[Animals]Amazing Animals Jim Clubb Heythrop Zoological Gardens

[Black CaT]

“Amazing Animals” is the largest privately-owned collection of exotic animals in the UK, and one of the country’s only licensed providers of exotic wildlife for commercials, TV, movies, and advertisements. Their facility has the nice-sounding name of “Heythrop Zoological Gardens” but, except for six “open days” per year, it is not open to the public and does not have to comply with zoo laws and regulations.

Amazing  Animals is owned and directed by Jim Clubb. Clubb is a longtime circus lion trainer, chairman of the Association of Circus Proprietors of Great Britain (ACP) and is married to Sally Chipperfield, of the infamous Chipperfield circus dynasty. Clubb got his start training animals while working for the Chipperfields and was once part-owner and managing director of Clubb-Chipperfield, his own company that shared premises with Chipperfield’s circus in 1998.

Clubb’s close ties with the Chipperfields are very concerning because while he was working with them, the directors of Chipperfield Enterprises were convicted of animal cruelty in 1999 after undercover investigations by Animal Defenders International revealed that they routinely used severe physical abuse  to “train” their circus animals. ADI obtained footage of the Chipperfields beating lions and tigers with metal crowbars and pipes, whipping a sick elephant, beating camels with broom handles, and mercilessly thrashing a baby chimpanzee named Trudy with a riding crop while taunting the crying animal.

The Chipperfield’s “litany of crimes against animals” were so shocking that the circus was shut down and the horrific footage convinced the UK government to ban the use of wild animals in circus acts nationwide (a ban which started in 2015).

Despite the ban and the folding of the circus, Clubb continues to use his Amazing Animals business to train and sell big cats to circuses in other countries, and he makes his cats give circus-like “performances” to guests during the six days per year his facility is open to the public — if it were open any longer than that, it would have to be regulated like a zoo. This 2010 blog post by Clubb includes photos of him wielding long sticks to train a batch of white lions in a dark, dungeon-like room.

The lions were shipped to a circus in Japan once their training was complete, where one of them was attacked by other circus lions and was so stressed his mane fell out. The circus folk in the comments pointed out that the sticks are called “forks” and “are for lifting an animal off of another animal or used to pin an animal down.”

In 2012, there was national outrage after an investigation by the Captive Animals’ Protection Society and LionAid revealed that these lions were born at the West Midlands Safari Park, which claimed to be a reputable zoo breeding the white lions for “conservation”. An article about this has been reproduced below. It fails to mention that the West Midlands Safari Park was founded by Jimmy Chipperfield (a relative of Clubb’s wife), that the current director of the Park is a former circus performer,  and that Clubb’s lion act had previously performed at the Kinoshita circus where the cubs were sent. LionAid has more details about the circus connections in this case.

Four rare white lion cubs born in a UK safari park have been sent to perform in a Japanese circus after being trained in a British facility.

The cubs were born at West Midlands Safari Park, in Bewdley, Worcester, in 2008 but will spend their adult lives entertaining crowds in the Far East.

Animal rights charities have expressed outrage after discovering they were flown 6,000 miles to Japan’s Circus Kinoshita.

The safari park has been criticised for providing four rare white lion cubs to a businessman who provided them to a Japanese circus.

It is understood one of the lions has since moved to a zoo in western Japan after it developed a nervous condition which caused its mane to fall out.

https://911animalabuse.com/amazing-animals-jim-clubb-heythrop-zoological-gardens/