Animal welfare law comes closer with big UK operators targeted

The Animals (Low Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill has been discussed in parliament for the second time. It aims to ensure businesses “do not benefit from selling attractions, activities or experiences to tourists involving the unacceptable treatment of animals”.

Conservative MP Angela Richardson is behind the bill. She told parliament: “Five of the most influential travel companies in the UK continue to sell harmful, exploitative wildlife experiences, such as swimming with dolphins, wildlife shows, big cat petting and selfies, animal rides and bathing.”

She added: “We will legislate to ban the advertising and offering for sale here of specific, unacceptable practices abroad. Our intention is that this will steer tourists towards visiting attractions that involve animals being cared for and treated properly.”

Richardson detailed abuse found among animal attractions sold in the UK. These included: “Depriving dolphins of food so they will perform, confining dolphins to tanks 200,000 times smaller than their natural home range – the tanks are nearly always featureless, with little mental stimulation – separating elephant calves from their mothers at a young age, restraining them with only minimal movement and keeping them in isolation to break them and subjecting elephants to violent training regimes such as repeated beatings with hooks and sticks, as well as reducing their natural roaming range, which varies from between 30 and 600 sq km in the wild.” 

She added social media influencers had a role to play.

“They may not be one of the companies we are targeting today, but they often receive money, payment and an endorsement for promoting these activities. It is perhaps not for this legislation, but we need to look at how we can effectively target the online influencers in this space as well.”

The bill will establish a framework of offences involving the sale and advertising of low-welfare animal activities abroad.

Labour MP and former Abta head of public affairs Luke Pollard told parliament: “Much good work has been done by the industry on a voluntary basis, but it is clear that far too many people still do not regard the sale of tourism elements involving animals as something awful.

“It is important that we take steps to reduce the sale of these tourism attractions, but we must also take steps to work with destinations to remove them in the first place.”

He warned the planned legislation would not stop independent sales of animal attractions and added there must be a debate on whether digital click-throughs would be captured by it.

The bill will be discussed in committee before being brought back to parliament and voted on.