Animal welfare improvements at Dutch pig slaughterhouse

Pigs are very sensitive to unfamiliar and abrupt noises. This is because - compared to us humans - they are not very good at locating where the noise comes from. Pigs can also hear sounds that we cannot hear (ultra sound). There is often a lot of loud noise inside slaughterhouses, caused by creaking and banging  metal gates. This can lead to great panic among the pigs, something we often see when we visit pig slaughterhouses. Eyes on Animals advised Ivo Hendriksen slaughterhouse, a plant in The Netherlands that slaughters mainly piglets, to put rubber between the fence and gates, which they did. This simple adjustment lead to a significant reduction of noise and as a result of that, the pigs are less stressed. In addition, the slaughterhouse also placed a big sliding door to make sure that the pigs are protected from drafts when they are in the waiting pens. These concrete changes make a difference at reducing fright and discomfort. Read more

Director of Eyes on Animals has regular column in Dutch Farmer’s Magazine

Eyes on Animals director was offered to write a column on a regular basis in a professional Dutch agricultural magazine called ‘Boerderij’ (Dutch for ‘Farm’). This magazine has a circulation of 50.000 copies and is read by farmers, transport companies and people working in the meat industry. This makes it a perfect medium for us to present our views and get best-practices spread and bad practices exposed! See one of the columns below. Read more columns (one can sign up for free).

Animal-Transport regulation also valid outside EU

More than once, Eyes on Animals has filed a complaint against livestock transport companies for violating the European animal protection during transport regulation once they had crossed the EU border into Turkey. The authorities however refused to intervene because they believed that the regulation did not apply outside of the EU. Of course we did not agree with this and refused to reconcile to this situation. On April 23rd, 2015 the EU Court of Justice decided that indeed European transport companies still need to obey EU regulations after exiting the European Union! This means that the authorities responsible for enforcing these regulations no longer have an excuse to justify not taking action. Read more

Eyes on Animals watches over the welfare of farm animals. We cannot do this work without financial help. Please, do support us with a donation.

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