#performing animals

A band of performing chimpanzees of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus sounds off in Madison Square Garden, March 30, 1959.

At the end of 2017 / in early 2018, we talked about a bill on the blog called Nosey’s Law - an “anti-circus bill” in New Jersey that, if passed as written, would have also banned normal 4H activities, ended outreach programming with rehabilitated raptors or rescued small exotics, and even made taking snakes and frogs into a classroom for show and tell illegal. I thought that was a really important bill to focus on, because I fully believe legislation pertaining to animal use and animal welfare needs to be accurate, well written, and fully thought out no matter what specific issue it addresses. Nosey’s Law was a great example of what it looks like when legislators haven’t put in that effort: the state senator sponsoring the bill had blindly trusted representatives from the NJ Humane Society of the United States chapter and other animal rights groups when they told him that amending the language of the bill - in a way that massively broadened it’s area of impact - wouldn’t hurt any business in the state that wasn’t a circus. The man genuinely had no idea that the overly broad, unspecific language of the law he wanted passed would shut down a majority of animal education and outreach work done in New Jersey. Luckily. it got vetoed, and a much more well-written and specifically targeted version of the law was passed during the next legislative season in 2018. 

I tell you this story because California’s new proposed “anti-circus” or “traveling animal act ban” bill SB 313 makes the effect the original Nosey’s Law would have had look like child’s play. It is genuinely one of the worst laws I’ve ever seen proposed regarding animals (and I spend a lot of time reading and yelling at various pieces of animal-related legislation these days). Do you want kids to be able to learn about reptiles and other wild animals through licenced, regulated classroom programming? Do you do 4-H with alpaca? Do you want to ever see any non-domestic animal in a movie? Do you like it when your local zoo or aquarium or wildlife sanctuary brings in new animals? Would you like them to be able to bring them back if they have to evacuate due to a natural disaster? Too bad. SB 313 has the potential to ban literally all of these things. 

Okay, so what the hell makes this bill so bad? Two really simple things: a lack of specificity, and a fundamental misunderstanding of who uses exotic animals for what types of businesses in CA. 

The bill basically defines what makes something a “traveling animal act” and then says “it’s now illegal to use wild or exotic animals in one of these.” That should be simple enough, right? Here’s how it works. In order to define the type of traveling animal act that’s prohibited, the bill defines a “performance” and then defines a “mobile or traveling housing facility”, and says a traveling animal act is any performance that an animal is brought to in that type of mobile housing. As much as you’d think it shouldn’t be possible to fuck that up... that’s where the problems start. Let’s look at the definitions used for everything involved here:

A “performance” as defined by SB 313: “Any animal act, carnival, circus, display, exhibition, exposition, fair, parade, petting zoo, photo opportunity, presentation, public showing, race, ride, trade show, or similar undertaking in which animals perform tricks, give rides, or are used as accompaniments for the entertainment, amusement, or benefit of a live audience.” 

A “mobile or traveling housing facility” as defined by SB 313: “A vehicle, including, but not limited to, a trailer or railway car, used to transport or house an animal used in a performance.”

The simple version: it’s a performance if the public is able to look at the animal and derive any benefit from doing so. If the animal got there in a vehicle, it’s a traveling animal act, and it’s now illegal. The only exemption is if the animal is on display at a permanent facility accredited by either Association of Zoos or Aquariums (AZA) or Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS), or, an outreach program run by said accredited facilities. 

There are a lot of reasons this language will cause problems, most of which are fairly common for these sorts of broad “anti-circus” bills: zoo and sanctuary accreditation programs are designed for those specific business types, and so most small education and outreach companies (like those that do classroom and library programs) don’t qualify for them and would be force to close; there are plenty of good zoos, aquariums, and wildlife sanctuaries in CA that do outreach but aren’t accredited by either of those two groups for entirely valid reasons, and would therefore also lose their ability to continue those programs; it makes no allowances for common occurrences like children bringing their “exotic” pets like snakes and hedgehogs to school for show-and-tell (and, if the school was reported, could result in $25,000 fine for the child’s family); the list of “wild and exotic” species that it applies to for some reason specifically includes alpaca, which are common farm / 4-H animals; it would prohibit any small trained exotics from being used in any film where the animals would be brought to the set, and so on. But there’s one really major issue that I haven’t seen any of the major animal groups in CA comment on: there’s no time limit on when moving an animal somewhere new stop being a “traveling act” and just becomes exhibition in a new home.

So, okay, the whole point of this bill is to ban circuses from ever being able to operate in CA. The way other states have addressed this (such as the final, much better version of Nosey’s Law) is to prevent people from traveling around with animals and exhibiting them in ways where they’re not going home to a permanent housing facility each night. That makes a decent amount of sense, right? Thing is, that’s now how SB 313 is written. It simply says that you can’t move an animal somewhere in a mobile housing vehicle and then show it to the public. Period. If (A) occurs by (B), then (C). So... that technically means if I moved an animal to even a stationary, permanent zoo or sanctuary in CA, it would be illegal for me to ever put that animal in the view of the public. The animal arrived in a mobile housing vehicle (A) and “exhibition” counts as a type of “performance” under the definition in the bill’s text (B) so therefore, it is illegal for me to do it because I would be causing a “traveling animal act” to occur (C). 

Now I know you’re going to look at me and say, okay, but obviously moving an animal between zoos is different than taking an animal on the road with a circus! They’re totally different things! And you’re right... except that that doesn’t actually matter with regards to legislation like this. Most people (and I’m pretty sure, also the legislators sponsoring the bill) are pretty sure that it’s “common sense” that what they’re trying to ban is different than outreach programming or moving a zoo animal to a new home. Thing is, as soon as you actually define a term in legislation, it’s no longer going to be interpreted based on a common sense definition. The way this law is written, if it passes, it would legitimately be illegal for any non-AZA or non-GFAS facility in California to bring in new animals for any type of public exhibition. 

Because we can’t have nice things, it actually still gets worse. Since there’s no exemptions or caveats for specific situations, this law also means that if a zoo or sanctuary had to evacuate their animals (say, because of a wildfire), it would be illegal for them to bring their animals back to the facility and open to the public again. Even if the animals are travelling in a moving housing vehicle literally only to save their life, putting them back on display after such transport still fits the definition of prohibited behavior in this bill as it’s currently written. 

Obviously, the senators supporting this bill don’t really understand how overly broad the scope of the language is, or what impact it would have - there are hundreds of education, outreach, and entertainment businesses in California that maintain a federal licenses to use exotic animals in their work. Like the guy who wrote Nosey’s law, they don’t understand the way the industry they’re trying to regulate works or what the prohibitions they’re putting into writing would actually do. The sponsoring senator for SB 313, Hueso, is well known for working with anti-captivity animal rights groups, and he likely has trusted them when they told him this is the best language to use and that it won’t harm entities he supports. Not only is he getting duped, but so are the constituents of any CA legislator who supports this bill. Even if the people in those areas have decided that they think circuses should be illegal in the state, I can guarantee you that nobody wants their kids fined for taking their alpaca to a county fair, or for their local zoo to no longer be able to bring in new animals, or for the educators that help kids at summer camp fall in love with snakes to be forced out of business. 

Circus act. Beautiful pictures for children to paint and draw. 1922.

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