Former screen siren threatens to quit France for Russia, in protest not at tax hikes but at treatment of two circus elephants
Brigitte Bardot has threatened to follow Gérard Depardieu in asking for a Russian passport, in protest not at tax hikes but at the treatment of two circus elephants.
The animals, named Baby and Nepal, are owned by a touring circus and thought to be carrying tuberculosis. They were ordered to be put down by a court in Lyon, southern France, on Friday as a precautionary measure.
Bardot's threat on Friday comes a day after her fellow actor Depardieu caused a storm in France by becoming a Russian citizen in protest at high tax rates proposed by François Hollande's Socialist government, which he accuses of penalising success.
"If those in power are cowardly and impudent enough to kill the elephants … then I have decided I will ask for Russian nationality to get out of this country which has become nothing more than an animal cemetery," Bardot said in a statement.
Baby and Nepal's owners, Cirque Pinder, also said on Friday they would appeal to save the elephants, which first tested positive for tuberculosis in 2010 but have since been kept in a zoo in Lyon away from the general public.
Bardot, who first rose to fame as a screen siren in the 1956 Roger Vadim film And God Created Woman, has become an increasingly controversial figure with her outbursts on animal rights, but also on gay people, immigrants and the unemployed.
Since retiring from the screen in the 1970s she has become a semi-recluse, devoting herself to her Brigitte Bardot Foundation for animal rights.
She has also frequently taken aim at Eid al-Adha festivities, when Muslims ritually slaughter sheep. In 2008 she was convicted for a fifth time in 11 years for incitement to religious hatred over a 2006 tract on Eid al-Adha in which she said the Muslim community in France was "destroying our country by imposing its acts".
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/04/brigitte-bardot-gerard-depardieu-russian
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