A 2018 report on EU live animal transport regulations listed numerous violations: rough handling, inappropriate vehicles, overcrowding, high temperatures, and failures to feed and water.
BIBI VAN DER ZEE: ‘The live animal export trade has ballooned in Europe while the commission fails to enforce its own regulations… In the past 20 years the EU has become one of the global centres for animal export. Within the bloc animals are travelling ever-longer distances, and a steadily increasing number are now being exported to non-EU countries… Over two decades the trade has mushroomed at an alarming pace. The EU’s rapporteur states that “long and very long journeys are increasing”. The value of live animal exports across and out of the EU has trebled from $1bn (£763m) in 2000 to $3bn in 2018, according to UN Comtrade data…
In 2005 the commission introduced regulations on animal transport that were far ahead of the rest of the world at the time… But in 2018 Jørn Dohrmann, a Danish MEP, was asked to check how well the 2005 regulations were being implemented. His findings were damning. The parliamentary resolution that followed his report listed rough handling, inappropriate vehicles, overcrowding, high temperatures, failures to feed and water, uneven reporting and inspections, widely varying punishments for infringements (10 times higher fines in some states than in others), and no centralised record of operators that perpetrate systematic breaches of regulations.
Dohrmann’s findings were just the latest of many investigations (including some by the commission) to find that regulations were being breached all over the place… On top of this the EU has expanded east to include countries that have big rural populations and farming sectors, but limited processing facilities. The EU stamp has made their animals even more attractive to buyers, and Romania, Slovakia, Latvia and the Czech Republic are among those that have built up useful export sectors.
The trend for fewer but bigger slaughterhouses is also a key factor. Last year Eurogroup for Animals looked into the sector as part of their call for a shift to a trade in meat and carcasses, rather than live animals. They found there were no centrally held figures – but that where numbers were available the pattern was clear. It’s a similar trend to the US – where the shift to larger slaughterhouses occurred much earlier. According to the Animal Welfare Institute, the number of slaughterhouses fell from nearly 8,000 in 1970 to just under 3,000 in 2018′. SOURCE…
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