New legislation passed by the Dutch Senate could signal a sea change in animal welfare legislation across the EU. The Dutch move comes at an interesting time: the EU is on the verge of passing ‘End the Cage Age’ legislation, a significant event in farm-animal welfare which could see all farmed animals out of cages by 2027.
The new Dutch law was initiated by the pro-animal Partij voor de Dieren, and will come into effect in 2023.
It stipulates that animals must no longer suffer pain or discomfort when kept in cages or stables, and must be able to display natural behaviour. Displaying natural behaviour will almost certainly mean that piglets or calves cannot be removed from their mothers before they are weaned. The new law could also prohibit owners from keeping a rabbit in a hutch or a bird in a cage because these are social animals. The legislation may eventually put an end to intensive livestock farming in the Netherlands.
In contrast, the Irish Government’s Animal Welfare Strategy, published earlier this year, is a million miles from what they are doing in the Netherlands. While the introduction to the strategy reads like an animal rights charter, the strategy itself falls depressingly short of meaningful progress towards a more enlightened approach to animal welfare. Anyone standing inside a pig or poultry shed, as I have done, will understand that raising animals in these conditions is the antithesis of good animal welfare.
The campaign to end factory farming is growing every day. A more enlightened approach to how we raise our farmed animals is taking hold, based on the widespread acceptance that animals are sentient beings like us. The Irish Government is one of the best at talking the animal welfare talk, but it has to be one of the worst when it comes to taking any meaningful action.
Gerry Boland
Keadue
Roscommon
Our shameful trade in live exports
The live export trade is a stain on our society. Every year, nearly 2bn cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and other animals are crammed onto filthy, crowded ships and tossed about on rough seas for days or even weeks — forced to stand in their own waste, often without adequate water, food, or veterinary care. Many animals are trampled by others, or die of dehydration, starvation, or illness.
Their suffering is compounded when accidents occur and ships are delayed, catch fire, or even sink. In November 2019, a ship transporting 14,600 sheep capsized shortly after leaving port. In spite of many days of rescue attempts, only 180 sheep survived the disaster.
Animals raised for their flesh and skin already endure miserable lives. The least we can do is spare them the unnecessary trauma of an arduous journey overseas before they’re killed. Monday, June 14, is Ban Live Exports International Awareness Day — let’s use this occasion to contact policymakers and demand that they end this shameful trade. And let’s also take personal responsibility. The suffering of animals will only end once people stop eating and wearing animal-derived products.
Sascha Camilli
Media & Special Projects Coordinator
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
8 All Saints St
London
Verbal gymnastics from Sinn Féin
So Eoin Ó Broin (June 9) argues that he wouldn’t describe Sinn Féin’s
practice of training activists to set up fake polling companies as lying.
Hmmm, the mind boggles. How would he describe it? Deviousness?
Subterfuge? Economical with the truth? Verbal gymnastics?
Aileen Hooper
Stoneybatter
Dublin 7
No place for BLM gestures here
Get up off the knee, Irish international soccer players. This frivolous gesture has no place here when the issue of Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a phenomenon taking place more than 4,800km across the Atlantic in the US.
There is nothing brave about bending the knee to anyone or anything. Leave the pseudo-politics to the always self-indulgent.
Win games for us in the course of the 90 minutes, and do not substitute “the knee” as the main talking point at press conferences.
Robert Sullivan
Bantry
Co Cork
Journalists holding Government to account
Reference Daniel McConnell’s article in Saturday’s Irish Examiner (June 5), the Covid epidemic has highlighted to me the importance of good journalism and diligent journalists in the role of keeping politicians accountable. Initially, the Government has been hiding behind Brexit, and now it is the Covid pandemic.
Next, it is going to be the corporation tax saga. This is allowing the Government to get away with all accountability in the present day. The fact that a couple on two good wages cannot afford to buy a house in this country is scandalous.
The Government also has totalitarian power under the current health legislation. They are running native Irish businesses into the ground, destroying jobs, destroying the work ethic of young people, deciding who can work and who cannot work. They are deciding who can travel and where they can and cannot go. All our civil liberties are being eroded from underneath us. This is supposed to be a free state and a republic. It certainly does not feel like that to me. They are scaremongering the public into submission. It has become apparent to me that journalists are playing a vital role in the accountability of Government.
Eoghan Bresnihan
Cork
Country run by incompetents
The lessons to be learned from the “fake polling” that politicians engaged in are numerous. It also confirms what many now fear — we have fallen under the direction of inept careerists rather than those answering a call to do what is best for their country and fellow citizens. Look at the misery and chaos that reigns in the lives of thousands of citizens unable to access the basic necessities in a country that some say is the wealthiest in Europe.
We must not make the fundamental error of ascribing to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Jim O’Sullivan
Rathedmond
Sligo
Church’s revision of law just a PR stunt
Fergus Finlay hit the nail on the head with ‘Church still incapable of saying there is no excuse for a priest abusing a child’ ( Irish Examiner, June 8).
In 2014, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a devastating 16-page condemnation of the Church’s record on abuse of children (ref CRC/C/VAT/CO/2).
It urged that the Church “immediately remove all known and suspected child sexual abusers from assignment and refer the matter to the relevant law enforcement authorities for investigation and prosecution purposes”; and “ensure a transparent sharing of all archives”. And more.
This canon law revision is just the latest of many PR stunts and meaningless apologies — betraying victims while protecting perpetrators and those who shield them.
Pope Francis has defied the UN experts by doing anything but what they urged. Ireland and other nation states need to put pressure on the Vatican to conform to these CRC recommendations.
Keith Porteous Wood
President, National Secular Society
Dutch House,
307-308 High Holborn
London
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