Independent UK: Exposed: The long, cruel road to the slaughterhouse

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Exposed: The long, cruel road to the slaughterhouse
See the campaigners' video as investigation reveals misery of global trade in animals


By Emily Dugan
Wednesday, 13 February 2008


Millions of animals are suffering unnecessarily at the hands of meat traders by enduring cruel, drawn-out journeys across the world to be slaughtered on arrival.

The alarming evidence of their suffering has been revealed after a secret investigation by 10 major animal charities, including the RSCPA, Compassion in World Farming and the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). In shocking footage, animals including horses, pigs, sheep and chickens are seen being transported thousands of miles across the world, when they could as easily be carried as meat.

Click below to see video footage of the animals on the Brazil to Lebanon route:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/exposed-the-long-cruel-road-to-the-slaughterhouse-781364.html


Thousands of animals die en route from disease, heat exhaustion, hunger and stress. The others escape the intolerable conditions only to confront, immediately, the butcher's knife.

The video is the product of the Handle With Care coalition, which has united animal charities to campaign against the abhorrent practice. The coalition, which is lobbying for change in the countries concerned, unveiled an international campaign yesterday in countries including Brazil, Australia, the US, Spain and Italy.

Across the world, more than a billion live animals are transported every week, many over long distances. The video reveals the horror of five particularly gruesome journeys. Australia, the world's largest exporter of live animals, sends more than four million live sheep every year to the Middle East. Shipped in cramped, poorly lit dens, the journey takes 32 days. Three sheep are crammed per square metre in the ship's hold, causing many of the animals to die of suffocation before encountering the slaughterhouse weeks later.

Those sheep that do arrive are fattened before being killed in accordance with Halal butchery laws. Eighty per cent of Australia's abattoirs are Halal-certified, raising the question of why they could not be slaughtered in Australia and transported frozen.

Many live exports are undertaken to make the fraudulent claim that the animals are home-reared. In Spain, thousands of horses are illegally crammed into lorries for a sweltering 46-hour journey to Italy. Canadian pigs, in conditions just as obscene, are condemned to a 4,500-mile journey by land and sea to Hawaii, so that, when slaughtered, their carcasses can be sold as "Island Produced Pork". For nine days, hundreds of pigs are crammed together in the dark, standing in their own excrement. Exhausted and hungry, they become ill, vomiting from motion sickness and waiting for long periods without food. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/exposed-the-long-cruel-road-to-the-slaughterhouse-781364.html