Brussels, 1 December 2021 – Only days before the important vote in the Committee of Inquiry on the Protection of Animals during Transport (ANIT), global animal welfare organisation FOUR PAWS, alongside Eurogroup for Animals, highlights the need for legislative change to the way animals are transported. For 29 hours a billboard truck will drive through the European district of Brussels to highlight the duration that bovines & ovines can be legally transported in one journey. The action is also accompanied by speeches from a selection of cross-party MEPs taking their stand next to the NGOs. Passing key amendments in the ANIT will then push forward a vote in the EU Parliament in the Plenary, due to take on 17 January 2022, to fundamentally revise transport legislation and to put through an urgently needed ban of all long-distance transport of live animals via road and by sea.

Recently Germany, Netherlands and Luxembourg called for a ban of all long-distance exports in a joint statement. Earlier this year New Zealand announced to ban live animal transports by sea until 2023.

Sultana: “The Committee of inquiry on live animal transport has worked intensively for over a year now. Each hearing and field visit they conducted clearly showed that problems connected to live animal transport are systemic and we urgently need to change legislation. We count on the members of the ANIT to vote for a strong report and recommendations, to get one step closer to end the suffering of billions of animals.”

EU is the world’s biggest live animal exporter

In 2019 there was a total of over 220 billion bovines, pigs, poultry, and ovines exported from the EU to non-EU countries. This year alone there have been several fatal accidents with animals being transported. After a three-month ordeal through the Mediterranean Sea around 1.600 young bulls had been slaughtered in Spain after the transport ship Elbeik was not allowed to enter the Middle East due to feared bluetongue cases among the bulls on board. Almost 900 young bulls from the transport vessel Karim Allah experienced the same fate some weeks earlier and only recently 14 sheep died after the Phoenix III was being stuck off the Italian coast due to bad weather conditions.