John Craven
So, it has finally come to an end – the contentious policy that, over the years, saw millions of live animals crammed into lorries and transported hundreds of miles from British farms to be slaughtered abroad.
As I write, the Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Bill is about to become law, having passed unopposed through both houses of parliament. In fact, there have been no exports of live cattle, sheep, goats, pigs or horses for food since December 2020, simply because, post-Brexit, there have been no suitable border controls in mainland Europe to handle them.
From now on, whether border controls are improved or not, the trade will be banned, much to the delight of animal welfare organisations such as the RSPCA and Compassion in World Farming, who have opposed it for 50 years. Their constant campaigning drew attention to unnecessarily long journeys in crowded trucks, resulting in injury, stress, exhaustion, thirst and rough handling.
Back in the early 1990s, live exports were big business: 2.2m cattle, pigs and sheep were sent for slaughter abroad in 1992. Under EU rules they could be transported for up to 24 hours without food or water.
A camera crew from Countryfile tracked one British lorry packed with calves for more than 700 miles to the Spanish border. There were comfort stops for the driver but nothing for the thirsty, hungry calves, which were then transferred to a French lorry and driven to an abattoir In Spain. Such journeys were commonplace and increasingly they provoked public anger, peaking in what became known as ‘the Battle of Brightlingsea’. For 10 months in 1995, this small coastal town in Essex saw hundreds of protestors attempting, day after day, to prevent lorryloads of cattle and sheep from reaching the port.
I reported on the highly emotional scenes as police in riot gear broke up human chains so that convoys of lorries could pass. Many of the protestors were ordinary local people, young and old, visibly upset that their town had become involved in what they believed to be a cruel and inhumane trade. The convoys ended when exporters admitted the extra costs of transporting through Brightlingsea had become too high.
The trade faced another hit the following year, when bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) led to a 10-year ban on the export of British beef, an
