Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Make some noise to end to cruel trade
New legislation is required to ban live animal transport for slaughter, writes Wiltshire farmer
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.
Australia is a country the UK should not have done a trade deal with while they are routinely carrying out longdistance live exports. Politicians should have woken up to this before they did a deal