WESTERN DAILY PRESS Saturday, March 2, 2024 27
COUNTRYSIDE COUNTRYSIDE
Make some noise to end to cruel trade
New legislation is required
to ban live animal
transport for slaughter,
writes Wiltshire farmer
Ro Collingborn
THE current situation of attacks
on shipping by the rebel Houthis in the Red Sea have had
many consequences, not least on
animal welfare.
Nearly 17,000 cattle and sheep
bound for Israel were held up at sea
for a month as the Red Sea crossing
was deemed too dangerous. After 15
days, they were ordered to return
back to Western Australia where,
incredibly, the exporter applied for a
licence to re-export them via Southern Africa. These were live animals,
many at the end of their lives, travelling from Australia for halal slaughter.
On these journeys, the cattle and
sheep are packed together in pens
on ships many stories high, having
already endured a long journey to
reach the port of embarkation. The
conditions once on board can only
be imagined. Australia is the world’s
largest exporter of live cattle, and if
caring people from other countries
knew what was going on, there
would be mass protests. Due to this
laissez faire attitude to animal welfare, Australia is a country the UK
should not have done a trade deal
with while they are routinely carrying out long-distance live exports.
Politicians should have woken up to
this before they did a deal.
Australia isn’t the only country
involved in this kind of transport,
though I have only just discovered
the extent.
This was highlighted when Cape
Town was recently enveloped in an
incident where a foul stench spread
over the city and was traced back to
a ship moored in the harbour. This
ship was packed with 19,000 live and
dying cattle and had come from Brazil. Its destination was Iraq and the
animals had already spent two and a
half weeks at sea with an obnoxious
build-up of faeces and resulting
ammonia and limited air circulation.
If the smell disgusted the inhabitants
of Cape Town, how much worse was
it for the tightly penned cattle?
Travel over such long distances on
ships barely equipped for animal
transport, generally old converted
cargo vessels, means that the animals have to endure rough seas, a
dirty environment, heat stress, injuries, shortages of food and water,
exhaustion and often death. Ritual
Halal slaughter awaits them at the
end of their long journey.
While Australia is the world’ s largest exporter of live cattle, Brazil is the
largest exporter of beef. It is also the
largest producer of Halal meat, and
uses pre-stunning. Putting the two
together, why can’t processed meat
be transported, rather than live animals?
With this in mind, on April 27,
2023 a Brazilian court in Sao Paulo
banned the export of live cattle from
all the country’s ports. Animals
International, which provided the
evidence for this judgement, said:
“Frightened animals had their eyes
and faces stabbed, their leg tendons
slashed and tails painfully twisted in
crude attempts to restrain them
before they were beheaded while
still conscious.”
Federal Judge Comes wrote: “Animals are not things. They are sentient living beings, that is individuals
who feel hunger, thirst, pain, cold,
anguish and fear.” The court also
acknowledged that “the maritime
transport of live animals for slaughter in other countries is carried out
in a cruel manner, as is the method
of slaughter to which they are subjected, different from what is foreseen and authorized by Brazilian
legislation”.
It added: “In addition there is the
cruelty inherent in the slaughter
method practised in Islamic countries of destination, which also does
not provide for the desensitization of
the animal to provide it with a painfree death.”
The ruling also questioned the
handling practices for transporting
the animals.
“The mere economic interest of
livestock companies exporting live
cattle cannot prevail, but the plethora of norms and principles that are
refractory to practice, protective of
animal dignity.” (Translated from the
Portuguese).
The court imposed a ban on the
export of live animals in all ports in
the country. However, this judgement was open to appeal and cannot
have been implemented yet, otherwise a ship crowded with cattle from
Brazil could not have docked in
Cape Town. Although Australia and
Brazil have been conducting live
animal transport on the biggest
scale, many other countries take
part, including our nearest neighbour Ireland, which congratulates
itself on the trade deals they have set
up with the Middle East.
The EU as a whole is also guilty in
engaging in this trade.
According to Four Paws International, more than one billion poultry, 49 million cattle, pigs, sheep and
goats are exported from the EU to
other countries every year, mainly by
sea. The ships used are often old,
converted cargo vessels with poor
ventilation and stability.
Recipient countries are mainly in
the Middle East – countries like
Libya, Jordan, Saudi, Lebanon,
Egypt, Eritrea where there may be no
animal welfare laws. The only solution to all this is national legislation
in the countries engaging in this
trade forbidding live animal transport by sea. It can be done – New
Zealand put such a ban into its laws
after a transport ship sank drowning
41 crew members and the 6,000 animals on board.
Currently the numbers of animals
and subsequent cruelty involved in
the trade around the world are still
immense. The longer the population
of these so-called ‘civilised’ countries to turn their backs, the longer
live animal transport for slaughter
will continue.
■ Ro Collingborn is a Wiltshire
dairy farmer and has been dairy
chairman of the Women’s Food
and Farming Union, on the Milk
Development Council, the Veterinary Products Committee, the
RSPCA Council and a Wiltshire
Wildlife Trust director.