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The Watchdog monitors fundraising, spending, and political activity in the name of animal and habitat protection—both pro and con. His empty bowl stands for all the bowls left empty when some take more than they need.

November 2006

The 28-Hour Law & timely influence

Among the most encouraging regulatory developments for farmed animals ever was the USDA disclosure on September 28, 2006, in a letter to the Humane Society of the U.S., that since 2003 it has recognized that Congress meant the Twenty-Eight Hour Law of 1873 to limit the time that any hooved animals could be kept aboard any kind of vehicle.

Less encouraging was that the USDA for three years avoided having to enforce the reinterpretation of the Twenty-Eight Hour Act, and 1906 and 1994 amendments, by keeping knowledge that it had been reinterpreted to themselves.

"The USDA clarified its position in a 2003 internal memo distributed to government veterinarians," explained Cristal Cody of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "The policy change came to light in response to a legal petition that HSUS filed in October 2005 to extend the law to trucks."

Said USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service spokesperson Jim Rogers, "We never considered the 1906 law as being applicable to the transport of animals by truck," Rogers said. "Now we see that the meaning of the statutory term 'vehicles' means vehicle."

Summarized Farmed Animal Watch, "The change in policy was news to many organizations, including the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the American Trucking Associations. It has become common practice in the pig industry for two drivers to be assigned to every trip, avoiding having to stop along the way. Trucks carrying calves avoid stopping so the animals don't lie down, said a representative of the Iowa Cattlemen's Association, who claims that calves travel better standing."

The livestock industry can be expected to fight the new USDA interpretation--and disclosure that it exists may trigger a hostile Congressional response. In a parallel situation, the USDA arbitrarily exempted rats, mice, and birds from protection under the Animal Welfare Act from 1971 until September 2000, by leaving them out of the regulatory definition of "animal." Suddenly, after 30 years of lawsuits and lobbying, the USDA settled a case brought by the American Anti-Vivisection Society by agreeing to recognize rats, birds, and mice as animals. Before 2000 ended, former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) pushed through Congress a budget amendment that prevented the USDA from writing a new regulatory definition of "animal," and a year later won a further amendment that permanently excludes rats, mice, and birds from Animal Welfare Act coverage.

"We do not have enough people to even begin inspecting on the roads," Rogers told Cody, perhaps signaling that the USDA would prefer to continue ignoring the Twenty-Eight Hour Law--or to have it rescinded.

"The livestock industry has also long attempted to evade the application of the Twenty-Eight Hour Law to trucks," commented HSUS spokesperson Erin Williams. "Just last week in testimony before Congress, the National Pork Producers Council claimed that the law was 'enacted to deal with the movement to slaughterhouses of cattle by train' only and strenuously opposed the 'extension' of the Twenty-Eight Hour Law to truck transport."
The USDA letter to HSUS, said Williams, concluded that "[w]e agree that the plain meaning of the statutory term 'vehicle' in the Twenty-Eight Hour Law includes 'trucks' which operate as express carriers or common carriers."

Added Williams, "USDA also noted that it is working to investigate "alleged violations of the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, and is currently investigating a shipment of breeding pigs from Canada to Mexico," a case involving the deaths of more than 150 pigs who arrived by truck at a Brownsville, Texas, livestock export facility in July after an extended journey of more than 28 hours. HSUS, Farm Sanctuary, and other animal protection organizations have asked both state and federal officials to investigate the case."

That sounds a bit more promising.

If the Twenty-Eight Hour Law is at last enforced as Congress intended, a generation before William Howard Taft banished the cows who provided the Presidential milk supply from the White House lawn circa 1910, more animals will benefit than from any other animal welfare regulation in effect worldwide.

Immediately affected will be the 40 million cattle and 123 million pigs who are trucked to slaughter each year in the U.S.

"More than 50 million of the nearly 10 billion farm animals transported by truck every year (counting chickens, who are still not protected) must endure trips far in excess of 28 hours without food, water or rest," charged Williams. For example, "A 2005 Compassion Over Killing undercover investigation of long-distance pig transport found dead animals left on trucks for more than 30 hours, animals enduring extreme heat without water, and animals suffering from a variety of injuries [received in loading and transport], including bruises, abrasions and bleeding lacerations on their bodies, legs and ears."

Also in 2005, Animals' Angels, Animal Rights Hawaii, and the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals documented similar suffering among pigs shipped in weekly lots of 400 to Hawaii from Alberta, Canada, a total journal of more than eight days. If "vehicles" really means any vehicle now, ships are also vehicles and that trade could be stopped.

By helping to establish transport time standards, USDA enforcement could help the European Union to introduce and enforce similar limits on the length of time animals can be aboard trucks without off-truck rest, still a frequent problem, as illustrated by an October 11, 2006 bulletin from Compassion In World Farming.

"Six truckloads of British calves exported for veal arrived at Dover docks last night," CIWF said, "and were expected to sail for continental Europe in the early hours of this morning. However, the boat, the Claymore, only turned up at midday today." The calves were loaded after spending "15 hours on the docks, packed on the trucks, without food, only able to drink water if they could reach the drinkers on the truck. Although the trucks are destined for Holland, France, Spain and Belgium," CIWF continued, "the drivers have now been instructed to head for a staging post at Veurne in Belgium and give the calves 24 hours rest, food and water. CIWF will seek verification that this rest does in fact take place," the bulletin pledged, "as previous experience shows that stops for food and watering are frequently ignored in continental Europe."

Enforcing the Twenty-Eight Hour Law could also be influential in India, where because cattle slaughter is legal in only two states, cattle are often clandestinely transported long distances to slaughter, under abominable conditions. This too is illegal, but enforcing the law is typically left to brave individual representatives of humane societies.

Clementien Pauws of the Karuna Society, badly beaten by cattle transporters in October 2006 (page 6) was only the most recent of many victims of the failures of Indian governments to interdict a traffic which may be the nation's leading source of bribes paid to public servants for ignoring their jobs. At least two Indian humane workers have been killed in confrontations with illegal cattle transporters since 2000. Several others have been severely injured. The Visakha SPCA cow shelter was burned by illegal butchers and transporters in 2000. Neither are police exempt from the violence when they try to intervene. Bullets fired at two police officers who tried to stop a cattle truck near Delhi in April 2004 killed a sleeping roadside vendor.

The mayhem in India underscores the importance of live transport to the meat trade everywhere. The meat trade and live transport are virtually synonymous. Those whose livelihoods depend on live transport can be expected to try to run over anyone who gets in their way, politically if possible, but with at least one literal precedent in the February 1995 death of British activist Jill Phipps, 31, who was crushed by a cattle truck at a protest against shipping live calves to continental Europe.

Global high stakes

Only slaughter for human consumption involves more animals than live transport, and by a narrowing margin, as only a dwindling few percent of livestock, worldwide, are still slaughtered at the farms where they were raised.

Globally, more than 20 billion chickens, 1.5 billion sheep and goats, 1.1 billion cattle, and 600 million pigs are transported to slaughter each year.

The magnitude of the humane issues involved in transport tends to increase with the distance that the animals are moved. Partly this is because longer transport inherently means more time spent in transit, and therefore more travel stress. Also of significance is that the longer the haul, the greater the expense, increasing the inclination of transporters to try to pack animals together as densely as possible, to take more on each trip.

Some of the earliest written records of civilization include discussions of how animals should be handled in taking them to market.

Unfortunately, despite thousands of years of proscriptions against such practices as carrying poultry hung upside down by their feet, the perceived economy and convenience of cruel livestock transport methods has prevailed against humane teachings at almost every point of conflict. To people accustomed to killing animals to eat, hauling, driving, or handling them by cruel methods has rarely been a visible concern.

Viewers of the 2004 Animals Asia Foundation video Dr. Eddie: Friend or Food are typically shocked, both in China where it was made and abroad, to see Guangdong live market workers tossing jam-packed cages of dogs and cats from trucks to the ground, but countless less widely distributed videos show similar treatment of every species sent to slaughter, around the world, wherever the traffic is not supervised by people who have both the will and the legal authority to intervene.

Efforts to reform livestock transport and handling have traditionally had for leverage only the certainty, in the ages before refrigeration, that animals had to be alive and healthy in appearance upon arrival at markets and slaughterhouses where buyers inspected and bargained over those they would kill. Until recently there was little profitable demand for animals dead or dying from abuse.

Because transportation was slow until modern times, moving animals for slaughter more than a day's walk rarely occurred. An army on the march might be followed by drovers herding animals "requisitioned" from unfortunate farmers along the route, but otherwise moving livestock for many days to slaughter was not profitable, until the arrival of barge canals and railways in the early 19th century coincided with the growth of cities. Suddenly the technology existed to make possible raising livestock far from the points of consumption--and newly affluent urban residents could afford to steeply increase the amount of meat they ate.

For most of human history, most people lived close to their food sources, but throughout the world the advent of industrial development has drawn most of the labor pool into cities, where they are sustained by agricultural systems which of necessity use ever fewer workers to produce more food. As more animals are produced and transported, and the value of the human labor invested in each animal diminishes, the cost of each animal death has also dropped. Instead of trying to avoid losing any animals to transport-related stress, illness, and injury, as farmers did when they raised relatively few animals and the loss of even one could be an economic blow, livestock producers who think of the animals as industrial production units merely try to keep the losses low enough to minimize harm to profit. Potential loss of profit from a predictable percentage of animals reaching their destination dead is offset by the revenue from rendering carcasses to recover byproducts, an industry made profitable by collecting carcasses in volume.

Whether animals reach their destination dead is no longer the economic consideration it was pre-barge and railway, but that is the least of the equation. The introduction of refrigeration in the early 20th century within the U.S. and more recently abroad means that receiving visibly suffering animals is no longer an economic liability, unless the animals have a disease that is potentially communicable to humans through consumption. Otherwise, the overwhelming majority of consumers will see only parts of a processed frozen carcass. Most people who eat meat will never have the opportunity to decide that any particular animal looks too unhealthy to be ingested.

Remarkably, the risks to both animals and human health inherent in long-distance livestock transport were recognized in the U.S. almost as soon as the practice began. The oldest U.S. humane society, the American SPCA, was only two years old when Congress in 1871 began deliberating over the bill that became the Twenty-Eight Hour Law of 1873.

Farmers in the politically dominant Northeast were concerned that livestock transported by railroad would threaten their markets. The public health sector, then a relatively new branch of government, was alarmed at the potential for spreading epidemics of food-borne disease, as occurred several times during the then-recent U.S. Civil War, when troops were fed bacterially tainted carcasses.

Yet the debate was driven by concern for the suffering of animals themselves, voiced from now curious directions. Animals & Their Legal Rights, published by the Animal Welfare Institute, extensively quotes an 1871 account issued by the Chicago Live Stock Reporter that sounds much like animal rights literature produced today in India, parts of Africa, and other places where animals are still often moved by train.

"Eighteen to twenty cattle are forced into 30-foot cars, giving less than two foot space to the animal, and not infrequently smaller animals--calves, sheep and swine-are crowded under them," the Chicago Live Stock Reporter noted. "In this way they are often carried for days without food, water, or possibility of lying down."

Continues Animals & Their Legal Rights, "It was chronicled in Chicago papers in 1870 as remarkable that a shipment of 194 cattle from Brigham Young's farm in Utah to Chicago, "riding 1,500 miles, lost only 210 pounds per head."

The original Twenty-Eight Hour Law sought to improve livestock transport by requiring animals in transit to receive food, water, and at least five hours of off-vehicle rest at regular intervals on multi-day journeys.

Unfortunately, poorly built and maintained rest facilities, combined with crude loading and unloading procedures, continued to cause avoidable suffering.

Congress responded by creating the Bureau of Animal Industry within the USDA in 1884. Charged with enforcing the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, the BAI evolved into the Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service of today.

"Numerous convictions for noncompliance with the law were obtained, but [due to the deficiencies of the original law] the law of 1873 was repealed and the present Twenty-Eight Hour Act was enacted in 1906," Animals & Their Legal Rights recalls.

Within the next year, animal transporters were fined 401 times for violations and 828 additional cases were pending. The railways responded by establishing as many as 900 inspected livestock rest points, but by 1988 barely two dozen still existed, even on paper.

Four hundred cited violations of the Twenty-Eight Hour Act per year were still the norm in 1967, according to the Animal Welfare Institute, but fewer than 100 citations were issued in 1976 and none in 1988, when enforcement was effectively abandoned because hooved livestock in the U.S. by then moved almost exclusively by truck.

Birds not protected

The two inherent weaknesses of the Twenty-Eight Hour Law of 1906 were that it failed to anticipate either the growth of live poultry transport or the advent of the automobile. In 1906, and for about 20 more years, most poultry were still raised in back yards. Poultry slaughter still existed mostly as an adjunct to egg production. As keeping poultry was relatively easy, even in pre-automobile cities, where chickens could derive much of their nutrition from the undigested grain and insects in horse manure, no one imagined that anything remotely resembling factory poultry farming could be done or be profitable. The arrival of automobiles simultaneously drove poultry out of U.S. streets, however, and introduced vehicles which could inexpensively transport chickens.

Factory poultry farming and automobile use have continued to grow in tandem throughout the world. Wherever paved roads are the norm, poultry production is increasingly concentrated--but before disease outbreaks associated with eating contaminated poultry began to attract global concern in the early 1990s, poultry transportation everywhere had largely escaped any form of regulation. Only the rapid worldwide spread of the avian influenza strain H5N1, potentially lethal to humans, appears to have generated any regulatory awareness that abuses in poultry transport long decried by animal advocates may have much broader consequences.

Mailing eggs for incubation and newly hatched chicks is among those abuses. The practice began back when rural mail carriers were typically the first people for miles around to own "station wagons," a term originally meaning the vehicle that served a post office. Light hauling of all kinds was a regular part of postal business before the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service in 1968, when other carriers took over most parcel transport, and moving live poultry for short distances between farms was easily done without risk to the birds.

Postal regulations, like the Twenty-Eight Hour Act, have yet to be updated to reflect the changes that overtook animal husbandry just a few years later. Postal transport of eggs and hatchlings by the mid-1950s had become an enormous subsidy to the commercial poultry industry, and to the operators of bird shooting clubs, who typically obtain quail, pheasant, and other birds used as live targets by mail.

Humane opposition to mailing live birds dates at least to the 1960s. Mass deaths of young birds in transit, believed to occur by the tens of thousands, attract mass media notice about once a year: 500 day-old bobwhite quail who froze to death en route from Pittsburgh to Syracuse in May 2005, for example, and 3,370 young turkeys who died in August 2006 on their way from Hybrid Turkeys, of Canada, to Zacky Farms, of Fresno, California.
North Carolina Department of Agriculture food and drug safety administrator Joe Reardon in August 2005 warned fellow officials that the present U.S. Postal Service regulations governing transport of live birds "are inadequate and present great potential for contamination of the poultry industry."

Yet instead of moving to stop mailing poultry, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced a bill to prevent the U.S. Postal Service from pursuing regulatory amendments that might keep birds out of the mail. The bill died in committee, but will likely be reintroduced whenever mailing poultry next comes under scrutiny.

The longest hauls

The automobile also made possible the livestock commerce between Australia, New Zealand, and Middle Eastern destinations, which for decades has amounted to trading cattle, sheep, and goats for oil.

Except at Ramadan, when personally slaughtering animals for the fast-breaking feast is traditional for heads of households, the major reason for shipping live animals instead of carcasses was until recently the lack of refrigeration in most of the destination counties. Introduction of refrigeration was and is inhibited by the notorious lack of reliable electrical power grids. As electrical delivery capacity expands, refrigeration is increasingly commonplace, and carcass shipments are correspondingly capturing market share, simply because far more carcasses fit on a boat than live animals, and they take much less labor to handle.

But live exporters and the Middle Eastern slaughter industry are unwilling to abandon their industry while anything of it lasts, producing a multi-directional set of conflicts.

Whether or not Down Under live export is the cruelest part of the animal transport industry, as some investigators allege, it certainly involves subjecting animals to transport conditions for the longest time, typically two to three weeks, and has been under scrutiny for quite a long time as well. Protesting against live exports was among the early activities of the Australian group Animal Liberation, formed by Christine Townend and others soon after Australian philosopher Peter Singer published his 1974 book Animal Liberation.

Recalls Asa Lind of the Auckland-based Animal Rights Legal Advocacy Network, "Between 1981 and 1985, over 600,000 sheep died in transit. Within the first 20 years of the practice, it is estimated that more than 2 million animals died," including 40,600 sheep who were killed in a fire aboard the Farid Fares.

Opposition to live export intensified in 1990 and 2003 when tens of thousands of sheep were refused entry into Saudi Arabia for 16 and 11 weeks, respectively, on veterinary pretexts that were widely doubted because of coincidences of timing with protest involving Australian support of U.S. foreign policy. The 1990 incident came as the U.S. and allied forces prepared in Saudi Arabia to repel Iraqi occupiers from Kuwait; the 2003 incident followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

New Zealand barred live exports of lambs in 1997. Though New Zealand exported at least 43,000 sheep for slaughter in 2003, frozen carcass export appears to have taken over most of the New Zealand market share.

Australian live sheep exports to the United Arab Emirates and Jordan meanwhile reached a record high volume, increasing 40% and 183%, respectively, in fiscal 2006, according to Meat & Livestock Australia.

PETA claimed on September 20, 2006 to have influenced Qatar to suspend live sheep imports from Australia, after showing officials documentation of animal suffering in transit, but imports from Australia actually increased, according to Rohit William Wadhwaney of the Gulf Times, due to a suspension of imports from India due to hoof and mouth disease.

Australian cattle exports to the United Arab Emirates doubled in fiscal 2006, but that was still a relatively small part of the Australian live export market. From 1996 through 2005, Australia exported more than a million live cattle to Egypt, most of them killed at the Bassatin slaughterhouse near Cairo.

Australian agriculture minister Peter McGuarin in February 2006 suspended the Egyptian traffic after the Australian edition of 60 Minutes aired video taken in January 2006 by Lyn White of Animals Australia that showed Bassatin workers poking out the eyes of cattle and cutting their leg tendons before subjecting them to a version of hallal slaughter that clearly flunked the goal of the animals not suffering.

McGuarin reauthorized Australian cattle exports to Bassatin and two other Egyptian slaughterhouses in October 2006, under two memorandums of understanding which are supposed to ensure that the animals are handled and killed in compliance with Australian slaughter standards.

Australian Royal SPCA president Hugh Wirth objected that, "There is still absolutely no requirement that the abattoirs stun the animals to ensure they are rendered immediately unconscious." This a frequent objection of humane organizations to both hallal slaughter and Jewish kosher slaughter, even when the slaughterhouses use the modified methods-- widely practiced in the U.S.--that were developed in the early 1980s by Temple Grandin to expedite the killing and reduce the animals' awareness that they are being killed.

"Dealing with the devil"

Animals Australia, PETA, and the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt hoped to forestall the renewed trade by rallying last-minute public opposition.

Responded Egyptian Society of Animal Friends chair Ahmed El Sherbiny, in a statement amplified by Meat & Livestock Australia, "I was pleased to hear that Australia expects to increase the amount of live sheep and cattle it exports to the Middle East over the coming years."

Elaborated El Sherbiny in an October 10, 2006 e-mail to the heads of 15 animal advocacy organizations who questioned his judgement in welcoming more live animal shipments, "I have witnessed real progress this week at Bassatin. An Australian, Peter Dundon, has been working at Bassatin, creating improvements for local Egyptian cattle, funded by Meat & Livestock Australia. Someone was punished this week for cruelty to animals that was identified by Dundon. New management at Bassatin was both cooperative and supportive in enforcing punishment.

""If animals are going to be imported into Egypt," El Sherbiny continued, "I would rather have them come from a country that is investing in skills-based training, and is working with our government to raise the standard of animal welfare in Egypt. My approach may be regarded as dealing with the devil, but I regard it as the lesser of two evils. I see no other exporting countries making any efforts whatsoever, and they all have much lesser standards in shipping and long distance transport. Most have none."

Animals Australia, Compassion in World Farming, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, and SPARE were among the organizations objecting that El Sherbiny should not have endorsed overseas live transport.

Objected SPARE founder Amina Sarwat Abaza, in an open letter published as an advertisement in the Weekend Australian and the West Australian newspapers, "The problems at Bassatin or other Egyptian slaughterhouses cannot be solved by a new piece of equipment or a training course. Even if Australian animals are treated differently at Bassatin," she asserted, "in other slaughter halls at this huge abattoir other animals will still be subjected to brutal treatment." The Australian government "is reassuring the Australian community that on recommencing the trade with Egypt, the welfare of Australian animals will be overseen by the Egyptian General Organization for Veterinary Services," Abaza added. "Australians should be aware that GOVS is the body responsible for placing strychnine-laced food on the streets in Cairo to kill stray dogs and cats in the cruelest way imaginable."
El Sherbiny, SPARE, and WSPA have all long sought to persuade GOVS to stop poisoning dogs and cats.

Only time will tell if El Sherbiny in his "dealing with the devil" can use the Meat & Livestock Australia interest in selling animals to Egypt to leverage improvement in the treatment of all animals who are killed at Bassatin, and in transforming the institutional culture of GOVS, as he hopes.

Meanwhile, that we here in the U.S. are still struggling to re-implement the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, 133 years after Congress passed it, illustrates the necessity of securing reform as well as seeking abolition. Technological change will almost certainly end intercontinental livestock shipment relatively soon, in favor of the frozen carcass trade, just as the introduction of long-haul trucking ended cattle transportation by railroad. Yet as the transition from railways to trucks demonstrated, abolishing one source of abuse achieves nothing if it is replaced by another.

Truckers were exempted from the Twenty-Eight Hour Law for most of a century because even though the law existed, there was not a sufficient climate of public awareness and concern to persuade the USDA that extending it to trucks was a mandate.

Whatever becomes of the intercontinental livestock transport industry, it is incumbent upon animal advocates in all nations to build a mandate for strong animal welfare standards wherever animals are slaughtered, hauled, or for that matter used in any other way--and this must be done at the same time as inspiring and encouraging fellow humans to rethink using animals for any harmful or exploitative purpose.