More animal welfare! Everyone is actually in favour of this. The only question is: what actually helps animals? The German government has now submitted a draft amendment to the German Animal Welfare Act for its first reading in the Bundestag on 26 September 2024.

As we all know, no law leaves the Bundestag in the form in which it was introduced. Accordingly, many parties are trying to influence the final legislative text. One demand made by certain animal welfare organisations is to introduce a so-called positive list for keeping animals in private households. Such a list would include species that can be kept at home. Conversely, the keeping of all other species would be illegal. It is clear that species that Citizen Conservation is concerned with would not be on such a positive list.

On the initiative of the Bundesverband für fachgerechten Tier- und Artenschutz (BNA), the Verband der Zoologischen Gärten (VdZ) and the Zentralverband Zoologischer Fachbetriebe (ZZF), an impressive alliance of 42 associations and organisations that are involved in animal husbandry with a focus on science, species protection and animal welfare have now presented a joint position paper. The paper welcomes the current draft amendment to the Animal Welfare Act in principle. Positive lists, on the other hand, are fundamentally rejected as objectively unsuitable and highly problematic from a legal perspective.

In addition to, for example, the Bundesverband der Beamteten Tierärzte, Bundestierärztekammer, Deutsche Tierpark-Gesellschaft, Deutsche Veterinärmedizinische Gesellschaft, Deutscher Wildgehege-Verband, Stiftung Artenschutz and Zoologische Gesellschaft für Arten- und Populationsschutz, Citizen Conservation and our shareholders Frogs Friends, VdZ and DGHT have also signed the paper.

Citizen Conservation is dedicated to the mission of building conservation breedings for endangered species through collaboration between institutional and private animal keepers. In the fight against global species extinction, we cannot afford to do without the capacities of hundreds of thousands of committed animal keepers, their knowledge, their time and the space they make available. The knowledge they have gained also serves animal welfare. A positive list, which by definition would only include species that are well established in pet keeping, would undo all our efforts and cause massive damage to animal and species protection.