At the Muller Circus, tiger cubs are born, exhibited and then disappear year after year…

At the Muller Circus, tiger cubs are born, exhibited and then disappear year after year…

At the Muller Circus, tiger cubs are born, exhibited and then disappear year after year…
03.11.2021
At the Muller Circus, tiger cubs are born, exhibited and then disappear year after year…
Circuses

In October 2021, whistleblowers alerted us to the fact that the Muller family, the owners exploiting Jumbo, were exhibiting a tiger cub to the public, and even allowing them to be touched. Our investigators went to the site and found two of them. This constitutes mistreatment and an offense. And what’s happening to the cubs? We are lodging a new complaint against the circus and putting the Drôme DDPP on notice.

Circuses are supposed to obey rules. In this case, it’s the decree of March 18, 2011. Each trainer has a license for certain animal species, and a maximum number is set. Muller has for instance a hippopotamus, Jumbo, and tigers. But not everything is allowed! These animals must all participate in the show (which is often far from being the case), otherwise why subject them to transport and confinement in cage trucks? As for the shows themselves, they must follow certain rules: no exhibition of tiger cubs, for example, in the decree authorizing the opening of this circus! But that’s exactly what our investigators witnessed! Cubs just a few weeks old, separated from their mothers at an early age, dragged brusquely from their cages by one paw, then groped by the audience.

Welfare, safety and health: trampled underfoot by trainers

Handling tiger cubs in particular is totally contrary to the well-being of the babies, but a simple separation is already a problem for both the cubs and their mother.

Such interactions are strictly forbidden. For safety reasons, of course, but also for health reasons: diseases, known as zoonoses when they are transmissible from one species to another, can be transmitted. What the Muller Circus is doing even goes against the recommendations of the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums (EAZA).

How, under such conditions, can we expect children to see animals – particularly tigers, whose species is disappearing – as anything other than objects at their disposal? How can we hope to protect the planet if nature is objectified in this way?

For the baby tigers and their mother, we have lodged a complaint against the circus for mistreatment by an operator, irregular exploitation and detention methods likely to cause suffering.

What happens to the babies? Do they feed the traffic?

What’s more, as we’ve already said in other cases, we’re deeply concerned about the fate of these babies. At Parc Saint Léger, at Mario Masson‘s, at Triomphe, Paris, Idéal or Gougeon cousins’ Italiano circuses: what happens to the babies after a few weeks? A few months? After all, circuses cannot exceed the number of felines authorized in each opening decree. And although the births are always described as “unusual”, there are still some every year. What happens to them, then, since circus performers have to give them up, or even get rid of them, on pain of being fined?

We are also putting the Drôme prefecture (DDPP department) on notice to find out how many births have taken place in this circus, and what has happened to the animals. The bill on animal mistreatment (PPL Animaux) only provides that breeding be prohibited in traveling circuses within two years. This will do nothing to help these baby big cats, victims of this and other forms of trafficking, such as ending up in a taxidermist’s shop where their remains are sold for tens of thousands of euros!

Two proceedings are therefore underway: one criminal, the other administrative.

France, champion of animal experimentation: grey mouse lemurs in sight

France, champion of animal experimentation: grey mouse lemurs in sight

France, champion of animal experimentation: grey mouse lemurs in sight
04.10.2021
France, champion of animal experimentation: grey mouse lemurs in sight
Animal testing

Researchers in France are still conducting experiments on primates. Specifically, in its branch in Brunoy (Essonne), the French National Museum of Natural History has the largest breeding centre for mouse lemurs in the world. The animals are kept purely to be cut up for science.

Photo: © Gerald Cubitt / Photoshot / Biosphoto

France is renowned for its culture, its intellectuals, its historic towns and villages and its beautiful landscapes… Take Brunoy, in Essonne, for example. Although tensions in some of the surrounding housing estates can sometimes lead to unrest, the centre of this residential suburb retains at least part of its historic heritage, with magnificent buildings and plenty of green space giving rise to its reputation and its charm.

A centre of excellence

This is the setting within which scientists from the National Museum of Natural History (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle – MNHN) have, for some fifty years, been carrying out specialist research in the fields of forest ecology and adaptive strategies of living organisms, on the site of the Petit Château, an 18th century mansion.

Primates destined for experiments

It is a fine programme – on paper! However, the walled grounds, now closed to the public, are currently home to the largest primate breeding centre in the world, a community of nearly 500 small lemurs. Their name in English is ‘grey mouse lemur’; in French ‘microcèbe mignon’, meaning ‘charming lemur’, while the Latin name is ‘microcebus murinus’. They are kept for use in animal experiments. Mixed teams of scientists from the MNHN, the CNRS and other research institutes really love these descendants of animals caught in Madagascar, particularly because their small size makes them as easy to handle as mice while they have ‘much more in common with humans than the classic rodent models’.

From observation to euthanasia

This represents a great opportunity for laboratory technicians, who subject them to batteries of tests. These include ‘simple’ behavioural studies, which nevertheless sometimes, as here, consist of leaving the animals in darkness or making days and nights shorter in order to reduce their lifetimes. However, other experiments can be much more invasive, as part of research on inflammation of the eyes, pancreatic lesions, or the development of tumours as part of ageing. Research in neuroscience, in particular on the structure of the brain, cognitive abilities and Alzheimer’s disease, causes terrible suffering to the subjects, which are usually put to sleep afterwards.

Ill-treatment before decapitation

One of the worst studies our team of scientists knows of focused on the ability of grey mouse lemurs to enter torpor to adapt to their environmental conditions. Apparently harmless on the face of it, in practice this study involved keeping individual animals in isolation without enough food for several days. They were then all decapitated and samples were taken from their corpses, frozen and sent to Canada. This is because the MNHN, not content with conducting its own experiments, also offers its ‘materials’ (in this case, lemurs) and its ‘services’ to scientific researchers throughout the world. It even has a website, called IBiSA, which offers services and equipment’ useful to foreign laboratories keen on small lemurs.

An insatiable appetite

So, France is once again standing out as a result of its ferocious appetite for animal experiments, especially on primates. It makes every effort to increase its reputation in this respect at international level. The MNHN has even stated its ambition to renovate its premises and to take early action to extend its animal house to house 800 lemurs. There are more studies and more suffering to come… We have recently written three letters, to the President of the MNHN, the Director of the Essonne department DDPP [whose responsibilities include animal protection], and the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, asking them to disclose all documents relating to the MNHN centre for the breeding and use of animals for scientific research in Brunoy. A spotlight needs to be shone on what is happening there, and on the suffering of the grey mouse lemurs.

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Corridas, Novilladas, in Beaucaire as elsewhere in the South of France, bulls die in front of children

Corridas, Novilladas, in Beaucaire as elsewhere in the South of France, bulls die in front of children

Corridas, Novilladas, in Beaucaire as elsewhere in the South of France, bulls die in front of children
07.08.2021
Gard
Corridas, Novilladas, in Beaucaire as elsewhere in the South of France, bulls die in front of children
Corrida

Having received images of the July 25 Beaucaire novillada from whistle-blowers, we are publishing these damning images. With these photographs of these six young bulls’ last moments before being put to death by teenage bullfighters, one of these one-day spectators gave us his testimony.

The bulls die, as they always do in French arenas, in immeasurable suffering, under the cheers of their torturers and without understanding what is happening to them. Very young children attend these spectacles, which are deleterious to their psychological development, and are trained to do so. Others, barely of age, even take part in executions of extreme brutality and violence. From now on, our society should be putting up safeguards for young people, until these unjustifiable and barbaric practices are banned outright.

Investigations and images that continue to denounce these barbaric practices

We have never ceased to condemn bullfighting. From the first demonstrations in the 1990s alongside Théodore Monod, when the association was still called Aequalis and Talis, to the long partnership with Jean-Pierre Garrigues, to today, in the face of this novillada, a rite of passage for young bullfighters, which took place in Beaucaire. So, on July 25, our activists were raising public awareness with images from our investigations, both the one entitled “Bullfighters in the making”, and the 2019 one at the Nîmes bullfighting school, both conducted undercover. 

And we won’t stop until it’s a thing of the past. In reality, bullfighting is torture for the animals concerned, even if legally it benefits from a “cultural” exception, and constitutes a harmful spectacle for everyone, first and foremost children, a particularly vulnerable audience.

Ennui, dégout et pitié

For this whistleblower, who was attending a show of this type for the very first time: 

Convinced that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to judge what we haven’t experienced, I took the plunge and went to the Beaucaire arena with a friend. […]

My predominant feelings could be defined as follows: boredom, disgust and pity. Pity for the animals, who were obviously wondering what they were doing there, but also pity for the spectators, who applauded with ridiculous gravity at every sword stroke that signed the agony of a young bull. Couldn’t they hear the chilling cries of pain from the animals? Didn’t they see, after the picador’s work, the gaping wounds from which blood gushed in geysers?

I remembered the aesthetic discourses of people I knew who were bullfighting enthusiasts: tragedy, beauty, philosophy. I even read up on the aesthetics of bullfighting… But all I saw was a disgusting, nauseating butchery, repeated six times at factory speed. As soon as one poor beast was killed, another would make their entrance, just as bewildered as the previous one.

Children don’t have the reflex to protect themselves

“I was surprised to see, as soon as I arrived, the presence of children, some of them very young, with their parents. […] I thought that the emotional charge described by bullfighters was not suitable for children. I’m now convinced of it. However, what I saw was still below what I had sensed about the issue.

Barely a few minutes after the first bull entered the arena, he sent four men who were harassing him flying. Some adults hid their faces in their hands. The children received this vision in all its brutality. They had no reflex to protect themselves. What did they understand? What did they feel? I don’t know, but it questions and bothers me.

One of the bullfighters ended up in his tights on the sand, his ballet flats flying off on impact. […] It was grotesque and terrible.”

Apart from the bull, who bled to death under the sharp points of the weapons, none of the participants was seriously injured.

Embellishing this slaughter with quasi-mystical philosophical considerations reminds me of Napoleon’s remark to Talleyrand: “Here, sir, you’re nothing but shit in a silk stocking.””

Our 2009 report is sadly still relevant.

We’ll be present again this summer at the Béziers Feria on the afternoon of August 14,  alongside Colbac, our partners in FLAC. Join us !