There was an audit of Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) between 12 and 21 February 2018. ” The aim of the audit, was to assess the suitability and effectiveness of existing ones measures for preventing tail biting and avoiding the routine culling of tails in pigs”.
Who is DG SANTE?
It is the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety of the Commission and responsible for monitoring the implementation of the relevant legislation. It is headed by Mr. Andriukaitis, who is known to us as “the do nothing man”.
A kind of police is DG SANTE, we can say, which controls (with its many sub-directorates) , whether agreed measures for the health of humans and animals are observed.
These directorates in Brussels are (May 2011):
Directorate A: General Affairs (6 departments)
Directorate B: Consumer Affairs (6 Departments)
Directorate C: Public Health (4 departments)
Directorate D: Health System and Products (5 Departments)
Directorate E: Food Production Safety (6 Departments)
Directorate F: Food and Veterinary Office (7 departments)
Directorate G: Veterinary and International Affairs (8 Departments)
These are further subdivided into related departments (see below on the link), so we ended up with a huge apparatus that costs for us much money and usually without having a useful effectiveness.
The current situation in Germany
By crop we mean the cutting off of the tail of a pig. The purpose is: pigs are omnivores, they even nibble each other. The “specialists” call this “caudophagia”: tail biting.
Every four weeks, when the new piglets are there, the farmer comes and cuts off their tails, more precisely: the last third of the tail. He presses their tail tip against the glowing hot cutter. The top falls, the heat fuses the wound, the farmer puts the pig back into the bay.
That is nothing but a painful mutilation, an amputation.
Actually, what every farmer does is illegal. The German animal protection law, paragraph 6, prohibits the amputation of body parts in vertebrates.
The EU Directive 2008/120 / EC even clarifies the prohibition for pigs: “A cropping must not be carried out routinely.” Exceptions are allowed with veterinary approval.
But the exception has long been the rule in Germany. Experts appreciatethat up to 99 percent of the piglets from conventional farming are cropped.
A ringlet tail pigs have almost only in pictures.
Farmers talk about practicing animal welfare, and claim that without cupping pigs would bite each other and cause bloody acute injuries, bad abscesses, inflammation in the entire back area.
Cause of the (illegal) routine cropping.
The intelligent animals live there in a monotonous stable on full slatted floors and have no employment. They have no freedom of movement, no employment opportunity and no retreat. Due to boredom or stress they start to bite into the tails of other animals.
They suffer from the loss of their natural behavior and can not live up to their needs. In boars, however, tail biting is unknown.
But what is the pig industry doing? It does not change the keeping conditions, but one adapts the animals to the Farma conditions, to make as much money out of them as possible! No cropped pigs, no one wants!
The result of the audit from 21. February 2018
They did not find a practicable solution for doing without cropping!!
The report concludes that the federal and state authorities’ strategies for reducing tail biting and avoiding the routine curbing of tails in pigs have not produced any concrete results, and are still routinely cropping tails in Germany, despite considerable sums of money spent on research and disseminated the respective results.
Certificates of established veterinarians justifying the need for cropping are not based on sufficient evidence that other measures have been taken to avoid tail biting. This and the lack of verification of these certificates during official controls lead to routine tail docking.
The competent authorities agreed that the initiatives of the Action Plan had not yet fully realized, but made it clear that this is a long-term project and that they assume that the continuous involvement of stakeholders and the establishment of new working groups will result in a appropriate effect will be achieved.
With other, simple words: they have controlled, and nothing has changed. They made suggestions but they did not punish anyone.
The pigs will continue to be chopped up with hot iron, and we will continue to give money to the peasants, so that they may respond to the suggestions of the audit and perhaps practice them.
Until then, it remains legal, which is illegal.
This is also a way to do a job.
However, it is the most ineffective and most sloppy way of all.
Click to access organisation-chart-dg-sante_en.pdf
My best regards, Venus
World Animals Voice 