Robert B Fishman
The "Animal Health Law" (AHL) has been in force in the EU since the end of April 2021. In this Regulation 2016/429, the EU has summarized numerous regulations on animal health and tightened some provisions on disease prevention. The enthusiasm for environmental and nature conservation organizations is limited.
"The Animal Health Law (AHL) only serves to make the unspeakable trade in livestock and pets, reptiles and aquatic animals possible," complains the agricultural scientist Edmund Haferbeck, for example. He heads the animal welfare organization PETA the Legal and Science Department. Nevertheless, like other animal rights activists, he hopes for further restrictions on the trade in live animals, especially puppies. For a better one animal welfare.
Breeders and dealers offer cheap puppies on eBay and their own websites. Many of these animals are sick or have behavioral disorders. "Dogs brought into the country illegally from 'dog factories', mostly in Eastern Europe, are sold here to blue-eyed interested parties as supposed 'bargains'," reports the German Animal Welfare Association DTB. However, the animals are often sick, the necessary vaccinations are missing and the puppies are not socialized due to the early separation from their mother.
The DTB hopes for improvement according to Articles 108 and 109 of the Animal Health Act. They allow the EU Commission to lay down rules for the registration and identification of pets.
The Austrian branch of the animal welfare organization "4paws"Praises the approach, but calls for" EU-wide identification and registration of pets in interconnected databases ". So far there is only one such mandatory electronic pet register in Ireland. Pet owners across Europe can already search for their lost cat or dog by entering the ID number of their animal at europetnet.com. To do this, the animal needs a corresponding microchip as small as a grain of rice.
PeTA puts the turnover with pets in Germany alone at five billion euros per year. Where “animals are traded and poorly kept”, PeTA employee Edmund Haferbeck always sees the risk of people becoming infected with communicable diseases. He cites the trade in living reptiles as an example. Every third Salmonella infection in small children can be traced back to the handling of exotic animals, PeTA cites a study by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). And: "Up to 70 percent of sensitive animals die from stress, insufficient supplies or transport-related injuries before they are even put on the market."
And you have long since thought for yourself: In fact, animals transmit numerous infectious diseases to humans. The most recent example of such zoonoses are, in addition to HIV (AIDS pathogens) and Ebola, the Sars-COV2 viruses, which cause Covid-19 (Corona).
The return of the epidemics
For this reason alone, the Animal Health Act focuses on disease control. While the new rules for pets will not apply until 2026, the EU regulation is already tightening the provisions for "farm animals" in agriculture. Veterinarians have to check the farms more often and more strictly than before.
The list of notifiable diseases now also includes multi-resistant germs, against which most antibiotics are no longer effective. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned of the consequences of the unhindered spread of antibiotic-resistant germs: If they spread as they did before, they would kill 2050 million people in Europe, North America and Australia alone by 2,4. There are no antidotes. Many of these germs arise in factory farms where pigs, cattle, chickens or turkeys are packed together. Often whole stocks are given antibiotics here if only one animal has become sick. The drugs reach people via sewage and meat.
Despite Animal Health Act - The animal transports continue.
Last winter, two Spanish ships with more than 2.500 cattle on board wandered across the Mediterranean for weeks. No port wanted the ships to enter. Experts suspected that the animals were infected with bluetongue. Environmental organizations such as the German Animal Welfare Association document these and many other international animal transports over long distances on their websites. Activists from the Animal Welfare Foundation (Foundation for Animal Welfare) in Freiburg, in southern Germany, personally accompany animal transports in order to document the misery of cattle, sheep and other "farm animals" on ships and trucks. The reports spoil the appetite even of staunch meat eaters.
An example: March 25, 2021. For three torturous months there were almost 1.800 young bulls on board the animal transport ship Elbeik. Almost 200 animals did not survive the transport. Because the surviving 1.600 bulls are no longer fit for transport, according to the veterinary investigation report, they should all be killed in an emergency. As of today, the Spanish official veterinarians have been trying to eliminate the surviving young bulls in a chord. 300 animals per day. Unloaded to be killed and then disposed of in containers like rubbish.
29 hours straight on a truck
The European Animal Transport Regulation has been in force since 2007 and was intended to prevent such abuses. Animal transports to countries outside the EU are prohibited when the temperature is more than 30 degrees in the shade. Young animals may be transported for up to 18 hours, pigs and horses for up to 24 and cattle for up to 29 hours, provided they are then unloaded for a rest break of 24 hours. Within the European Union (EU), official veterinarians must check the animals' fitness for transport.
"Most of the transport companies do not adhere to the regulations," reports Frigga Wirths. The veterinarian and agricultural scientist deals with the topic for the German Animal Welfare Association. A check at the Bulgarian-Turkish border showed that between summer 2017 and summer 2018, 210 out of 184 animal transports took place in temperatures of more than 30 degrees.
The EU regulation in 2005 was a compromise. It only lays down the rules that the EU states could agree on. Since then, tightening has been discussed again and again. A committee of inquiry of the European Commission is currently dealing with it, but it has not been moving for 15 years.
Calves that nobody wants
The problems lie deeper: The EU is one of the largest milk producers in the world. In order for modern high-performance cows to give as much milk as possible, they have to give birth to a calf approximately every year. Only about a third of the cattle born in Europe stay alive to later replace their mothers in the milking parlor. Most of the rest is slaughtered or exported. Because Europe produces too much meat, prices are falling. According to the Animal Welfare Foundation, a calf brings in between eight and 150 euros, depending on its breed, gender and country. You get rid of the animals in distant countries.
According to the EU Animal Transport Regulation, young calves can be transported eight hours at a time for ten days, even though they still need their mothers' milk for their nutrition. Of course, you won't get them on the way.
Transports to Central Asia
Animal transports go to North Africa, the Middle East and as far as Central Asia. Trucks drive the cattle through Russia to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. According to European law, the freight forwarders would have to unload and take care of the animals en route. But the stations provided for this often only exist on paper. The Hessian animal welfare officer Madeleine Martin visited alleged unloading and supply points in Russia in the summer of 2019. The papers of a transport show one in the village of Medyn. “There was an office building there,” reports Martin on Deutschlandfunk. "An animal has certainly never been unloaded there." She had similar experiences at other alleged supply stations. According to the report on Deutschlandfunk, the German federal-state working group, which was supposed to take care of animal transport, “has not met since 2009”. Madelaine Martin's report on the situation in Russia "has so far been ignored".
In the EU, too, animals are not doing much better on transport. "Trucks full of live animals stand for days at borders and ferry ports," reports Frigga Wirths from the Animal Welfare Association. Many freight forwarders used cheap, Eastern European drivers and packed their trucks as full as possible. To reduce the weight of the load, they are taking too little water and food with them. There are hardly any controls.
Despite the Animal Health Act: 90 hours to Morocco
At the beginning of May, several media reported about an animal transport over 3.000 kilometers from Germany to Morocco. The journey lasted more than 90 hours. The reason for the transport was allegedly that the bulls were needed there to set up a breeding station.
The Animal Welfare Association does not believe that Morocco wants to set up a dairy industry. Hesse's animal welfare officer Madeleine Martin also asks why people don't export meat or bull sperm instead of live animals. Your answer: "The exports are made because our agriculture has to get rid of the animals, because we have had a world market agricultural policy - guided by politics - for many, many years." Veterinarian Frigga Wirths agrees. In addition, it is actually cheaper to cart live animals to North Africa or Central Asia than to transport frozen meat over long distances.
Minister calls for bans
Lower Saxony's Agriculture Minister Barbara Otte-Kinast tried this spring to ban the transport of 270 pregnant cattle to Morocco. Their reason: The German animal welfare standards could not be complied with in the heat of North Africa and the technical conditions there. But the Oldenburg Administrative Court lifted the ban. The minister “regrets” this decision and, like the Tierschutzbund and Animal Welfare, calls for “a nationwide ban on the transport of animals to third countries in which compliance with animal welfare is not guaranteed - the faster the better!”
In fact, a legal opinion on behalf of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia comes to the conclusion that the German legislator can ban animal transports to non-EU states if the standards of the German animal protection law are not complied with there.
Solution: a vegan society
In view of the prevailing climate crisis, it is not only the Animal Welfare Association that sees a simpler solution: “We are going to be a vegan society.” After all, around a fifth to a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, a very large part of which comes from animal husbandry. Farmers grow animal feed on more than 70 percent of the world's agricultural land.
Photo / Video: Shutterstock.
