The horse meat trade

Horse meat: Dark dealings of Europe's cruellest trade

Horses sold for meat at a night-time fair in Poland are being transported across Europe in a trade that has suspected links to organised crime.

The Telegraph,

24 January, 2013

It is minus 6C and the tea is laced with vodka. Handfuls of notes are being carefully counted and Piotr is leaving with 7,000 zloty – about £1,400 – for his old mare.

He is not alone. Everywhere on the frozen, snow-covered field, groups of men are looking at horses and haggling over their price.

Welcome to Skaryszew: the place where horses arrive from Polish farms and leave in lorries for fattening and slaughter.

Men have been selling horses here on the first Monday of Lent since 1432.

But now those horses could even end up in the British food chain, because Skaryszew, 75 miles from Warsaw, is the start of a long, and sometimes obscure chain that has been blamed for horse meat being found masquerading as beef in British shops and wholesalers.

^{(David Rose for the Telegraph)}

From Skaryszew, the horses will travel as far afield as Italy to be slaughtered. Who profits from the trade, and what checks to ensure the horses are safe to eat are, at best, questionable.

For Piotr, however, it has been a good trip. The farmer has travelled two hours from his village, Cisów, to sell his mare, expecting to get 5,000 zloty for the animal – a large amount in a country where the average agricultural worker’s annual wage is just under £1,200 a year.

His entrance to the fair at 1am is hampered by a group of Polish animal rights protesters who jump in front of his truck, demanding that their vets examine his horses before he can continue.

Security staff also check that he has the correct paperwork, including passports, for both horses he is transporting.

“She can’t get pregnant so I want to get rid of her,” he says. He has other horses, he adds, enough that the mare does not have a name.

Speaking from the cab of his truck, which is littered with beer cans, he says that the other horse belongs to a friend who will be arriving later.

Although his documents are checked animal welfare campaigners, who are here to investigate the trade, say that the passport system – which exists to follow European law and is therefore almost the same as the one in Britain – is open to abuse.

^{Handfuls of notes are being carefully counted (David Rose for the Telegraph)}

The passports say whether the horses are fit for human consumption and are issued by the Polish Horse Breeders Association at 18 regional offices, but there are concerns that the documents can be forged, or the details on genuine ones falsified by unscrupulous vets – concerns that have already been raised about the British scheme.

There are no government inspectors at Skaryszew, so when security staff check passports, it is no guarantee of their authenticity.

Piotr parks in a row of trucks, all with horses tethered to the back. This is where the deals are struck.

A black stallion rears up, to the excitement of the crowd and its boisterous – and drunk – owner, Zbyszek.

“It’s the best horse in the village,” he proclaims, pulling on its harness to bring it under control, but he does not care if it gets sold for meat or breeding. “I just want to get rid of it, I have too many horses,” he says.

Close by are six or seven men in leather jackets and black flat caps. This is how buyers and sellers meet, smoking cigarettes and drinking their vodka-laced tea.

One shines his torch on a horse, tethered to a truck, before slapping the hand of the seller to confirm the deal. All along the road, similar exchanges are taking place under the glare of lamps powered by noisy generators.

The meat trade is carried out at night and the sellers either know, or do not care, that their animals are going for slaughter. During the day, most horses are bought for farms or as pets. However, for now, in the darkness, the trade is in meat.

Further along the road a Lithuanian-registered lorry has parked. It has two trailers and, by the end of the night, they will be filled with 21 horses.

^{A ssick horse, after a long journey, it's to weak to stand and will require vetenary treatment (David Rose for the Telegraph)}

A group of men, some carrying thick wooden sticks, which are apparently rarely used, are gathered around it. Throughout the night they bring horses to the lorry and gradually it starts to fill up.

By 3am, it comes good for Piotr, when he sells his mare to the Lithuanian contingent for 2,000 zloty, about £400 more than he hoped, and he runs back to his truck, empty headcollar in hand, to fetch her passport.

“I’m happy, it’s more than I expected,” he says breathlessly, before running back to the Lithuanian lorry to collect his money.

The owner of the truck, who would give his name only as Algis, said that he would be taking the horses to Lithuania, almost 400 miles away.

“These horses will not be eaten because Lithuania is short of horses for work and for leisure,” he said.

However World Horse Welfare, a British charity which campaigns for greater regulation of the transportation of horses, and whose campaigns officers are at the fair, says that the truth is very different.

^{Successful deals made at the 400 year old market (David Rose for the Telegraph)}

This lorry load, and others from the fair’s late night deals, are heading for slaughter. The reticence to admit it is because the animal rights activists, as well as international campaigners, have stepped up their interest in the trade.

Poland is the biggest exporter of horses in the EU, accounting for 45 per cent of the 65,000 transported every year.

The sheer number reflects the country’s size and the abundance of horses on its farms, where modern methods are slowly arriving.

There are hundreds of fairs every month and most horses will end up in the Bari region of Italy, where horse meat is popular, unlike in Poland where, like Britain, it is barely eaten – at least knowingly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the charity is most worried about the welfare of the animals, which it points out can lead to disease and leave meat unfit for human consumption, a concern which is likely to be heightened by the lack of inspectors checking the horses before they are driven from Skaryszew.

Hannah Westen, a campaigns officer for the charity who watched the sale, said: “Long-distance transportation across Europe for slaughter causes massive stress to the horses involved and leads to serious welfare problems such as exhaustion, dehydration, injury and disease.

“This suffering is utterly needless, horses could be slaughtered close to their point of origin and the meat transported instead.”

However, a more sinister set of suspicions hang over the whole horse trade in Poland: that it is a front for crime.

^{The Hungarian Border Freight Park on the Cech Border (David Rose for the Telegraph)}

Piotr, like most of those who sold animals at last week’s fair, was paid almost £3.40 a kg for his horse, yet the most expensive horse meat, from foals, fetches only £2.40 a kg in Italy, where the animals will mostly be slaughtered.

On top of the payment to Piotr and the other sellers is the cost of a journey covering about 1,500 miles. The route the horses take goes through Poland, then into the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia before entering Italy.

At a cost of at least an extra 250 miles it avoids the direct route through Austria, where checks on welfare and, perhaps more importantly, paperwork are more rigorous, according to World Horse Welfare.

Additionally, some horses will be kept for as long as six months at stops along the way to be fattened up.

The charity, and the Polish authorities, suspect the answer is simple: that the horses are being used in a form of money laundering.

The suspicion is that the movement of horses creates a convenient paper trail for gangs to “clean up” dirty money.

By exaggerating the value and number of horses moved, they can explain the existence of large amounts of cash gained from less legitimate enterprises.

Paying farmers like Piotr slightly over the odds for their animals is, then, a small price compared with the potential profits.

There are darker suggestions too, that the lorries can sometimes be used to smuggle drugs or guns, relying on the presence of horses to create the impression of legitimacy.

If true, it would confirm the fears voiced by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, that criminality is in part the cause of the horse contamination scandal.

And also, it would be little surprise that the horses might enter the food chain as beef – as they have been proved to in Poland and France – because their disposal is simply the final element in the chain.

^{Most of those who sold animals at last week’s fair were paid almost £3.40 a kg for their horses (Reuters)}

Their transporters will be little concerned with where exactly they end up, as long as they have made it to a slaughter house.

The first stop for the Lithuanian lorry with Piotr’s horse is at the Pol-Madi assembly centre in Chronowek, 20 miles away, where the transport firm checks on the horses and draws up paperwork for the lorry-load.

From there the long road to Bari begins, with the final stop before Italy usually at Rédics in Hungary, on its border with Slovenia, where there is a feeding station.

The caretaker is paid in cash, about £50, for food and drink for animals on a small truck, to £190 for 24 hours’ rest. Sometimes there is an extra charge of £86 to remove a dead animal.

The stop is owned by a Hungarian businessman who lives in Liechtenstein, through a company formally closed in October by the Hungarian courts for financial irregularities.

When asked if the lorry drivers carried anything other than livestock, the caretaker said: “This is something that is really hidden from my eyes. Now that the borders are open it is very much possible.

“I am sure there are people who are in the business for a reason, but I am not one of those.”

Whatever the truth of the finances behind the horse trade, Piotr’s mare is firmly on its way to Italy – a country which yesterday announced it too had found beef products contaminated with horse.

The discovery is likely to prompt Italian authorities to take an interest in the opaque trade which brings horses to their country, and quite possibly into Europe’s food chain in the form of fake beef.

Animal Abuse

States Considering Laws That Would Make it an Act of Terrorism to Report on Abuses at Factory Farms

Cryptogon,

4^th February , 2013

Via: Global Possibilities:

How do you keep consumers in the dark about the horrors of factory farms? By making it an “act of terrorism” for anyone to investigate animal cruelty, food safety or environmental violations on the corporate-controlled farms that produce the bulk of our meat, eggs and dairy products.

And who better to write the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, designed to protect Big Ag and Big Energy, than the lawyers on the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force at the corporate-funded and infamous American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

New Hampshire, Wyoming and Nebraska are the latest states to introduce Ag-Gag laws aimed at preventing employees, journalists or activists from exposing illegal or unethical practices on factory farms. Lawmakers in 10 other states introduced similar bills in 2011-2012. The laws passed in three of those states: Missouri, Iowa and Utah. But consumer and animal-welfare activists prevented the laws from passing in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York and Tennessee.

Animal welfare

Dogs facing death for legal highs

Dogs will forced to take lethal doses of party pills under a controversial scientific testing method being considered by the Government to determine whether the designer drugs are safe for humans.

Stuff,

2 December, 2012

The SPCA, animal rights groups and the Greens say using animals to prove the safety of non-medical drugs is "barbaric" and are urging New Zealanders to fight the proposal when public submissions are called for.


SPCA Auckland chief executive Bob Kerridge also urged New Zealanders to force officials into banning the trials.


"Any test at all for this product on animals is quite frankly abhorrent," Kerridge said.


"This is a product that is of no benefit to humans. In addition to doing considerable harm to the animals, it has no beneficial outcome whatsoever. Therefore, [the testing] should not be allowed."


Under current laws, novel recreational drugs, or party pills, are exempt from the rules applied to pharmaceutical companies, which must prove drugs are safe for human use.


Until now, it has been up to the Government to prove party pills are unsafe but it wants to change the law, putting the burden on manufacturers to prove the pills will not cause harm.


According to a Ministry of Health report - "Regulations governing the control of novel psychoactive drugs" - outlining what testing would be needed under the law change, a designer drug "must" go through pre-clinical animals studies and it is "critical" to show a drug is safe for animals before it can be given to humans.


"At the study's completion, animals are sacrificed and tissues from all organ systems examined," the paper said.


Both rats and dogs would be subject to a lethal dose 50 per cent (LD50) test, where doses of the drug increase until half the test group dies. The method is banned in Britain and is not recognised by the OECD.


Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne said that despite a public consultation process, it was "unavoidable" that party pills would be tested on animals - including dogs.


"The Government is committed to minimal use of animal testing, but the hard truth is that scientifically, animal testing is unavoidable to prove that products are safe for human beings," Dunne told the Star-Times. "It is an unpleasant but necessary reality."


Legislation detailing the testing regime will be voted on early next year, following select committee debate that will allow for a period of public consultation.
A Ministry of Health spokesman said current policy was that animal testing in New Zealand should be "minimised" and the ministry was "actively" seeking alternatives to animal testing for party pills. It added: "The testing requirements for products to be approved under the new regulatory regime are not yet determined, though they would broadly resemble the tests new medicines undergo." Those tests include the LD50.


Animal welfare advocates called on New Zealanders to fight the proposed animal testing.


Green Party MP Mojo Mathers said: "I think it is barbaric. Dogs and other animals shouldn't be made to suffer just so that we can get legal highs on store shelves.
"I really encourage people who feel that testing of party pills on dogs and other animals is unethical to speak out against this proposal. Animal testing is cruel and it's not justifiable for party pills.


"Anyone who owns a dog will know that they are intelligent, affectionate animals capable of great loyalty and trust to humans," she said.


"To contemplate subjecting them to such cruel tests that will cause very high levels of pain and suffering, all in the name of allowing people to have a legal high is, in my view, totally unethical."


Once the pills have gone through tests involving dogs and rats and no major concerns are uncovered, they will be tested on humans.


The paper said: "Clinical trials with healthy volunteers need to be conducted in a medical setting with close medical supervision with access to advanced emergency care in the event of volunteers suffering adverse clinical effects.


"As these drugs are by nature psychoactive, volunteers will also need to be closely monitored by a registered psychologist for evidence of adverse psychological events."


The drugs could also "impair judgement of the user and have detrimental effects upon themselves and others, secondary to the user's altered state, such as impaired driving leading to motor vehicle accidents".


The ministry's document outlining the clinical testing process also touches on the "addiction potential" of party pills containing BZP.


It states that previous trials involving rats - that measured the animals' reactions to different substances - had shown they reacted to BZP "in a manner similar to that found with other addictive drugs such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine".
More than 20 million party pills were sold in New Zealand in the five-year period leading up to the Government's 2008 crackdown on the over-the-counter highs.

'the Hobbit'

The world premier of 'the Hobbit' is coming up this week in Wellington.

While I hope that people enjoy the movie people have to be aware of the dark side of the making of this movie – it involves the sovereignty of New Zealand

The dark side of 'the Hobbit'
Colluding with Hollywood

Book slams Govt's accommodating position to Warners with The Hobbit

TV3.

27 November, 2012

If you haven't heard, one of the biggest films of the year premiers in New Zealand next week – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

While it's on track to make millions, it has faced its fair share of controversy, including a damning new book out this weekend.

All has not been quiet in the shire recently, and now there is a new book out about the union disputes from two years ago.

Author Jonathan Handel, an American entertainment attorney and journalist, is critical of Prime Minister John Key's negotiating skills.

“I have to ask myself, ‘did he know how to interact with the big boys?’” says Mr Handel. “Because Warners flew down like colonial masters and the Government paid for the limos.”

Mr Handel notes that MP Trevor Mallard said at the time it's the sort of behaviour you'd expect in Fiji, not New Zealand.

“And it really is extraordinary. You are going to come down and negotiate hardball with us and we are going to lay out the red carpet and lay down on the carpet.”

The Hobbit has had its fair share of setbacks. 
 

Fans and journalists were generally left cold when they saw early footage of the film, shot in 48 frames per second. That's double what you’re used to seeing at the movies, so initially it looks more like a cheap TV show than an epic film.

Bloggers were puzzled, one calling it a “soap opera look” or a “video look”.

In reaction, Warner Bros have dramatically decreased the number of screens showing The Hobbit in 48 frames per second.

Then there was more drama, with PETA claims about the ill treatment of animals on set and, as usual, the Tolkien Estate suing to the tune of $98 million, saying the film's producers have overstepped what they're allowed to do with merchandise. 
 

Of course Warners will be laughing regardless. When Hobbit tickets went on pre-sale in the United States, they outsold Skyfall and Twilight instantly.

To see video GO HERE

To see a background to events in 2010 GO HERE

 

After having rollen out the red carpet and given into Warner Bros' demands and smashed the union, PM Key was back in Hollywood a month or so ago ready to give up Kim Dotcom and bend over for Hollywood

 

Hollywood moguls press Key for bigger NZ subsidies

The Government is under pressure to raise the 15 per cent subsidy it offers to lure foreign film and television companies, to compete with an Australian proposal raised by Hollywood heavyweights who dined with the Prime Minister this week.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10838732

.....

As a horse lover this really bothered me. Peter Jackson, not surprisingly denied the whole thing while the SPCA 'could not' find evidence of cruelty - apart from the fact that they were looking at this months after the event they wouldn't have anything to say about cruel practices like hobbling of horses

‘The Hobbit’: Unexpected Cruelty

PETA,

New Zealand has been buzzing with excitement at the upcoming release of The Hobbit, but disturbing allegations of a slew of animal deaths on set have left a dark shadow over the film’s release. While audiences will see an adventure story set in a fantasy world, for the animals involved in the filming the abuse and neglect that they experienced were far too real. In all, five horses, 12 chickens, a pony, and several goats and sheep were allegedly maimed or killed, and according to whistleblowers, all these incidents could have been prevented if director Peter Jackson’s lead trainer and the head of production had fulfilled their duties and heeded the warnings of several wranglers.


Reports of animal neglect coming from whistleblowers include the story of a horse named Shanghai who was hobbled (his legs were tied together so that he couldn’t move) and left on the ground for three hours because he was too energetic for his rider. Afterward, in order to hide his rope burns for filming, his legs were covered with makeup and hair. Hobbling is an outright violation of the American Humane Association’s (AHA) guidelines.


More alleged abuse took place where the animals were housed, with one horse killed and another injured after being placed with two highly strung geldings, despite concerns that the geldings would be too aggressive. Another horse was reportedly killed after falling off an embankment in a severely crowded paddock. Yet another horse died when the horses were moved to the stables, probably from colic, an extremely painful illness, after being fed large amounts of food that he wasn’t used to.


After this incident, the horses were reportedly moved back to the paddocks, where another horse had the skin and muscles of her leg torn away by wire fencing. It has also been reported that several goats and sheep died from worm infestations and from falling into the sinkholes that covered the farm, and 12 chickens were mauled and killed by unsupervised dogs or trampled by other animals when left unprotected.


It is astonishing that these events could happen when the unit production manager was warned by his wranglers and the production was monitored by the AHA! Even more astonishing is that this movie was directed by Peter Jackson, a master at computer-generated imagery (CGI). In a movie that features CGI dragons, ogres, and hobbits, CGI animals would have fit in perfectly.


Jackson could have made The Hobbit without using a single animal—and he should have. Hurting and killing animals for the sake of a movie is unacceptable, not to mention preventable. And in the end, animals are not ours to use for entertainment or any other purpose.

UPDATE:

I  am reproducing some comments from Facebook - naturally, at this stage unsubstantiated.


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It gets even darker than that, if you research it.

New Line raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to film LOTR via the BNZ, who secured the money from Kiwi investors. LOTR grossed $3 billion internationally, but "lost money" on paper after all of the profits were siphoned off to the Cayman Islands.

The BNZ made tens of millions in fees alone for raising the money on the local market, but the only ones who lost were the Kiwi investors.

You will never hear Sir Peter or John Key acknowledging this but it is a historical fact.

Even Allan Hubbard invested millions in LOTR and was ripped off. 

 

He spent two years fighting in court to get it back and was eventually forced to settle for a few hundred thousand dollars as compensation - only a small percentage of what he had invested.

Many other wealthy New Zealanders lost money on LOTR. Someone should research it and make people aware.

Even Peter Jackson had to sue the producers for royalties he was entitled to after LOTR, but he still went back and worked for them, such was his desire to make movies, obviously.

There is an extremely dark underbelly to the history of LOTR and the Hobbit.

"South Canterbury Finance invested $30 million in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, only to have New Line produce accounts showing that the movies did not make a profit, but made "horrendous losses". According to SCF CEO Allan Hubbard: "We found it surprising because it was one of the biggest box office success of all time."[15] (The three films rank 5th, 18th and 25th on the list of Highest Grossing Movies.)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Line_Cinema