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ANIMAL RIGHTS CAMPAIGNERS are angry over the deaths of four horses in Kilkenny this week.
TheJournal.ie learned that four pregnant mares were euthanised by Kikenny County Council on Wednesday, despite rehoming offers from numerous equine rescue services.
Pauline Doyle, who runs a Horse Sanctuary in Waterford, said that nobody in the pound acknowledged her offer to take the horses.
“I’m really, really angry,” she told TheJournal.ie. “Under European law, an animal is seen as a sentient being with a right to life.
“There is no reason on earth why they should have been put down.”
Doyle, who is equine registered and keeps her rescued animals on 30 acres of land, says that she was not the only one who offered to rehome the horses.
She claims the mares were “due to foal within a matter of days” and that would have been obvious to anybody who saw them.
Kilkenny County Council told TheJournal.ie that “whether or not a mare is in foal does not affect the decision to euthanise a horse”.
A spokesperson said a pregnancy would not be “readily apparent without a specific veterinary examination” and that the attention provided to each impounded horse does not include the necessary exam.
The council confirmed that a total of six horses were put down on Wednesday.
In a statement, it said:
Unfortunately under the Control of Horses Act, County Councils have the distressing task of dealing with the large numbers of unwanted, stray horses in the country. Under the legislation, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) funds County Councils to implement the Act.
However DAFM has recently reduced the level of funding available and it no longer covers the full cost of implementation of the Act. In particular DAFM no longer funds re-homing of horses. Each Council is expected to recover its full costs from the person re-homing a horse.
Since the economic downturn, the number of stray horses has continued to rise dramatically.
Between 2008 and 2012 Councils across the country impounded over 10,000 stray horses. As the number of horses increases, the percentage euthanised has increased.
This group horses were removed from council land after the tenants moved on.
Since January of this year, Kilkenny has impounded 54 horses and picked up the carcasses of four horses.
Only four horses were returned to their owners and 12 of the horses were in such poor condition that they had to be euthanised immediately on humane grounds.
The remainder have bee euthanised by a registered veterinary practitioner. Only one horse remains in the pound.
According to the council’s statement, the carcasses of 20 dead horses have been found since the beginning of 2013.
“The circumstances of their deaths were far from humane,” it said.
“Impounding of horses has done nothing to resolve the national problem of too many unwanted horses in the country. A solution is required that includes curtailment of indiscriminate breeding of horses. There are not enough places to re-home them all.”
Doyle agrees that immediate action is needed.
“I’m very much against the cull of Ireland’s horses,” she explained. “They cannot kill 18,000 horses. If they do, there will just be thousands more ponies next year.
“However, I am not naive enough to think that we can save them all.
“But these five foaling mares could have been saved. It is heartbreaking that they were not when there were homes available to them.”
In the past year, Doyle has rehomed two thoroughbreds, rescued five young horses which were found on a road in Tipperary and broke in an 11-year-old which is now being ridden by an 11-year-old girl.
She has called for the government to bring in a strict licensing regime for breeding with heavy penalties for those who do not adhere.
Doyle also tried to dispel a myth that the Traveller community is connected to many of the abandoned horses.
“It is not Travellers,” she said, emphatically. “It was greedy people during the boom – but now that there is no money involved, horses are being dumped left, right and centre.”
The solution, she says, must come from all stakeholders moving forward together, including the Thoroughbred industry, the Traveller community, the government and horse rescue services.
Minister Simon Coverney has repeatedly rejected proposed culls, claiming there is no major welfare problem.
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I mean yeah the lad probably shouldnt have flown close enough to steal a chip but also Russia is quite a good deal closer to the Baltic than the USA. So close in fact that they have a seaport and a major city on it, while the USA is several thousand miles away. USAF hardly taking recon pics of fish.
@stephen: They’re doing lots of training with their NATO allies.
Maybe he was just trying to tell the yank he’d taken a wrong turn…’our submarine base is over that direction’…only sayin!
Given the content of this article any chance The Journal could also report of the NATO jet that buzzed the Russian Defence Ministers plane earlier today ?
Right up beside it and they would have known very well it was a Russian government jet.
Whatever you can say about the posturing both do with military planes involved but to send a fighter jet up to a unarmed Russian government plane seems to be delivering a slightly sinister and not so subtle message.
Did Goose get a polaroid picture of the Russian pilot?
I think the the story needs to add more weight to the fact a US spy plane was operating a few minutes flying time from Russian airspace.
@Aidan O’Donovan: Russian military planes are frequently intercepted off the coast of Alaska, USA
@Diaspora’d:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/18/politics/russian-bombers-f-22-intercept-alaska/index.html
@Diaspora’d: all about the lens your using. Alaska is off the Coast of Russia! The Baltic ain’t near any part of the US, they’re all at this all the time. No biggie
@Diaspora’d: lol Russia is only a couple of miles from Alaska
But was he inverted?
Putin and the Russians have more restraint than any other nation on earth. If the tables were reversed, WWIII would already be on…….
@Patrick Kavanagh: agreed, the US nearly brought the world to nuclear apocalypse in 1960 because the russians moved missiles to cuba, a stone from the yanks. And now nato which is basically the us are building bases and pointing missiles towards russia & they want us to believe the russians are the threat
@Frank McGonigal: ..and the US president responsible was feted and fawned over just a year later when he visited Ireland in 1963.
What was the Russian pilot doing so far from home?
@George Vladisavljevic: Probably out of Kaliningrad.
This headline is a quote from a US military spokesman. I guess it must be true then!!
At the speed they would be traveling at and with only 5′ of clearance between both aircraft all it would have taken to bring both planes down would have a a gust of wind at the wrong time, turbulence or the slightest error of movement by either pilot.
I believe it’s standard practice for all planes to use a transponder, a device that alerts other planes in the vicinity of their presence when they may not be able to see them. It’s worth remembering that no pilot wants to have another plane, commercial or military, accidently fly into them. Russian planes routinely turn their transponders off making them a risk for all air traffic.
@Rusty Balls: yet you likely believe the US spying reconnaissance plane had its on while in Russias back yard!
u wouldnt have seen US spy planes within a 1000 miles of russia 30 years ago. bloody cheek of the yanks in this case
@gregory: Their training with their NATO allies. You know, the countries that broke from the Soviet Union and have no wish to return. Why are these countries so determined to ally themselves with ‘the west’ and not Russia?
@Honeybadger197:
David Hasselhoff
@Thinck: Keep that to yourself though. Say nuthin’…
https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/873260044317593600
Heres a few photos.
@Honeybadger197: A lot more than 5′ between those planes.
@Mick Jordan: Certainly is. Nice photos though. Serious selection of bombers.
@Honeybadger197: thats not it. Different plane different day.
@TeaRex: You’re 100% correct. Apologies.
@Honeybadger197: still great photos though
@Honeybadger197: Great pics. I liked the joke by USDoD in the comments as well.
I dont see the report mentioning where exactly it happened, other than international airspace. Was it just outside Russian airspace, in which case it was the American pilot was flying too close to a Russian plane.
The Russian pilot should have gone to Specsavers…..
What’s the issue here? If Russian spy planes were flying so close to American air space you can bet your ass they would scramble fights to intercept them.
Pot, kettle, black.
@David Ronan: Its the distance they came to that the US are giving out about. It was simply a stupid thing to do. Both planes could have been brought down by the smallest error or nature.
@Mick Jordan: were the Americans stupid for shooting the Syrian plane out of the sky in Syria this week?
@Cal Mooney: Not if they were defending members of their Special Forces from attack by the Syrian Air Force.
@Cal Mooney: No they were absolutely correct.
@Cal Mooney: you’re wasting your time here Cal….America=great lads altogether, Russia=terrible lads altogether. Sure it even said it on the news. The boys know their stuff.
@Mick Jordan: They never claimed they were protecting members of their special forces but do you think it’s legally OK for a country to shoot down a plane inside that jets own sovereign territory when the aggressor has no legitimate or legal right to be there at the moment?
A nation that is not legally merited to be inside another country has no legitimate claim to use the reasoning of ‘self defence’ at all anyways. Coming legally speaking, not opinionated points of view.
@Andy Brown: sadly different rules and standards are applied to here when asserting who’s right or wrong as usual. West = good, East = bad. Asides from operating illegally without invitation by the Syrian gov., the US has for 5 years now been training, arming and supporting the ‘rebels’ fighting against the Syrian army while ensuring they’re well supplies and enforcing embargoes on Syrian forces restocking supplies. In that time ISIS got to run amuck as the army where kept busy battling western backed foreign invaders under a long changing array of names. The Syrians still and understandable see all forces as illegal and legitimate targets as any country would. The US and our media have been busy ensuring we don’t make the above association and accept US are solely there to fight IS.
Pretty s**t spy plane.
The usual shit from the war mongers . Why can’t they stay at home and kill their own .
American shit.
@Brendan Keegan: Nice abusive comment there, did you ever wonder why these former Soviet Eastern Bloc countries rush to join NATO ? Russia is there nearest neighbor yet they can’t wait to join NATO
Keeping up foreign relations. Yes, I know the finger Goose.
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