Dear friends and friends,

We travelled a lot these past couple of  months to inspect slaughterhouses and to give training courses. We have also been creating new informative pages for our website. Here is a brief update of our activities:

Inspection of a pig and poultry slaughterhouse in Germany

A few weeks ago we visited a pig and poultry slaughterhouse in Germany. The raceway to the stunner was completely unique, unlike others we have seen. It was circle shaped, similar to Dr. Temple Grandin´s recommendations, and significantly reduced stress for pigs when they were moved through it. The handling was much calmer and gentler than we have seen in other plants. This circular design can be of great importance for other slaughterhouses, where moving the animals from a group to single-file often causes panic and sometimes injuries. Read more. Chickens and turkeys were shackled upside down while still conscious and rendered unconscious via passing an electric water bath, as they are in most smaller or older poultry plants. Since this causes a lot of pain and stress, we are going to look for alternatives systems together with the slaughterhouse. The good news is that the managers of this plant are really serious about doing things better. They already put a lot of effort into reducing stress and suffering during the slaughter of pigs, now together with them, we are going to make sure that the suffering of poultry will be decreased too. To be continued!

Eyes on Animals in Egypt

Eyes on Animals has just returned from a 5-day visit to Egypt. We had been contacted by an Egyptian businessman who asked for our help with reducing animal-suffering at Egyptian slaughterhouses near Cairo. We decided it was an opportunity to not miss, but soon ascertained that Egyptian slaughterhouses are so primitive that demolishing and rebuilding is the only option. We will remain available for advice when the businessman has convinced the Egyptian authorities to replace the current slaughterhouses.
Read more

Poultry transport in violation

Recently a concerned truck driver sent us a video of a poultry-truck from the Blom company on highway A2. The poultry-truck did not have a tarp, meaning the chickens did not have any protection against the icy wind. To try and stay warm, the chickens had all moved away from the outer sides. Some animals were stuck on their backs and many were dead. We forwarded our complaint to the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). Read more

Expansion of the EonA website – welfare-tips for the industry

During our work we are often confronted with animals suffering as a result of insufficient (practical) knowledge. Pigs, which are group animals, are often moved individually at slaughterhouses. Sometimes the raceway appears to be a dead end, causing animals to panic when moved forward. In many cases, the design of the livestock trucks also cause animal suffering. For example animals become trapped and trampled because of wrongly-designed partitions and animals become dehydrated and weak because of drinking-systems not being suitable to the physiology of specie on board. By better observing the animals a lot of animal- suffering can be prevented. We are therefore working very hard on writing down our knowledge and experience and publishing new pages on our website, under the new category ‘Industry tips’. This way we can keep the industry alert about the problems we observe in the field and the best-practices needed to solve them.

Good initiative: foster mothers for calves

Fortunately there are also wonderful initiatives coming from the industry too. We recently visited veal farmer Jacob Beeker. Jacob buys the unwanted calves from a Jersey dairy farm. Normally these small calves are killed after birth because they are not profitable. Jacob however raises them in a large barn with thick straw-bedding. In spring and summer they have  access to a large field to graze on. And what is even more special: the calves are looked after and suckled by foster cows. Often the livestock industry is a vicious circle of one problem leading to another, with consumers around the world taking advantage of the cheap meat and dairy options. But innovative and caring farmers like Jacob exist, who put a stop to the vicious circle and create a more gentle world for animals within the industry. Read more

Furthermore…

We are working on improving the way poultry are caught and loaded for transport, we are in the midst of organizing a workshop on how to improve calf-welfare for dairy farmers, we are in contact with retailers to sell calf-friendly milk and we have been again in Turkey to reduce suffering at Turkish slaughterhouses and to promote stunning. On top of this, we gave several training-courses to Hungarian livestock truck-drivers, Polish police officers and to the Dutch authorities (NVWA and RDW) on truck-design.

Will you help us continue to further decrease the suffering of farm animals? Please donate so that we can continue inspecting and improving livestock transports, farms and slaughterhouses.