LAST year, over a million sheep add half a million cattle left Britain鈥檚 shores, destined eventually for the slaughterhouses and butcher鈥檚 shops of the Continent where fresh meat fetches premium prices. From Shoreham to Brightlingsea, highly visible protests by animal welfare campaigners have helped to push the 拢200 million trade down by around 30 per cent this year, according to the Meat and Livestock Commission. But while both the protests and the exports continue, the fundamental question has yet to be answered 鈥� do long voyages across Europe鈥檚 frontiers harm livestock?
Answering this basic question is becoming even more urgent as legislators in Europe plan new laws to control journeys. British rules state that when travelling for more than 15 hours to an abattoir, truck drivers should break their journey so that the animals can be rested, fed and watered. European Commission laws allow 24-hour journeys, and the commission is planning amendments that would introduce mandatory refreshment breaks at different intervals for different animals. The RSPCA, however, says that this does not go far enough. Allowing journeys in stages, it says, helps drivers to ignore the rules. The society wants to stamp out the transport of livestock over long distances altogether and make the rules easier to police by strictly limiting travelling times to 8 hours 鈥� any truck which is found more than 8 hours drive away from the farm of origin would be clearly in breach of the legislation.
Signs of tension
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The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has funded research into the effects of journey lengths. The study was intended to pinpoint whether transportation is necessarily harmful to animals, and if it is, whether the harmful effects can be minimised by restricting the duration of travel. Toby Knowles and Paul Warriss, from the department of clinical veterinary science at Bristol Veterinary School, looked at the levels of stress that cattle and sheep suffer during journeys of different length.
In planning their research, Knowles and Warriss faced the usual problem of how to assess the welfare of an animal. Finding objective measures is tricky enough in humans because individual responses vary so enormously. With an animal, the visible signs of stress are much harder to read. And livestock of different species, age and experiences may vary considerably in their physiological responses to particular situations.
Loading stress
Knowles and Warriss targeted three areas: emotional stress, physical stress and the effects of hunger and thirst. They measured heart rate and levels of cortisol, a chemical released into the blood in stressful situations, as well-established indicators of emotional stress. Physical stress was measured mainly through the concentrations of an enzyme, creatine phosphokinase (CPK), in the blood. The enzyme is released from muscle cells in response to changes in the permeability of the cell membrane resulting from muscle damage or tiredness. The effects of hunger and dehydration were assessed from the loss of weight, and factors such as increased urea and albumin concentrations in the blood.
The results, to be published soon in The Veterinary Record, confirm the feeling among researchers that the most stressful experience that a farm animal faces is during loading. Animals unused to contact with humans will be forced up ramps into an alien environment where they have the additional stress of mixing with other, unfamiliar livestock. Knowles and Warriss found that during loading the heart rate of sheep rose from around 90 to around 135 beats per minute on average. So even if journey breaks are observed, says Knowles, unloading and loading animals to feed them may cause more stress than continuing for the current maximum journey times.
During transport, Knowles says, sheep appear better able to cope than other farm species. While their heart rates and cortisol levels remained at high levels for about an hour and a half, they then gradually fell, and after nine hours they had adapted to the new situation. The sheep were able to lie down in the truck and judging from CPK levels, they did not appear to be physically stressed. Their heart rates fell to the typical 60 beats per minute for a sheep at rest.
This result is supported by a study published by Knowles last year. He had looked at the number of sheep which died, due to pre-existing causes exacerbated by stress, en route to a large slaughterhouse in southern England or in the slaughterhouse lairage where they are rested after the journey. Although death is obviously the most extreme outcome of poor welfare, he says, the results did give a 鈥渞ough but unambiguous鈥� measure of the effects of the journey. The sheep coped reasonably well with the stress. Of the 588 707 studied, 107 were dead after the journey, giving a mortality rate of 0.018 per cent 鈥� only one-tenth of the rate for broiler chickens, determined by Warriss in 1992.
Warriss has shown that cattle fare less well. Unlike sheep, cattle do not lie down and become tired more quickly. But their emotional response is similar. Cortisol levels increase during loading, then start to fall as the animals become used to their new surroundings. On balance, Warriss doubts that reducing the journey time for cattle from 15 hours down to, say 10 hours, would bring about much improvement in welfare. Even so, he says that it would be undesirable to extend the limit much beyond 15 hours because of the effects of fatigue, hunger and thirst.
In a separate study, Warriss also looked at the welfare of pigs during transport. Pigs rarely have to suffer long journeys, because most are sent directly from the farm to the nearest slaughterhouse. But during the relatively short journeys to slaughterhouses, pigs are four times more likely to die than sheep.
This is partly due to temperature sensitivity, Warriss believes. If the temperature in the truck rises above 16 掳C, they begin to suffer from heat stress. 鈥淭he problem seems to be that pigs do not have very effective hearts for their size and in stressful episodes the heart is not able to cope,鈥� he explains. Another factor is genetic 鈥� many pig breeds carry the halothane gene which causes an abnormal response to environmental stress, known as malignant hyperthermia.
Air alternative
It is clear that the stress of being transported by road varies dramatically from animal to animal. But would the same problems arise with air transport? Late last year, when some British ferry companies and port owners bowed to public pressure and turned down live animal cargoes, air transport became a viable option for some dealers.
Little research has been done in the area because this mode of transport is so new. However, Des Leadon, head of the clinical pathology unit at the Irish Equine Centre in Johnstown, County Kildare, has looked at the effects on 112 thoroughbred racehorses during flights from England to Australia. These horses are especially well cared for during flights, with ample food, water and supervision. But Leadon says that the results mirror the findings of Warriss and Knowles for cattle and sheep in journeys by road. Horses are notoriously nervous travellers, but appear to settle down after the disturbance of loading and adapt well to their new situation.
Leadon suggests that the significance of heart rate and cortisol level increases in animals is overstated. These natural responses have evolved to prepare animals for 鈥渇ight or flight鈥�, in response to danger or new surroundings. Why should they be harmful? This is a subjective question that science will be unable to answer, Knowles admits. In the end, 鈥渢he final judgment of good or bad welfare can never be wholly objective,鈥� he says.
Unenforceable rules
And even if researchers do produce a consensus on how to assess the welfare of animals while they are being transported, and they are translated into legislation, experience suggests that enforcing it will be near impossible. The European Commission admits that current transport rules are 鈥渞arely, if ever, respected鈥�. It says it has neither the staff nor funding to police the trade.
And what about the huge numbers of animals entering the European Union from the thriving trade in cheap animals from eastern Europe, where there are no restrictions? Livestock usually travel in far worse conditions 鈥� in overcrowded trucks without food and water 鈥� than would be allowed under current EU legislation, and are often found to be unfit for further travel or even consumption when they arrive at their destination.
Aware that stricter regulations could be ineffective, John Webster, head of the Bristol Veterinary School, suggests an alternative approach 鈥� a financial incentive to kill the trade at its source. The only sure way of stopping the trade is to apply economic pressure in the opposite direction, he reasons. Farmers rely heavily on subsidies from the EU and these should only be paid for animals sent to the nearest available abattoir. 鈥淭he carrot of imaginatively used subsidies might work where the legislative stick has failed, @ he says.