you would want to because that is the way that they like to live and we do not want to put them in solitary confinement.

When my children were young, we followed the recommendation of their grandfather and took them to Marwell Zoo, near Winchester in Hampshire, which showed me as a parent the extraordinary educational value that well managed zoos can offer. Indeed, when I was exchanging views on zoos on Twitter over the weekend, one came from a friend of mine who works in one of the most innovative schools that I know, the Essa Academy in Bolton, talking about the marvellous educational value of zoos and what technology can now do to enhance that using, for example, augmented reality to show evolution and some of the extinct species that obviously are no longer available in zoos.

When I was a Defra Minister, I was also pleased to visit a wonderful project in the heart of the Amazon that the Darwin Initiative was funding with the Zoological Society for London to sustain local communities that were farming ornamental fish and looking at alternative ways of creating a living for those people.

It is worth recalling, though, that there are problems at times with zoos. We heard about those from my noble friend Lord Harrison in his fine speech, and there are horror stories from around the world of cramped cages, the illegal trade of social animals living in solitary confinement and animals dying of malnutrition, including in US zoos—this is not confined to zoos in the poorer parts of the world but can be in some of the richest places in the world. When I was researching this, I was hoping that I would not find any examples from this country that would cause me concern, but sadly there are indeed areas of concern. I had a look on YouTube at a film about Noah’s Ark zoo near Bristol that was made a couple of years ago. According to the TV report, it would appear that that zoo was effectively breeding tigers to supply circuses. We will shortly be debating wild animals and circuses. Certainly, we on this side do not support the use of wild animals in circuses and encourage the Government to end that practice as soon as they can. The keeper of that zoo seemed to regard it as being just a business and had lost touch with the conservation and education concepts that are at the heart of a successful zoo.

I have also seen the Born Free Foundation’s excellent report evaluating the implementation and enforcement of the 1999 directive, to which my noble friend Lady Smith referred. The foundation produces specific country reports for members of the Union. It is worth noting that the report says of England:

“Despite a concerted effort by Defra to support and advise Local Authorities in the implementation and enforcement of the ZLA, it is questionable as to whether Local Authorities have the time, funding and expertise to ensure effective application of zoo legislation in England”.

That point has been made in the debate with reference to the Zoo Licensing Act. The document continues:

“Overall, the findings of this investigation indicated that licensed zoos in England were not fully compliant with the ZLA”.

That has to be of great concern in this debate. The document further states:

“Overall, English zoos were making an insignificant contribution to Threatened and ‘conservation sensitive’ species”.

The report also contains other findings. Those findings are clearly of considerable concern to us and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to them. I would also be interested to hear anything he has to say about the story that appeared in the Sunday Express this week about zoos being inappropriately hired out for wild raves. Will he comment on the questions raised about local authority capability and expertise, consistent licensing quality and consistent inspection by local authorities? On balance, we are in favour of well managed zoos but are concerned that more needs to be done to raise the quality of regulation.