Animals transported from CEE for slaughter in Italy can be subjected to abominable conditions By Sarah Roe At the Rajka border crossing between Hungary and Slovakia, they have built new facilities to cope with the rising tide of live animal transport to the West. A red unloading bay gleams in the autumn sunshine, and an extra lane on the road allows drivers with animals to the front of the queue. Each month, some 500 trucks, with up to 200 animals on board, pass through here, from as far afield as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, on their fateful journey to Italy. By the time they reach the Hungarian border, the last but one before the European Union, they will have travelled up to 750 miles, and many of the horses, cattle or sheep will be injured, dehydrated or dead. Cheap, plentiful and as healthy as any livestock to be found in the West, these animals are an attractive money-making resource for trucking companies and meat importers. The burning pyres of animals in British fields and live cargo restrictions throughout Western Europe did not put most people off their main source of protein. Instead, traders brought in lorry loads of animals from further East to satisfy demand. Live horses, rounded up from farms in Romania, Poland and the Baltics, are a particularly common sight. In recent years, up to 140,000 horses per year have been transported by road from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to the West. Italian companies bring in around 80 percent of the live horses, which are used in salami making and sold as an alternative to beef in many West European countries. “They can buy horses from about GBP 20 a piece and sell them in France and Italy for GBP 300 or 400 each, so they pack them in as much as they can,” says Ian Kelly at the International League for the Protection of Horses (ILPH), which conducts regular investigations into the trade. Horses are poor travellers and can quickly become dehydrated and stressed. Loaded together and tethered to the truck sides, the horses often kick and bite each other, since they are unused to such close proximity. On the frontier As another consignment pulls up behind him, Jeno Buchelt, chief veterinarian at the Rajka, Hungary, border station, describes an all-too-common situation: “Many times the horses are lying down in the truck, which can happen if an animal is sick, or if the driver brakes suddenly.” Horses that are lying down can be stepped on by other horses in the truck. Today’s cargo of sheep and calves are lucky. A cursory glance into the stuffy cages reveals no casualties from this Italian truck, which left Lithuania two days ago. International pressure from animal welfare campaigners and the EU, as well as the increased trade through Rajka, has encouraged Buchelt and his colleagues to upgrade their services. Along with facilities at the crossing, they are improving the local supply station, a short drive away. Special flexible water bowls, which can be pushed through truck bars, and extra ramps to aid feeding, have been ordered to speed up the service. Other EU accession countries, such as Poland and Slovenia, have also tightened their regulations. But according to Virag Kaufer, Hungarian coordinator for British-based Compassion in World Farming, many animals continue to suffer before they reach the modernised Hungarian border crossings. “The truck drivers’ attitude is that these animals are for slaughter, and they don’t care if they are exhausted or dehydrated,” she says. In April, Kaufer conducted an investigation at Redic, in southern Hungary, the last inspection stop for livestock drivers before Italy. A consignment of horses from Hungary, bound for Croatia, were already in a pitiful state, and the vet was nowhere in sight. “The horses had big wounds over their eyes and their legs; they were exhausted and dehydrated, and their urine was full of blood,” she remembers. She adds that the condition of the horses suggests they had travelled for longer than the four-hour journey through Hungary. “We suspect some of these animals were transported from other countries, which do not have a license to export to the EU.” Activists fight back Last year, Kaufer and her colleagues in other animal welfare groups throughout the region formed the East European Partnership for Farm Animals, a project funded through the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe that also involved groups from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary. The group organised an alternative lorry tour along the typical route for animal cargo, between Lithuania and Italy, to raise public awareness about the inhumane conditions of live transport. They also held a workshop in Poland for veterinarians throughout the CEE region, to discuss cooperation on animal welfare issues. It is the beginning of a long struggle. Although most countries are harmonised with EU legislation, which requires animal transport to stop for food, water and a rest every eight hours, or every 24 hours if trucks have additional supply facilities, in reality the laws are poorly enforced. Throughout the region, vets are overworked and underpaid, and drivers, who face pressure from employers, commonly use bribes to get the necessary stamp on their papers. Even in Hungary, where conditions have generally improved, in October this year a fully qualified vet received only GBP 150 per month. Truckers are under considerable pressure by their companies usually Italian ¡ª to get to destinations early, and supply stations cost them time and money. Route plans, which indicate to authorities how long a truck has been on the road, and if their animals need food and water, are apparently routinely forged. In the last few weeks, Buchelt studied some 300 route plans filed at Rajka border station and discovered that a large number of them indicate impossibly short journeys. The neatly-bound documents that he shows are hand-written and appear easy to fake. “They try to shorten the time on paper to avoid supplying the animals because it costs money for them,” he explains. Shocking conditions Vets should send trucks back if the rules have been broken, but this can be more cruel than allowing the truck to continue. “In a sense we are victims, because if the lorries start in Poland, for example, it actually causes more suffering of the animals to turn them back to their departure place,” admits Tibor Kaizinger, director for the department for border control at the Hungarian Customs and Finance Guard. Kaizinger was so shocked at the conditions he found at Redic two years ago that he instructed all border guards to check that drivers visit food and water supply stations in Hungary. But until border staff across the region begin to adopt the same attitude, it is almost impossible to prevent the maltreatment. Sadly, the problem is not confined to CEE. In 1998, around 700,000 lambs and sheep were exported from the UK for slaughter in continental abattoirs. Each year, around 500,000 live cattle are exported from the European Union, mainly Germany and Ireland, to the Middle East and North Africa. Animal welfare investigators at CIWF say some trucks travel for over 30 hours without a break. According to Kaufer, things could improve if drivers were paid for the quality of the live meat they deliver, rather than the number of animals transported. Another solution, touted by the ILPH, is to build slaughterhouses in a focal point like Hungary, or better still, the countries of origin, to deal with the trade. “We’re trying to get people to realize that the animals can be slaughtered, frozen and transported, and the same product comes out in the end,” says Kelly at the ILPH. But before such steps can be taken, campaigners will have to convince West Europeans that it is unnecessary and cruel to receive their meat live. Antal Nemeth, chief of the animal health and food control department at the Ministry of Agriculture and Regional Development in Budapest, is skeptical about lobbying efforts: "This is not an animal welfare or an animal health problem, but an economic issue, because slaughterhouse owners, spedition owners and distributors all have interests in this."

Photo: Lars-Eric Sipos SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER: Scenes from live animal checkpoints in Hungary include a load of sheep, upper left, a caged horse, upper right, and the errant hoof of a sheep in the back of a crowded truck, immediately above. These animals can travel for several days in tight conditions, and if drivers are not conscientious, their live cargo may go without adequate food or water.