Cornwall's 'Supercouncil' at it's finest.
For 40 years, Joy Bloor has looked after tortoises at her home in St Austell, Cornwall. She’s always done it for love, not money.
But now her sanctuary is being threatened with closure after council officials ruled that her 400 tortoises are ‘wild animals’. She has been told that she will be put out of business unless she applies for a zoo licence, which could cost £1,000.
Joy’s Lower Sticker Tortoise Garden has become a popular tourist attraction. Admission was free until the local council decided to make her pay business rates and she had to start charging £3 a head to cover costs.
Joy and Zeus the tortoise
That was just the beginning of the bureaucratic interference. The council is also insisting that all the tortoises should be tagged with electronic micro-chips. Presumably, officials are worried they might stage a mass break-out and start savaging the cattle on nearby farmland.
Someone at the Town Hall has been watching too many episodes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
If the tortoises did break for the border, it wouldn’t be that difficult rounding them up. The average walking speed of a tortoise is just 0.17 miles an hour. That would give even the slowest-witted council jobsworth ample time to apprehend them and return them to captivity. Some of the tortoises are more than 100 years old. They are hardly likely to go on the rampage across the Cornish countryside.
Joy said: ‘Even if they did escape, they wouldn’t get very far. Our tortoises are fully domesticated and follow us like little dogs. They come when we call them. They couldn’t possibly survive without humans to keep them alive.’
Micro-chipping them would not only be near impossible, because of the thickness of their leathery skin, it could also cause considerable distress and life-threatening trauma in some cases. And what if the tortoises simply retreated into their shells and refused to come out? Would they send for the Black and Decker drills?
The council argues that it has no option other than to force Joy to comply with the provisions of the Zoo Licensing Act 1981. Bailiffs have already visited the sanctuary and issued an enforcement order. She is now being threatened with prosecution.
This could become the latest cause celebre, once those Irish ‘travellers’ have finally left their illegal site in Essex.
No doubt Vanessa Redgrave is hot-footing it to Cornwall to save the St Austell 400. I have visions of the tortoises barricading themselves into their sanctuary, chaining themselves to concrete pillars, hoisting the United Nations flag and chanting: ‘Hell. No. We Won’t Go.’
Swampy and his mates are probably steaming down the A30 in a fleet of old Bedford vans to provide reinforcements, while riot police from neighbouring forces tool up and flood into Cornwall, ramping up the overtime. Let the Battle of Lower Sticker commence.
OK, so it’s easy to make fun of this, but for Joy it’s no laughing matter. Why should she have a lifetime of hard work and devotion ruined by block-headed bureaucrats?
All she’s doing is giving a home to domestic pets who either been abandoned or have lost their owners. Where’s harm?
The idea that she’s running some kind of zoo is beyond preposterous. Somehow I can’t see tortoises jumping through hoops or propelling themselves on the flying trapeze.
Most tortoises spend all day mooching around doing very little and hibernate from the end of September to the beginning of March. The sanctuary closes to the public for the winter. There’s not much call for paying three quid to watch tortoises sleep.
The Lower Sticker Tortoise Garden closes to visitors in the Winter while the tortoises are in hibernation
More to the point, think of the time and taxpayers’ money which has been wasted on this fatuous exercise — the officers’ reports, the site visits, the committee meetings, the legal opinions, the interminable discussions about whether tortoises are domestic pets or ‘wild animals’.
And this at a time when councils across the country are bleating about the ‘cuts’ to essential public services.
Actually, money is the motive force behind all this. First they slapped a massive bill for business rates on Joy, now they want her to buy an expensive zoo licence, call it a grand for cash.
The bold public servant responsible for this vindictive campaign is one Lance Kennedy, who styles himself ‘Cabinet Member’ of Cornwall Council and ‘Portfolio Holder for Community Safety and Protection.’
That grandiose title just about sums up everything which is wrong with the kind of individual who goes into local government these days.
He’s a jumped-up parish councillor, but has taken on the airs and graces of an international statesman. ‘Cabinet Member’ and ‘Portfolio Holder for Community Safety and Protection’. For heaven’s sake.
Protection from what, exactly — wild tortoises?
Just who does this pompous oaf think he is? When the local MP wrote appealing for clemency, Portfolio Holder Kennedy accused him of ‘inciting’ council officials to break the law.
Major Lance says he sympathises with Joy’s plight, but rules is rules: the refrain of intransigent tyrants down the ages. He is impervious to reason.
Bring on the Ninja Turtles.
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2040805/Joy-Bloors-Lower-Sticker-Tortoise-Garden-Beware-Cornish-Mutant-Ninja-Tortoises.html#ixzz1YtfrBqfO
