The lions were circling in a cage that was too small.
A sixty-year-old woman and her son were sentenced Monday by the Vannes court (Morbihan) to six months in prison for mistreatment committed against three wild animals that they illegally exploited in their William Zavatta circus.
Antonia Fleury, 61, and her son Teddy Gougeon, 38, who belong to the traveling circus community, were both absent from the hearing.
In addition to this “warning sentence”, in the words of the president, in accordance with the requisitions of the public prosecutor, the two defendants are also prohibited from keeping non-domestic animals for five years and are ordered to each pay 1,500 euros as moral damage to the One Voice association, civil party.
It was she who reported this mistreatment after observing it twice in July 2019 in Douarnenez (Finistère), then in Arzon (Morbihan) a few days apart.
Private detectives from the animal rights association noted how three lions, a male and two females, were kept all day in the compartment of a cage truck measuring only 15 m2, without being able to shelter from the sun or have any physical activity, even though they weren't even participating in the show.
Total opacity of the circus
For the inspector from the French Biodiversity Office (environmental police) present at the hearing, this was a flagrant violation of the regulations applicable to wild animals, especially since neither Ms. Fleury nor her sons did not hold a certificate of capacity to care for such animals or authorization to operate this circus.
This certificate had been refused twice to Teddy Gougeon for his total lack of consideration of animal suffering, despite the death of certain animals in his care, the public prosecutor said.
The lawyer for One Voice, Me Caroline Lanty, deplored the total opacity of the activities of the William Zavatta circus, which according to her does not appear in any commercial or company register, as well as the defects in the identification, which is nevertheless obligatory in as a protected species, of the three lions, of which we do not know what has become of them since 2019.
“We don’t know where these animals come from and we don’t know where they have gone,” confirmed Sylvain Darchy for the public prosecutor.
When the two defendants are checked by the gendarmes in 2022, after several delays in the procedure linked to their roaming, “we realize that these animals are being held outside the framework”, he summarizes.