Contact info to people who matter, combined with accurate facts that can be repeated in gripe letters or mails, need to be initially provided by the major welfare groups.  They have the funding to undertake it, they have the staff to obtain this info, and many of them have their supporters of specific issues funding them; so why not do it ?

EU Talk the Talk.

We have experienced it for years with the live animal transport campaign to eliminate suffering, the EU specialises in ‘talking the talk’, whilst in reality, they do very little for real actual progress in animal transport welfare.  We are used to / and always just get fobbed off with Reg. 1/2005 as being the answer to all of our concerns.  Well it is not.

But with my many years of campaigning for animal rights and better welfare improvements during transport, I have also reached the situation where I am questioning the whole current scenario of campaigning and what is really going on. 

Basically, the public funded animal welfare NGO’s do a more than fantastic job in undertaking trails of transporters; gathering evidence and documenting it.  All of the evidence; and it is a vast amount obtained over many years; is documented by them and usually formally presented in varying forms to the EU with the real hope of obtaining change.  There is nothing negative about any of this; campaigning for change is what they as organisations exist for.  I have undertaken evidence gathering myself on certain live animal transport issues in the past, met with politicians and banged the table with the obvious / clear evidence; and have lost count of the number of formal complaints and reports I have written to the EU exposing the ‘wrongs’ of specific hauliers, at specific times, involving specific consignments of the poor, sentient suffering animals.  Always, the efforts basically result in no actions or any real positive progress EU, as we have seen with ANIT this week.

I have sat and read for a very long time the statements that emerge from different sectors of the welfare groups; intergroups and the rest saying for years that ‘enough is enough’; we need changes.  Unfortunately, despite the words, which we all agree with but hear far too often, nothing much in my opinion really seems to change in reality; the EU does not really listen, and it certainly does not act as a positive regulation enforcement machine. 

So where are we going with the live animal export issue now ? – this last week in Brussels (ANIT) witnessed a meeting at the EU regarding live animals in transport, and what could be done lenitively to improve conditions for them.  This time it was yet another EU team established by the EU – this time called the ANIT: the Committee of Inquiry on the Protection of Animals during Transport.  Maybe ‘ANTI’ would better describe their approach.

The EU is and always has been a master at forming huge amounts of paperwork, web information, investigative departments and sections, committees and reporting organisations who are established and well paid (with EU taxpayers funds no doubt) to find out forever (it seems like it) what is going wrong; report on it again and again; and then hopefully at some long distant time in the future to fix it; bringing light into the forever dark tunnel that the campaigner stands at the end of.  But they (EU) never really appear to fix things much; the ‘normal EU campaigner citizen’ drowns in the deluge of different sites, information and political ‘yukspeak’ which can be found in the overwhelming EU maze of data that exists today.  This is where campaigners should rely on welfare organisations to do a lot more of the direct personal contact work for them; as well as giving them accurate information and facts to support their mails.

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