S7. E4: Gemunu de Silva: The Power of Undercover Investigations
“Within a month of our investigation’s release, we had some amazing news. The French government passed legislation to ban fur farms in France. In 2017, it was an issue which was not really on the public agenda, but within four years we have stopped an industry in France. Hundreds of thousands of animals don't have to be killed each year, don’t have to live in these small cages going crazy each year. It's a success and it's something that we feel proud to have been part of.”
- Gemunu de Silva
Gem is back!
Gemunu de Silva is the co-founder of Tracks Investigations. He is a filmmaker and an activist who's been investigating and documenting animal rights abuses since the 1980s. Tracks has completed over 260 investigative film projects. That is an astonishing number of investigations. 35 animal rights and protection organizations have benefited from their work in 57 countries.
Gem has been on the podcast before. I asked him to come back to talk about some of Track's most recent successes. There are many. The work that Gem has done for the past three and a half decades has changed laws, minds, and the world for millions of animals.
It was an absolute honor to have Gem back on the show.
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Transcript:
Gem: [00:00:15] Within a month of our investigations released, we had some amazing news that the French government passed legislation to ban fur farms in France. So in 2017, it was an issue which was kind of not really on the public agenda. But within four years, we have stopped an industry in France. Hundreds of thousands of animals that don't have to be killed each year don't have to live in these small cages going crazy each year. It's a success and it's something that we feel proud to have been part of.
Elizabeth: [00:00:59] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite, we have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review species unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Gemunu de Silva. Gem is a filmmaker and an activist who's been investigating and documenting animal right abuses since the 1980s. He is the co-founder of Tracks Investigations. Gem has been on the podcast before. I asked him to come back to talk about some of Track's most recent successes. Hi Gem.
Gem: [00:01:57] Hi, Beth.
Elizabeth: [00:01:58] It is so nice to see you in person in London. It is a real honor and a treat, so thank you for being here.
Gem: [00:02:04] Thank you both for inviting me back on to the Species Unite podcast. It's a real pleasure to be back.
Elizabeth: [00:02:09] I'm so happy to have you back. So for people who did not hear your first time around and if you didn't hear it, you should, because it's fascinating. Well, you just give a little background on who you are and what you've been doing for the past 35 years.
Gem: [00:02:25] I've been an animal advocate for the last 35 years since 1998. I've been focusing on investigations, so originally starting my own investigation films and producing films for Sky and National TV in the UK before joining a couple of animal welfare production organizations undertaking their investigations. But for the last 15 years, I've set up my own company called Tracks Investigations, and we undertake investigations on behalf of animal protection groups around the world. We've done a variety of projects. I think we're just clocked up our two hundred and sixtieth investigation, and we've worked for 38 organizations in 58 countries. We provide investigative work for organizations so they can get out and lobby and campaign with our material.
Elizabeth: [00:03:20] Your work does a couple of things. I mean, it does many things, and it involves many different species and many different cruelties. But two of the things that I think that it does the most are. I mean, you change laws and you bring massive public awareness to a lot of bad, bad things happening in the world.
Gem: [00:03:36] I mean, to me, that's the purpose of investigations. I'm not investigating just to get an immediate hit on a few thousand views. An investigation should be part of an overall strategy, really.and the whole strategy is, I mean, how you change the world is you get public awareness on your side, you get public outrage on your side and then the legislators should take note of it. Hopefully, action comes as a result of those investigations and it has.
Elizabeth: [00:04:03] Yeah, no, it totally has. That's one of the reasons I wanted to bring you back on because you've been doing this for close to four decades, three and a half decades, you probably more than anybody understand that for a lot of things to change, especially in this like super conditioned world where it takes so much to change the way we treat animals. You don't get quick returns for the most part, but you do get returns on shorter term investigations and I still mean years. I want to talk about that because I want to not only show the importance of what investigations do, but I want to talk about what these timelines mean. So let's start talking about some of your guys as most recent successes, because when you say you have 260 investigations, you have 260 successes and a lot of ways, I mean, that's really what these are.
Gem: [00:04:55] Yeah, I would say probably when we do an investigation out of our 260 investigative projects, I would say each one has brought value. Some have brought an amazing value and some some less, but each one has changed lives for the better for animals. You know, I'm confident of that. I'm quite proud of that in fact.
Elizabeth: [00:05:13] Millions of lives, with a lot of these, I mean, and the future is the stuff we will look back on, and these are practices that we will look back on and people a few generations from now, hopefully sooner will be an abject horror that this ever existed in the first place.
Gem: [00:05:30] When I first started back in 88 who had heard of veganism. You really couldn't go out to eat. People just thought you were a crackpot.
Elizabeth: [00:05:42] Now you can't walk around London with every block, there's a vegan restaurant.
Gem: [00:05:46] I mean, yeah, we just just went for a coffee now and everything is vegan. It's changed dramatically since I've started, and I like to think that some of our work or some of the work that I have done over the past 35 years has contributed to that.
Elizabeth: [00:06:01] Clearly, it has. So let's talk about a few of those investigations. I want to start with the Tigers because not only was this investigation massively successful, but it also got mainstream press, which does not happen a lot in animal type, you know, related issues. Let's just start with just telling me the story.
Gem: [00:06:20] A lot of our work, you see results over a period of years, sometimes decades. Whereas this investigation, we got a result. We actually and also we got the major effect on the specific animals we were investigating, which is not often the case. So yeah, let's start at the beginning, we were asked by an organization to investigate these 10 tigers, which were kept in what's called winter quarters. So these were circus animals, and during the summer, these circus animals are in the circus traveling around. This was in France, traveling around France, entertaining the public and what people don't realize is in the winter, circuses don't operate or these circuses didn't operate, and these animals are kept in what's called winter quarters. So the winter quarters for these 10 tigers was the back of a flatbed lorry. So you've got 10 tigers kept in really small conditions? So each tiger would perhaps have a cage of three or four meters. They're literally going pacing around these cages, and there's no enrichment for them, so it's kind of a barren cage. The circus fraternity for want of a better word to say, Oh, they go out on these tigers, they'll go out and exercise and they'll be able to have some escape from their really barren cage.
Elizabeth: [00:07:54] Like they're at this winter retreat kind of thing.
Gem: [00:07:56] Exactly, exactly. Whereas the reality is this, these tigers were kept on this lorry in an industrial estate in France. We were tasked to actually prove that they don't have exercise. To do this we kind of had to locate these premises and we decided that the only way we can prove they don't exercise is to actually have a camera placed on the facility continuously running for six or seven days. Sounds easy, isn't it?
Elizabeth: [00:08:28] Just so I get it right, there's just these cages on the back of a truck, basically.
Gem: [00:08:33] Exactly.
Elizabeth: [00:08:34] Someone's just like throwing them meat every day.
Gem: [00:08:36] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:08:37] OK.
Gem: [00:08:38] Exactly.
Elizabeth: [00:08:39] That's how they set for months and months and months.
Gem: [00:08:40] They'll spend three or four months in these cages. They don't even get a chance to go outside. They go crazy. You would go crazy, they have these stereotypical behaviors where they just pace up and down for hours, hours, days on end. It's mental torture for these tigers. It absolutely is. So we wanted to prove that these tigers didn't have an escape from this. So we got a crew of three or four investigators to actually try and delve into this, and we found the only place that we could put a camera is to climb an old Victorian type roof overlooking these lorries and yeah, to get to the roof It's, it was ridiculously strong pitch on this roof. So we have our ladders, we climb the roof and then we place a couple of covert cameras on on this roof to document exactly what's going on for these lives of these tigers, because it's all very well saying, Oh, we we don't think they have exercise, but you've got to prove it. So we put these cameras up and the cameras last for six to seven days. But you have to go and replenish the SD card. You've got to replenish the battery. So for every 36 hours, we're going back up on this roof scaling these walls.
Elizabeth: [00:10:03] Is it nighttime?
Gem: [00:10:04] It's nighttime and it's freezing. It's cold, it's windy.
Elizabeth: [00:10:07] It's scary.
Gem: [00:10:11] It's, it's scary and you don't want to be seen. You don't want to be seen because…
Elizabeth: [00:10:14] What happens if you get caught?
Gem: [00:10:17] We try not to get caught.
Elizabeth: [00:10:19] But it's not good.
Gem: [00:10:20] It's not good. It's not good. I think in all the investigations that we've done, we've been caught a couple of times. And yeah, we it's not it's not a place that you want to go to. You get the authorities involved, etc, and it's just something that we don't want to get involved with. We filmed these, these tigers and. And then we worked with an organization, and this is, you know, we work for the great French organization called One Voice. So the organization then, with our footage, went to the local authorities and said this is not acceptable. You know, animals are supposed to have exercise and they release the footage and there was a public outrage. I think on Facebook, there were about 100000 people who watched the footage, the edited footage within about three days and it kind of became a maelstrom. It was a really big issue in France, and it wasn't just these 10 tigers.It kind of represented the whole circus industry because these 10 tigers were part of the industry.
Elizabeth: [00:11:23] All the circus animals are.
Gem: [00:11:25] Exactly. So this investigation was kind of highlighting one issue, but it's kind of a broader picture. Basically, it's kind of showing this is what happens in circuses and circuses should have no, wild animals have no place in circuses today. The organization got lawyers involved and they took the owners of the tigers to court. Unbelievably, the court kind of agreed with the organization and thought these tigers shouldn't stay on this truck and the courts confiscated the tigers from the circus owners. It was amazing. It hadn't really happened before, especially in France. What was great about it is that after the confiscation, they were then taken to a sanctuary, so we knew these 10 tigers were instead spending their lives in these really confined cages, pacing up and down. Will be able to kind of exhibit more of their natural behaviors in this sanctuary in France. We don't often get what we call quick hits. You know, this happened within four or five months, which is, you know, from filming the footage to the animals living their lives in the sanctuary. In all my 35 years of investigations we don't often have the chance to save individual animals. We tend to think of it as a broader picture. So it's kind of heartwarming that we were able to save these tigers. But in a way, what's more important, it wasn't just the 10 tigers, the public outrage. It kind of highlighted what happened to these circus animals. So the organization then lobbied the French government, and earlier this year, the French government actually said they're going to phase out the use of wild animals in traveling circuses.
Elizabeth: [00:13:16] Which is awesome. I just think in so many countries where circus animals are still allowed, the public doesn't really realize what it's like. People just aren't aware.
Gem: [00:13:24] Exactly. And especially people perhaps are aware of the circus issues when they go and see the circus. But no one's really aware what happens in the four or five months that they're away from the circus.In France as well. We filmed other situations where we have had elephants on the back of a truck. You've got this big elephant and this is an elephant called a baby. It literally filled the whole truck up. And again, what we did there, you know, we in that instance, we placed cameras so you can see it when it opened, when the back doors of this truck opened because that was an enclosed truck, it was an absolutely enclosed truck. It was tragic. So far, we haven't been able to rescue all the circus animals. But if we kind of bring it to the public's attention that these circus animals are living a life of misery outside of the circus, well, potentially within the circus, but certainly in their quarters away. Yeah, we've just kind of needed to bring it to public attention.
Elizabeth: [00:14:26] I think it's one of the things you will see as somebody who's worked in this, you know, worked against this for so long, you will see in your lifetime, you know, it's country by country. Wild animals are not allowed in circuses, like every year, there's a few more countries or a lot more countries, and you've been a part of it since the beginning.
Gem: [00:14:44] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, back in one of the early projects that we did for Tracks was in 2008, 2009. Where we investigated the circus industry in the UK. We actually had somebody go and work in a circus, and they were managing a lot of the circus workers. We got undercover footage of again, these were elephants. They were three elephants in a circus and our investigator was there for two months documenting the lives of these elephants in this circus. As a result of that, Britain was one of the first that had banned wild animals in circuses. I've been kind of working on this issue for a while and hopefully there's a ripple effect. We're finding that if one country does it, then another country does it. This legislation and people can kind of copy that legislation and copy the campaign tactics of other organizations. Hopefully one day there'll be a life without circuses.
Elizabeth: [00:15:47] Well, and I would think the country is now still allowing animal circuses. It's going to be a shame. Like, I mean, the U.S., for instance, the country should be ashamed and every country that goes down. You stand out more when you're the idiots who are still putting these animals in circuses. So it kind of helps the progress. So you've worked with one voice before. I mean, you work with them quite a bit, right? The French.
Gem: [00:16:13] Yes, it's a French organization.
Elizabeth: [00:16:14] It feels like France all of a sudden is becoming like this powerhouse in change, right?
Gem: [00:16:19] I mean, we've done a lot of investigations there recently and I think it shows the power of investigations because historically, France hasn't been animal friendly.
Elizabeth: [00:16:33] No, no.
Gem: [00:16:34] Absolutely, but we've been working there for a while and especially in the fur industry. We've done in the last four years three major investigations into the fur farms in France. So in 2017 there were 11 fur farms in France in operation.
Elizabeth: [00:16:53] Were these mink farms?
Gem: [00:16:54] Yeah. So these are mink and fox farms. The thing with fur farming is that these are wild animals. These are wild animals confined to a cage in their natural habitats; these animals, mink and foxes would roam hundreds of miles. They live in family groups and they're kept in small wire cages. Sometimes five to a cage, and they suffer tremendous injuries in these cages. They'll have really damaged paws from just standing on wire for all their lives. There's lots of cannibalism because you've got five wild animals in a cage, so they'll attack each other.
Elizabeth: [00:17:39] They go nuts?
Gem: [00:17:40] Absolutely, they'll exhibit something called stereotypical behaviors, which they'll go round and round and round, and they go crazy in these cages. It's really kind of shocking, in the way that these animals are kept and it's for fashion. I think we've got to remember this.
Elizabeth: [00:17:59] Also, it is all stupid, but come on.
Gem: [00:18:02] Yeah. This is fashion. I won't even go there. Of course, we don't need fur coats in this day and age to keep us warm. So in 2017, we investigated six out of the 11 fur farms there just to show the conditions, and these investigations hadn't happened in France before on farms seriously and not at that stage, no. It's like the kind nobody had really done any fur farm investigations.
Elizabeth: [00:18:28] When you're sending guys into a fur farm, how are you getting in there?
Gem: [00:18:31] We do it under the cover of darkness. So I mean, we'll send a team of three or four people. We’ll have a couple of people filming there. We have lookouts, we have funexplained furarms are getting more security conscious. We have thermal cameras. So we'll kind of see people in the dark. We'll have beams that are infrared beams so we can show we can see where their alarms are. You know because often in these fur farms, they'll have these infrared beams. If you trip a beam bingo, the alarm goes off. We try to have material. We have the equipment to allow us to evade detection, and then we go under the cover of darkness and access these farms. Again, we don't break into anything unless you, you say we climb for we're very good at climbing, we're very good at getting over walls.
Elizabeth: [00:19:20] With investigations like this, I know some of the people that work for tracks like came from the police force or special forces type of things.
Gem: [00:19:28] We use a whole mixture, so we use ex-military people. You know, we people use ex-military people who have, yeah, who have been in the army we have. But all our investigators generally now have been trained by ex-military people. So if they're not ex-military people themselves, so they have access to the equipment, they know what kind of equipment to get in. Because when I first started doing investigations, it was just me just trying it out and seeing what happens. It's kind of gotten a bit more difficult in the last 35 years. You kind of have to respect that industries are becoming much more aware of investigators. Industries are getting much more security conscious. So it's not just a question of hopping over a fence and seeing what and trying to open a door. It's actually being a bit more aware of trying not to get caught.
Elizabeth: [00:20:17] I mean, you guys got to be like ninjas in some of these things.
Gem: [00:20:19] Yeah, we all do our athletics. Yes, we have to be alert, shall we say. But so, yeah, so in 2017, we did this investigation into this fur farm, and one voice put out a report and it created a stir. But the industry comes back and says, Oh, you've just picked out some bad farms or you just picked out a bad opportunity.
Elizabeth: [00:20:43] So you still investigated over 50 percent of the farms in France at the time.
Gem: [00:20:48] Exactly, exactly. With most investigations, you want to keep it into the public eye so you don't want it to kind of fade away. I think it's important if an organization is going to work on an issue to keep banging on until it, until it wins, basically. So we went back in 2019 and filmed four out of the five fur farms. On that occasion, one of the farms was an absolute hellhole. It was. We just saw a dying mink all over the place. Just the husbandry within that farm was husbandry, and all farms aren't, isn’t brilliant, but the husbandry in that farm was dreadful. So, you know, we filmed mink that were barely alive, literally half eaten. You could actually see the maggots coming out of their paws. It was dreadful. It was a real, filthy farm and that provoked a bit of an outrage. That fur farm was taken to court, and that was virtually immediately closed down because of the conditions there. But the rest still continued. So last year, in our brief period that we had that we could travel from the UK, we went there again and visited the four remaining fur farms in France. Just to show that it's still carrying on, it's still happening. Within a month of our investigations being released, we had some amazing news that the French government passed legislation to ban fur farms in France. It's a phasing out of fur farms, so it should have five years to date there's just one left.
Elizabeth: [00:22:31] That's incredible. So this last one will be phased out. It has to be faced higher than the five years just because they're the only ones left.
Gem: [00:22:38] Exactly and that just goes to show. So in 2017, it was an issue which was kind of not really on the public agenda. People say fur farms are banned, but within four years we have stopped an industry in France or we and the organization One Voice have stopped an industry in France. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of animals that don't have to be killed each year, and don't have to live in these small cages going crazy each year.
Elizabeth: [00:23:09] It's huge. It's enormous.
Gem: [00:23:11] It's yeah, it's a success and it's something that we feel proud to have been part of.
Elizabeth: [00:23:18] Even though it's taken years, it's still pretty quick.
Gem: [00:23:22] Yeah, three or four years to actually change something is very quick, but I think it's quite similar because we did have similar successes in Belgium. I mean, there were 17 fur farms in Belgium, and we investigated them all in 2015, 2014.
Elizabeth: [00:23:41] Same where are you going at night?
Gem: [00:23:42] Exactly the same. In fact, that was on one occasion we actually did get caught, so we, So yeah, and that's when we learnt about techniques to avoid getting caught. We got caught underneath one of these infrared beams that we tripped.
Elizabeth: [00:24:04] What happened?
Gem: [00:24:05] The fur farmer wasn't too happy. They obviously called the police.They thought we were animal rights activists.
Elizabeth: [00:24:06] Did you say no we're investigators?
Gem: [00:24:09] No. Well, another thing that we do as our investigators are investigators as journalists as well. So they're members of the National Union of Journalists. So I've been a member of the National Union of Journalists for 25 years, and I recommend all our investigators also get journalist passes because we are journalists. I think that's an important thing. We document and record suffering and we get those images into the print media. So when the police found out we weren't animal rights activists, but we were journalists documenting this thing, they let us go because we hadn't done anything wrong. That's incredible. We hadn't broken anything.
Elizabeth: [00:24:46] In the U.S. they probably would have put you in jail for 10 years.
Gem: [00:24:50] Yeah. So there was an uncomfortable situation where you spent a few hours in jail. But, you know, I think this is an important thing where when we investigate, we don't break, we don't do any criminal activity. We can actually justify the means of how we operate. Yeah, so in Belgium, I mean, what happened there is we did two investigations, and in 2018, Belgium said they were going to phase out all fur farms. That was 200,000 animals that aren't going to die each year in a fur farm. So Belgium went, then France went. Now we're seeing, other countries hopefully will follow suit.
Elizabeth: [00:25:31] Yeah
Gem: [00:25:32] They're some of the successes, and it's great when you can have legislative successes because that means it's not going to happen in future.
Elizabeth: [00:25:39] It's not coming back.
Gem: [00:25:40] Exactly. It's a dying industry. A success in France, which has traditionally been not friendly to animal welfare or animal protection, is, Yeah, it's quite nice to see.
Elizabeth: [00:25:51] And I think there's probably a ripple effect, right? Once people become aware of fur farming or they become aware of these tortured tigers, it opens up room for more awareness. All of a sudden it's like, Well, maybe I shouldn't eat that. Maybe I like it. Just it's an unveiling kind of process, and so more that the more the general public becomes aware of one kind of abuse. I think it opens their eyes.
Gem: [00:26:14] Absolutely. I mean, we work on issues of food, fashion, entertainment and research, and they are all kind of interrelated, really, because here's all how humans relationship with animals and how we use animals. Yeah, I think people kind of realize that, yeah, they're all interconnected.
Elizabeth: [00:26:33] So the one animal that typically brings most people in are dogs. Right? And you guys have done a really incredible puppy smuggling, many year long investigation in the UK, which I want to talk about. But up until 2012, dogs couldn't really get into the UK without a really long quarantine because of the fear of rabies. So the UK didn't really. You guys didn't really have puppy mills or puppy smuggling or any of that, right?
Gem: [00:27:00] No, absolutely. Until you know where an island in the UK is. And until 2012, puppies couldn't really be imported to the UK. They had to go for a three to six month quarantine and there was no international trade of puppies going into the UK. But then in 2012, the UK introduced what's called a pet passport. It was harmonizing with the European Union and so to allow easy travel of puppies or all animals throughout Europe. So the passport would have rabies and vaccinations. It would show that the animals have had vet checks and, you know, show the age of the animals. It's like a normal passport, like a human passport, so it enables animals to travel without having to be quarantined. So in 2014, the Dogs Trust, which is one of the major animal charities in the UK, approached us and they said, we're concerned about this issue. We think there is a massive influx of puppies coming into the UK, and a lot of these puppies are sick puppies or unvaccinated puppies, and they're getting ill. Could you investigate the issue?
Elizabeth: [00:28:12] What was your first reaction in your head?
Gem: [00:28:15] We'd never worked with dogs before.
Elizabeth: [00:28:19] I didn't think so.
Gem: [00:28:20] We never worked with dogs. We'd always focused on farm animals, wildlife, etc. And the Dogs Trust had never done any investigations. We thought, OK, let's apply some of the techniques that we use to, in other investigations and investigate this issue. So we've been investigating this trade for the last six years now. We've been to many Eastern European countries: Romania, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Lithuania, just as saying what's what the problem is, really?
Elizabeth: [00:28:49] How do you get into this? These places, the actual dog places?
Gem: [00:28:52] One of the ways that we do a lot of investigations is set up fake dealerships. So we pretended we were a puppy distributor in the UK.
Elizabeth: [00:29:03] For fancy dogs.
Gem: [00:29:09] Yeah. So we've had top dogs online, fabulous dogs. We've had a number of websites that allow us to actually access dealers and breeders because ultimately we're talking money. If you want to visit facilities in the open you need to have a reason why we need to see the conditions that these animals are kept in and be a journalist. People just close your doors and you can't really do these types of investigations out of hours at night. What we found was puppy mills. We found what we'd say in the states, in the Eastern Europe, which we didn't have in the UK. Really, we had few, perhaps in Wales, but the majority of dogs in the UK were potentially reputable breeders. But we found an explosion of these puppy mills in Eastern Europe. These dogs were then traveled, spending 60 to 70 hours on a truck on a bus, coming to the UK and then being sold on online classified ads.
Elizabeth: [00:30:12] For how much?
Gem: [00:30:14] These are up to £3000. These dogs are £3000 and you can buy them for 300 euros out there. So there's a lucrative market. What we found that this market was being dominated by the criminal fraternity, whereas previously they'd smuggled cigarettes, smuggled drugs, smuggled people, they were now smuggling dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:30:39] How did you figure that out? These were those same people.
Gem: [00:30:42] For example, one of them in, near Lithuania that we met as a breeder, we met him and I mean, he was an unsavory character, and then we got his details and googled it. Afterwards, he had a European warrant arrest for people smuggling out on him.
Gem: [00:31:00] Wow.
Gem: [00:31:03] So these were people who were involved in the criminal fraternity.
Elizabeth: [00:31:05] Because you didn't sneak in at night?
Gem: [00:31:07] Exactly, exactly. So in that case, we had a legitimate reason to go and see him and we were basically trying to do business with him, basically.
Elizabeth: [00:31:16] So you go in and you say, Hey, I might want to buy these dogs, but are you ever purchasing? Are you ever is our money going back and forth or is it?
Gem: [00:31:22] No, because well, and the majority of the cases, we are just trying to set up supply routes for the future. On a couple of occasions we have purchased dogs and then we've had them rehomed in that country where we've had the partner. But what we've also found is there's fraudulent vets involved, so we've found which is unbelievable. So the vets are in cahoots with these breeders.
Elizabeth: [00:31:49] So they are real vets?
Gem: [00:31:51] They are absolutely real vets and what they're doing is they're there. I mean, the basic issue of underage puppies is if you transport an underage puppy and underage, according to legislation, is under 15 weeks as they haven't been vaccinated or if they had been vaccinated, their vaccinations won't work. So they've got potential to get really sick, potential to have rabies, potentially to have parvovirus potential, they shouldn't be traveling at that age.
Elizabeth: [00:32:20] A lot of these dogs are sick, right?
Gem: [00:32:22] Exactly. I mean, that's how we first came across the issue because vets in the UK or people having buying pets or saying a lot of these pets were getting ill and then we just found out they'd come from Eastern Europe.
Elizabeth: [00:32:33] Like what you see in the U.S., left and right, as people think they bought dogs from a breeder and their puppy mill dogs and their health. I mean, their longevity and health is really not usually great because of the inbreeding and all the other bad things that happened in the puppy mill in the first place. Like, it's not just that moment of cruelty and all of that. It's a long run, too.
Gem: [00:32:58] Absolutely. I mean, these yeah, you've got no provenance of when you buy, when you buy a puppy off the internet, you've got absolutely no idea where this puppy has come from. Unfortunately, in the UK, a lot of people buy these on online classified ads. We've followed the whole custody chain of custody from these puppy farms in Eastern Europe. We've been on these trucks or these buses for 50 to 60 hours. We've even seen the lax controls at the borders because you're supposed to have proper border controls for puppies, when you have the pet passports. You're your space, people are supposed to be checking what's on those pet passports and if there's a legitimate puppy. I mean, for example, once I, for one part of an investigation, I took a toy dog, a dog that you bought from a toy shop like a stuffed animal, a stuffed animal, basically. I had a microchip for it because I'd bought a microchip and some passports from a vet and they just sold me the microchips and passports.
Elizabeth: [00:34:09] I can't believe this is an entire industry with fraudulent vets and fake microchips.
Gem: [00:34:14] Yeah, well the microchip is real. This vet had actually sold us a couple of microchips and sold us passports. So we thought, Well, we've got these, what should we do with them? Let's test the border controls. So we put this microchip inside. It sounds crazy. We put this microchip inside this stuffed animal and then took it to the border controls with its own passport. We'd actually even put and these have a vet stance and we actually put. The vets that we actually said Mickey Mouse in Spanish, it's just because we were feeling a bit cheeky and we went through these border controls at absolutely no problem because there was no visual inspection of the dogs and that's what we wanted to prove. There's no visual inspection, so anything could be happening. So these are just tick boxes. So that's another example how we've documented this trade right from the source until the end conclusion, which is the sellers. So last year, we found out that up to 30 percent of the dogs being sold on these internet sites are from abroad.
Elizabeth: [00:35:17] Do you know how many dogs that is?
Gem: [00:35:18] If I'm honest, I don't. It's thousands of dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:35:27] What about the people in the UK, like the middlemen who are bringing the dogs here, the buyers right, who are then, you know, reselling these dogs for 3000 pounds? Do they get in trouble?
Gem: [00:35:37] I mean, the thing is with puppy smuggling and this is why so many potential criminal fraternity have got involved in it as the risks are very few. The rewards are massive. The rewards from. You're talking 10 times the value of buying a puppy for 300 euros, selling it for 3000 and on one consignment, you have five puppies, you're talking 12000, 12000, you're talking thousands of pounds, just one consignment. If you actually get caught, you will get a £100 fine maximum. So and generally, people don't get caught because we've demonstrated that the controls are so lax. So whereas these people were bringing us, we said we're bringing cigarettes or smuggling cigarettes or drugs or whatever now Puppies it's the lucrative, it's lucrative market.
Elizabeth: [00:36:36] It's amazing. So puppies are more lucrative in a lot of ways than drugs because the risk is less.
Gem: [00:36:43] But yeah, it's it's it's a big issue. Well. Well, it wasn't the big issue when we first started investigating in 2014, but it has become now one of the biggest talked about animal welfare issues. And I can say this because there was a government committee recently, and one MP said they received more letters on the puppy smuggling issue than any other issue. Not just animal welfare issue on any other,
Elizabeth: [00:37:11] Any other political issue?
Gem: [00:37:12] Any other political issue. So much so in a period of five years, six years, this has become something that might have been a problem to something that's become a real political hot potato. Earlier this year, the government actually put a bill through parliament called the Kept Animals Bill, and within that bill, they have introduced or they're planning to introduce that puppies cannot be important to the UK under the age of six months. This was a major task that we put in our first report in 2014. Now hopefully when the bill goes through parliament next year, that'll put an end to puppy smuggling.
Elizabeth: [00:37:55] That's awesome because no one is going to bring them in over six months old.
Gem: [00:37:58] Exactly because people want puppies, right people. The classified, when you go in the classified, you don't want a six month old puppy. That's another reason why these breeders were trying to get rid of puppies underage because they didn't want to keep her. They didn't want to feed them for an extra month. They wanted to get rid of them at 12 weeks or 10 weeks. They didn't want to get rid of them at 15 weeks
Elizabeth: [00:38:22] It's cheaper.
Gem: [00:38:23] Because it's more desirable to have a younger puppy and it's cheaper for them.
Elizabeth: [00:38:24] So I mean, in reality, one day, let's hope that no one can buy a dog for 3000 pounds or dollars or like at some point. Let's hope the world shifts there. I want to talk about this new project that you're working on about sound because you had told me about this. But also one of the things that made me really think about it more deeply is I heard you being interviewed and you were talking about an investigation you've done into angora rabbits and what they go through. I think the thing that made me shudder the most hearing you talk about it was not even me hearing any sounds. I just heard you speaking, but you are talking about the sounds that you heard during this investigation.
Gem: [00:39:08] I mean, that was an investigation into angora rabbits and, which, again, is for fur. That investigation uncovered and we put covert cameras overnight on this Angora Rabbit facility? How do you get angora? For wool you have to pluck live rabbits and you're basically tearing the skin of a live or the fur or plucking the fur off a live rabbit.
Elizabeth: [00:39:44] Why do they use live rabbits?
Gem: [00:39:46] Because you can carry on using it, because it grows how it grows back.
Elizabeth: [00:39:53] Oh, come on.
Gem: [00:39:54] So you've got a ready supply of fur and you've got a continuous supply of fur.
Elizabeth: [00:39:57] How do people still wear angora like people don't know this that people don't know.
Gem: [00:40:00] I mean, that people don't know, that's that's a lot of the issues that we come across is if you don't think about it when you wear angora, that the wool that you wear has been plucked of a live rabbit, you just don't think about it. I'm sure. I hope when people realize that they will actually change their behaviors, and that's part of why we do our investigations to change behaviors. But in this particular instance, what was so strange about this is the person plucking it had some classical music in the background. He was listening to the radio, a classical radio station. So you've got this classical music interspersed with the screams of a rabbit and It's a powerful sound, it's a powerful sound and. Yeah, it's shocking, and I kind of felt a lot of the investigations that I have done. Sound has played an important aspect of it to me when I used to do investigations, it might be because I'm hiding behind the camera when I'm filming, but I'm still hearing things. I can always hear the sound of a cow being slaughtered in front of me, the gasps when its neck is cut. When I've been into a broiler unit, a chicken unit, I can always hear the 20000 birds squawking, the industrial fans. I'm kind of fascinated by the sound, really? I've kind of decided to do a sound project because whilst I've been an activist filmmaker for the last 35 years and believed in the power of the image for social change, I kind of like to explore new avenues of how to in my own work in animal advocacy. I think Sound's got a great potential to reach new audiences as part of it is part of it as a reaction to social media. I kind of, I know I'm aware that I don't like to look at lots of visual imagery of animal suffering.
Elizabeth: [00:42:17] Even though you look at it, I mean, that's what you do for a living.
Gem: [00:42:21] That's probably why. That's probably that's probably why, because I spend my days in front of an edit suite watching horrific images. So when I'm on social media and I see a lot of investigative footage and I see a lot of animal suffering, and I find myself just clicking a like clicking a like, but not really engaging with that image, you know, so it's and I think. Whilst I've always believed in the power of the image, I'm wary that people aren't really engaging with it. So I thought let's use sound because it gives sound, gives you an opportunity to listen. It gives you a moment longer to engage with something because you can't just click on the sound for one second. That's it. You've actually got to invest in it. I think it's got a powerful opportunity to be quite transformative, and actually engage people. So I've come up with this idea of making a sound piece of human's relationship with animals and how we use animals for food, fashion, entertainment research and using my back catalog of twenty five years of video images or video tapes. But actually just using a lot of the sounds. So having conversations with farmers having, for example, that Angora Rabbit and what happens to an angora rabbit in, and try and basically use a different medium, I'm kind of experimenting. In a way I think there's a great potential for using sound to advance animal advocacy. As far as I'm aware, no one's really done it before.
Elizabeth: [00:44:13] The sound is powerful.
Gem: [00:44:15] And sound is powerful. And I've got a personal relationship with sound as well because I'm losing my hearing. You know, I've got hearing aids and I've suddenly become attuned to sound, even though I'm losing my hearing, I become more mindful of the sounds that I hear. And I'm kind of keen to explore those sounds because as a way of art, basically as a way of sonic art. So I will produce an album and it will have some visuals on the gatefold sleeve because I can't quite ever get rid of visuals. But predominantly is to explore how you know our relationship with animals through sound basically, right?
Elizabeth: [00:44:56] There's an intimacy with sound that it's just not. You just don't get it. It's not the same thing with visuals. But when I was a kid, we lived in Germany and I rode horses at this German barn and next door was a pig slaughterhouse. A little one like a local, I guess, I can't remember how often you would hear the screams of the pigs. It horrified me. But my story literally up until just this minute, listening to you talk about sound has always been when I was like maybe a year into this, I was walking into my biology class and they were dissecting pig fetuses that day. I looked at the teacher and I said, I can't do this. I'm a vegetarian and I will never eat meat again. After that, I became one. I wasn't one. But now hearing you talk about this? I'm wondering, was it really that moment of the pig fetus or was it the year or two years leading up to it hearing the pigs? Was it the sound of the pigs being slaughtered? And then I walk in and I sit right?
Gem: [00:45:58] It's an emotion, I think sound has got an incredible ability to evoke emotion.
Elizabeth: [00:46:04] I think art is one of the ways to do it. I absolutely think that.
Gem: [00:46:09] I think when I finally give up investigations, this is an area.
Elizabeth: [00:46:14] That is something you've thought about?
Gem: [00:46:19] Yeah, I mean, I'll be 60 in three years and I think you can't always personally continue with investigations. Well, I think you can.
Elizabeth: [00:46:29] But I mean, for people who don't know, most people don't make it two years as investigators. I don't know what the numbers are, but very few people make it past two years.
Gem: [00:46:37] Yeah, well, I've been doing this, I said since 1988. Investigations and yeah, I still see the value in it, but I do realize at a time it does take its toll and I'd like to explore new avenues to try and work in our advocacy because that's all I know is animal advocacy. That's all I've done. I'm not going to like give up investigations and then sit on a beach somewhere.
Elizabeth: [00:47:01] You know, I can't imagine.
Gem: [00:47:02] But I'd like to explore new ways of trying to engage with people. So this is like me putting my feet in the water, you know, tentative steps in the way in the water to see if it can have a reaction.
Elizabeth: [00:47:17] Gem Thank you so much for not only for today, and it's so nice to see you in person in the flesh, but for everything you have done for decades and decades to and the resilience of animals that you've saved and all the minds that you've changed. So thank you.
Gem: [00:47:35] Well, thank you Beth for inviting me back. It's been a real pleasure just to talk about this.
Elizabeth: [00:47:50] To learn more about Gems and to learn about Tracks Investigations, go to our website Speciesunite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram @Speciesunite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website speciesunite.com and click Become a member. I'd like to thank everyone as species unite, including Gary Cronuts and Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santino Poky, Bethany Jones and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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