![]() They also approve the loading of animals onto the ships. In the EU, veterinary inspectors at the ports check vessels to make sure they’re fit for animal transport. The ship’s owner, Ibrahim Maritime Ltd., couldn’t be reached after several phone attempts and didn’t respond to text messages through a representative in Lebanon. The ordeal of the cattle on the Elbeik was so horrific that Spain’s agriculture ministry referred the case to prosecutors at the national court. In 2019, 14,000 sheep drowned in a shipping accident in a Romanian port, a livestock carrier caught fire while berthed in Greece, and another ran aground near Turkey. Last year, nearly 6,000 cattle and more than 40 crew members died when their ship lost an engine and sank off the coast of Japan. This spring, in addition to the cattle on the Elbeik, another 800 bulls on a ship to Turkey also had to be put down. Meanwhile, thousands of livestock have been lost at sea. “We look if the ship is overloaded because that affects seaworthiness, but it makes no difference if it’s 10,000 containers or 10,000 animals.” ![]() “We don’t look at the cargo or animal welfare,” said Maarten Vlag, secretary of the Paris maritime coalition that oversees ports from the U.K. Prices for live cattle from Australia are at record highs.Įven in normal times, live animals are considered cargo, and a ship full of sheep is more or less treated the same as one full of wool sweaters as far as most port authorities and shipping industry regulators are concerned. The robust market for halal meat among devout Muslims also means demand has spiked in recent years. But as consumers in countries like China and Vietnam have grown wealthier, they’ve added more meat and dairy to their diets, amping up demand for breedstock and dairy animals. Some 39 million tons of meat were exported globally in 2019, most of it slaughtered, packaged and frozen or chilled beforehand - a process that’s more lucrative for meat producers and avoids the health and safety issues of transporting live animals. Public health is at risk if animals are transported in conditions where germs and bacteria can flourish.” “Ship transports completely fall outside of any regulations or animal-welfare standards. “When it comes to animal welfare, transport by sea is a big black hole,” said Thomas Waitz, an organic farmer from Austria who is a European parliamentary representative on a committee charged with updating the rules for the cross-border shipping of animals. With new sensitivity to risks that diseased animals can pose to humans, a growing number of countries are limiting or phasing out the practice altogether. Animals have been stuck in transit far longer than expected and safety inspections have been dramatically curtailed. The pandemic has worsened conditions for the roughly 2 billion cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens that are exported each year, and epidemiologists have joined the calls for reform. The Elbeik has become Exhibit A in the mounting case to ban the controversial, $18 billion cross-border trade in live animals.
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