Sir, - Compassion in World Farming recently sent an undercover investigator to The Lebanon. He filmed the brutal and inhumane treatment of EU cattle exported to Lebanon. For example, we see one of these bulls being slaughtered in a Beirut slaughterhouse. He is brought to the ground by having two men jump on his back. His throat is slit whilst he is fully conscious and, understandably, terrified. He remains conscious as he bleeds to death, and you can hear him trying to breathe through his severed throat.
In April, we sent a copy of this video to Agricultural Minister Walsh, who is responsible for the welfare of Irish farm animals. We asked him to take action immediately to alleviate this terrible suffering. We were, therefore, very shocked to see the Minister on television in the Oireachtas Report (9th June) admitting to TD Tony Gregory that he had not even watched our video. He appeared not even to know that the film footage included Irish cattle (on the video an Irish ear-tag is shown very visibly).
Minister Walsh, it seems, does not take farm animal welfare problems very seriously. He continually refuses to meet representatives of CIWF in person, and is apparently too busy to watch a video showing indisputable evidence of extreme cruelty to Irish animals. The video lasts just six minutes.
Minister Walsh can pretend there are no problems, but there are. These problems will keep resurfacing and each time will do further damage to the Irish agricultural industry. We suggest that it would be better to acknowledge the problems, talk to all the relevant people (including animal welfare groups) so that full information can be gathered, and then work together to find a real solution. In CIWF's view, this solution would be to slaughter the animals here and export meat, therefore ensuring good animal welfare standards and keeping jobs in the meat industry at home. - Yours, etc., Mary-Anne Bartlett, Director,
Compassion in World Farming, Ireland, Salmon Weir, Cork.