Towards the recognition of animal welfare? Constitutional Council hearing on February 4, 2025

Exploitation for shows

28.01.2025

Versailles

We are asking the French Constitutional Council to solemnly recognize the notion of animal welfare. On February 4 at 3pm, it will examine our priority issue of constitutionality (QPC) at the Versailles Court of Appeal. In particular, the Council will have the opportunity to extend the ban on exploiting wild animals to all circuses!

While the parliamentary debates on the November 30, 2021 law provided for a total ban on wild animals in circuses, in the end this will only apply to traveling establishments from 2028. And with the government’s complicity, they’ll even just have to park their cage trucks for good to keep the animals and continue captivity, training and shows.

Instead of funding sanctuaries as promised, and seeking solutions for these animals who have been mistreated all their lives, our government once again decides to turn a blind eye to the tragic fate of hundreds of big cats, primates, zebras, birds and Samba, the last elephant held by a circus in France, and thus prolong their suffering with circus performers.”

Muriel Arnal

President of One Voice

Far from the hope of a peaceful retirement promised to them by our leaders, for the animals kept in circuses, the prospect of endless exploitation is taking shape. In the context of our request against the automatic equivalence allowing traveling circuses to settle down, the Council of State has referred the QPC we raised to the Constitutional Council.

For the sake of children, for the sake of animals, let’s ban circuses with animals!

Not only are we asking the Constitutional Council to legally enshrine the protection of animal welfare, which would then be imposed on all laws and public authorities, but also that it strongly affirms that animal shows are contrary to the principle of “environmental education” recognized by the Charter of the Environment.

As over 100 psychologists assert^[1], children’s exposure to circus performances can lead them to “deny messages of pain and hinder the development of empathy that is crucial during the process of development and growth, and hence [to] produce an incongruous response – i.e. joy and amusement – to punishment, discomfort and injustice”

On February 4 at 3pm, we’ll be at the Versailles Court of Appeal for a hearing during which the Constitutional Council will examine this possibility. In the meantime, join us in calling for a ban on the exploitation of animals in circuses, for Samba, Jumbo and all the others.

^[1] See Appendix 3, page 40: “Declaration by psychologists on the anti-educational value of animal mistreatment in circuses and shows”