Animal welfare activists are calling on the province of Ontario to rescue a younger macaque monkey displaying “troubling” behaviour at a roadside zoo within the city of Kincardine.
“We’ve filmed him performing stereotypical behaviours, which embody spinning in circles, pacing forwards and backwards in a repetitive movement, and in addition showing to chew himself,” animal rights lawyer Camille Labchuk mentioned.
“He lives by himself, as far as we are able to inform, on this enclosure and for these three years he has remained in that location each time we go to him and we’re very troubled by what we’ve seen,” she mentioned.
Animal Justice, a non-profit animal legislation group, is asking on animal welfare authorities to grab the monkey, named Boogie, and relocate him from Bervie Zoo to Story Ebook Farm Primate Sanctuary in Sunderland.
Labchuk mentioned Animal Justice has filed a number of authorized complaints with provincial animal welfare companies about Boogie’s situation, however up to now they’ve didn’t take away him.
Georgia Mason, director of the Campbell Centre for the Examine of Animal Welfare on the College of Guelph, seen video of Boogie and referred to his actions as “basic irregular behaviour.”
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“It’s displaying stereotypic behaviour, that are these repetitive rhythmic actions, in order that’s the pacing and twisting after which the self-biting is a quite common type of self-harm that you just see in laboratory animals in the event that they’re stored in poor circumstances,” she mentioned.
Mason mentioned “most surprising” to her is seeing the monkey alone within the enclosure as a result of primates are “extremely social.”
“The truth that this animal has been by himself for at the very least two years and presumably a few years longer, taking a look at his behaviour is simply actually not OK,” she added.
In 2023, World Animal Safety Canada, a non-profit group, discovered Ontario doesn’t have a provincial zoo licensing system and referred to as its rules “weak and non-existent” in terms of roadside zoos.
“You don’t want a licence or a motive or any {qualifications} to maintain an unique wild animal like a monkey in our yard and you’ll maintain them in any circumstances you want,” mentioned Melissa Matlow, senior wildlife marketing campaign director.
Matlow mentioned she visited Bervie Zoo just a few years in the past and is asking for it to be shut down.
“It’s a type of substandard roadside zoos that Ontario has issues with so I’m not stunned there are considerations of an animal struggling there. Ontario is the worst jurisdiction in terms of lax rules for captive wildlife.”
NDP MPP for St. Catharines Jennie Stevens wrote a letter to solicitor basic Michael Kerzner “on behalf of those that should not have a voice of their very own – animals stored in captivity.”
“The shortage of significant animal welfare regulation and enforcement in Ontario has allowed amenities like Bervie Zoo to function underneath substandard circumstances, ensuing within the struggling of susceptible animals like Boogie,” Stevens wrote in her letter.
She advised International Information they’re in search of “equity to animals,” to make sure they’re protected and never stored alone, and for his or her well-being to be the “high precedence.”
Hunter Kell, press secretary for the solicitor basic, wrote in an announcement: “Our authorities has made Ontario a pacesetter within the safety of animals with the strongest penalties and first enforcement system of its sort in your entire nation. We anticipate everybody accountable for animals to make sure they’re being effectively cared for.”
Kell pointed to the Provincial Animal Welfare Companies (PAWS) Act handed in 2019 “to make sure a strong, clear and accountable system to guard animals” and the “Stopping Unethical Pet Gross sales (PUPS) Act to assist make sure the protected and moral therapy of canine and crack down on unethical canine breeding” as methods the federal government is displaying its dedication to the welfare of animals in Ontario.
A request for remark by Bervie Zoo went unanswered.
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