Like young British people yearning for new experiences on different shores, Bernie knows just how hard freedom of movement is post-Brexit. For more than two years, the endangered Andean spectacled bear has been waiting to leave Chester zoo to find a mate in Germany.
His cousins — named for the white ring some of the species have around their eyes — in the wild are at risk of extinction, meaning conservation efforts in zoos are vital as an insurance policy. Yet post-Brexit paperwork has stalled efforts to move the bear from Chester zoo to mate with a female in a German zoo.
Bernie is not alone. The number of animals being moved between British zoos and their EU counterparts plummeted this year, to fewer than a hundred by the end of last month. When the UK was in the EU, more than 1,300 a year were crossing the Channel in crates to ensure the genetic health of zoo populations.
Efforts to exchange rockhopper penguins between Edinburgh zoo and Vienna zoo have been going on for more than a year. Previously, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland said that the process would have taken less than eight weeks.
The society has been trying for six months to send leopards from Highland Wildlife Park to France. The Amur leopard is one of the world’s rarest big cats, while an accompanying snow leopard is one of an endangered species.
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Primates are also affected. Moving an endangered female golden lion tamarin from London zoo to a zoo in Poland took 17 months. The small red-gold species is from Brazil and endangered. Historically, the taramin would have moved in about two months.
Donatello, a black howler monkey at Twycross zoo, was selected for a breeding programme to move to an Italian zoo back in November 2020. Yet paperwork woes meant he was unable to leave until September 2023. Moving an endangered Bornean orangutan from Blackpool zoo to Germany took a year.
Despite the Windsor agreement, designed to ease trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, even moving animals within the UK has proved a headache at times. A white-crested turaco, a quirky-looking bird from Nigeria and Kenya, is still unable to move from Chester zoo to Belfast zoo because of a lack of suitable paperwork.
The list of animals stuck or delayed stems from the fact that the UK and EU failed to establish a post-Brexit answer to the export health certificate which previously covered a vast range of species.
If a British zoo wants to move an animal, it needs a separate certificate for each species, for each country. In some places, it’s even more complex. British zoos need to deal with 16 regional health authorities in Germany, meaning that moving a bear to the country’s north can be different the country’s south.
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Matters are complicated further for some species covered by the CITES treaty for endangered species. CITES licences last for only six months, meaning that if export health certificates aren’t procured in that time, the transfer process can collapse.
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Moving rare animals between zoos matters because a broad gene pool for a species means a healthier and strong population in zoos.
Appeals by zoos to Rishi Sunak appear to have gone unheard. Lord Douglas-Miller, the zoos minister, said in a letter earlier this year that the government would not “compromise UK sovereignty over own laws” by aligning more closely with EU rules.
“This is entirely within the power of our politicians to fix, but they are choosing not to. We should be proud to have some of the best zoos, the best conservation organisations, in this country,” said Jo Judge, CEO of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums. “Yet this conservation work has been put under immense strain for four years now, with our government choosing bureaucracy over conservation.”
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Zoos are hoping that Labour might offer a resolution. Hilary Benn, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, has indicated that a Labour government would negotiate a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the EU, which zoos believe would greatly improve the flow of animals.
Labour and the Conservatives have been contacted for comment.
