NEWLY ELECTED FINE Gael MEP Nina Carberry has said she was “horrified” to to hear about the allegations concerning the country’s only active abattoir for horses, stating she plans to use her time Europe to push for passport regulation reform for horses.
In an interview with The Journal, Carberry, who was previously a champion jockey, said the passport regulations needs to be “cleaned up” at an EU level.
During the summer, an RTÉ Investigates programme used hidden cameras at the site of the abattoir for horses in Straffan, Co Kildare and uncovered animal welfare concerns for horses.
The behaviour was filmed as in a building where Shannonside Foods keeps horses before they are brought to the kill room.
Some dying horses were filmed being hit with long lengths of plastic piping, while in another incident, a horse was filmed over several hours while struggling to get back to its feet after it fell.
The only attention it received was the illegal use of a pitchfork in its side in an attempt to force it up. The horse then died after hours of struggling.
While the programme focused on animal cruelty, it also highlighted issues around the traceability of thoroughbreds, the falsification of passports and animals implanted with more than one microchip.
RTÉ Investigates also highlighted how falsifying identities of horses can compromise the integrity of the human food chain.
Carberry said the programme was “shocking”, telling The Journal that everyone was horrified by what they had seen.
She added that she was “very grateful” to RTÉ for carrying out the investigation, ”because other than that, how would we have known”.
“There’s a lot to be done, like with the transparency of the passports issues, it is something I really want to work really hard on in Europe, because that’s a big issue.
“I want to do that within the horse interest group over here as well. As soon as I seen that, I was like, this has to be done at a European level. We have very high passport regulations in Ireland, the UK and France, but not across Europe. So it’s something that we need to clean up,” she said.
The level of cruelty show to the animals was “not acceptable”, she added. Carberry has previously confirmed that she has never sent any of her horses to Shannonside Foods.
“You can see by the people in the video that they’ve never handled horses before, like the way they were treating them, like they didn’t want to even touch them. So that’s not acceptable to have people that can’t handle horses working like that. I was horrified, to be honest, and I think anybody that has horses and was looking at this, I think they were disgusted by it,” she said.
“There’s lots of issues to go at it, but definitely something for me to try and clean up is definitely transparency of horses across Europe,” said Carberry, who said horses going to slaughter need to have an identity and that should be the case right across the European Union.
“That’s something I really want to work really hard on,” said the Midlands North-West MEP.
Owners left their horses at the abattoir with the full expectation that they would be treated correctly, she said.
“They absolutely weren’t. It’s up to the abattoir to make sure that these people that are in there are able to look after the horses. It was totally wrong,” she said.
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