Eurogroup for Animals believes the resignation of Commissioner Dalli announced on 16 October brings new hope for Europe’s animals and urges his replacement as Commissioner to start working to improve the welfare of animals as quickly as possible. Many important decisions have been left in the air by Commissioner Dalli including maintaining the hard fought for ban on testing cosmetics on animals, but also in the area of animal transport, the animal welfare strategy, the adoption a robust animal health law, as well as for the introduction of measures that will protect Europe’s pets.

On 20 October, Tonio Borg was presented as Malta’s candidate for Commissioner and will now face a hearing at the European Parliament on 13 November before his position is confirmed.

In the meantime, President Barroso has asked Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič, the Commissioner for Inter-Institutional Relations and Administration to take over the Health and Consumer Policy portfolio until the new Commissioner is appointed.

The European Commission unveiled its work programme for 2013-2014 on 25 October.

Regarding animal welfare, the Commission plans are disappointing especially as h no legislative proposal is foreseen. However, several initiatives with animal welfare related aspects are included such as a legislative proposal on animal cloning for food, the review of EU legal framework for organic production, the preparation of an EU position on the follow-up to Rio +20, a Regulation on official controls along the food chain, and the framework Regulation on animal health.

For more information and to download the work programme and its annex, click here

The European Commission, the Cypriot Presidency, UECBV and AVEC recently held a conference on the implementation of Regulation 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing as new rules will be  applicable from 1 January 2013, to discuss the level of preparedness of all major stakeholders and Member States.

Overall, the data unveiled showed a very low level of preparation by most Member States. According to the latest official figures given by the Commission and received from 20 Member States, only four (Denmark, Germany, Sweden and UK) will be fully compliant with the new legislation on time.

Eurogroup is appalled by the situation and urges Member States and the European Commission to take all necessary steps in order to make sure the Regulation is implemented effectively next year.

On 17 October Member States and stakeholders attended a meeting organised by the European Commission on the implementation of the ban on sow stalls from 1 January 2013.

The latest official figures show that only five Member States are fully compliant today and forecasts for the 22 other Member States show varying levels of non-compliance by the deadline.

While the European Commission announced it intends to start infringement procedures as quickly as possible, much more time will be needed for all holdings to achieve full-conversion. This situation is unacceptable and unfair for those countries that are already compliant.

Eurogroup and its members are participating in CALLISTO, an EU funded international project to assess the role of companion animals as a source of infectious diseases for people and food animals.

Half of households in industrialised society keep companion animals, commonly cats and dogs. Yet increasing numbers of exotic and wild animals are kept which pose risks which owners often do not understand such as exposure to unfamiliar infectious agents that these animals may harbour and expose the lax nature of regulations on wildlife trade.

At the CALLISTO conference in October, stakeholders discussed the important conclusions from year 1 of this 3-year project. Year 1 involved assessing the current situation regarding policy, diseases of concern and sociological and welfare perspectives.

Year 2 of the project will entail risk analysis followed by the third year focus on policy recommendations.

For more information about the project especially the outcomes of Year 1, click here

Following the recent decision by Norway and Canada to resume their challenge of the EU ban on imports of seal products, Eurogroup for Animals would like to highlight again that most Europeans are against cruelty to seals.

An Ipsos-MORI poll released in July 2011 shows that a majority of people across 11 EU countries support the ban on seal products. This follows an amendment passed in the European Parliament last year calling on Canada to drop its challenge to the EU seal ban at the World Trade Organisation otherwise Europe would not ratify a trade agreement with Canada.

On average, nearly three in four adults (72%) across the 11 countries surveyed say they support the EU’s ban on the sale of seal products in Europe.

In the same context, a newly published study by veterinarians Andrew Butterworth and Mary Richardson confirms that commercial sealing is inherently inhumane, and that humane killing procedures cannot be respected in the context of commercial seal hunts.

To see the poll results, click here

To download the study, click here

A working group of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) met on 23 October in Paris to start developing global standards for animal welfare. The standards are expected to be completed by October 2013.

The meeting clarified that the new standards have no intention to impede the operation of other private standards on animal welfare. ISO standards will act as a global tool for animal welfare management rather than just a prescriptive standard.

Animal welfare organisations including Eurogroup, and its member organisations RSPCA, HSI and WSPA attended the meeting and were offered the opportunity to present their views on how the technical specification should be developed and what they should look like.

To read Eurogroup's note, click here

The Transatlantic Animal Welfare Council (TAWC), for which Eurogroup for Animals provides the secretariat, welcomes the European Parliament’s adoption of its report on Trade and Economic Relations with the United States. Crucially, and for the first time the European Parliament includes a mention of “animal protection standards;” a significant step forward.

To promote this step forward and to mark the occasion, the Transatlantic Animal Welfare Counci released a press release. To read it click here

Next week on 6 November, the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI Committee) will vote on the draft report by Dr Schnellhardt MEP regarding the non-commercial movement of pet animals.

Eurogroup would like to remind all members of the ENVI Committee of the importance of this report, which  reflects the concerns of EU citizens and which paves the way for the introduction of a requirement for dogs, cats and ferrets to be registered on an EU-wide authorised database and urges all members to vote in favour of the report.

For more information, click here

On Thursday 11 October, Queen guitarist Brian May as well as Gavin Grant, CEO of the RSPCA and Anne Brummer, CEO of ‘Save Me’ took part in a serious of meetings and interviws hosted at the European Parliament by Richard Howitt MEP to stop the cull of badgers in the United Kingdom.

Meetings were scheduled with UK heads of delegations of different political groups as well as with the British Vice-President of the European Parliament and the UK coordinator of the ECR group in the Agriculture Committee. It was a good way to get a better picture about the EU’s vaccination policy and the EU’s acceptance of the newly developed DIVA vaccine which allows a differentiation to be made between tuberculosis infected and vaccinated bovines. The vaccine which is considered a major breakthrough could be placed on the market within the next months and its systematic application could help stop the culling of badgers that are seen as vectors of the tuberculosis disease.

Brian May and his delegation also met with William Neale, member of the Cabinet of Environment Commissioner Potočnik and with Georg Häusler, Head of Cabinet for Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos. The latter made it clear that the EU does not ban the vaccination of animals and that the problem lies in the commercial acceptance of products from vaccinated animals especially in third countries.

The European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee adopted at its last meeting the own initiative report prepared by Janusz Wojciechowski MEP. The report includes a demand for the revision of Regulation 1/2005 and a pushes for animals to be slaughtered as near the place of rearing as possible.
The report will now be forwarded for adoption by the European Parliament at its Plenary session in December.

To coincide with the Committee’s vote, Eurogroup released a new academic report authored by Dr Alexander Rabbitsch which compares current transport times of livestock with the EU social law on drivers’ hours. The research shows that both laws are incompatible and that if the mandatory application of the social legislation governing lorry drivers is fully applied only multi-manning with three drivers will allow a long journey to be compliant with both the live animal transport and social regulations.

For more details click here

The European Commission’s Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) recently published the outcome of audits carried out in Bulgaria and Mexico during which shortcomings related to the welfare of animals were found.

The audit conducted in Bulgaria evaluated the implementation of controls for animal welfare on farms and during transport and reveals that there is still need for improvement particularly in terms of verification of effectiveness of official controls, training and enforcement. Moreover, no clear guidance is in place and the controls are mainly based on a documentary quantitative assessment of controls carried out against those planned. In addition to that, the report also mentions that regarding animal welfare during transport, additional effort is needed at major border points between the EU and Turkey, to help improve training of staff and communication of animal welfare non-compliances to Member States of origin.

To read the report, click here

The audit conducted in Mexico evaluated the operation of controls over the production of fresh horse meat and meat products intended for export to the EU as well as certification procedures. Although the report concludes that certification for the export of fresh equine meat to the EU is in line with EU requirements, auditors do not exclude that in one slaughterhouse the dressing of carcasses occasionally started before the bleeding had ended. Discrepancies were also noted in the registered statistics concerning the number of imported horses and slaughtered imported horses.

To read the report, click here