Police called in to investigate ‘criminal’ horsemeat scandal

by JAMES MEIKLE, FELICITY LAWRENCE and PATRICK WINTOUR

Cross-posted from The Guardian

Package of horse meat, Switzerland, likely full of yummy cancerous toxins.

Scotland Yard has been asked by the food standards watchdog to investigate if there is a criminal element to the horsemeat scandal – as the food industry prepares to test every processed beef product line following evidence adulteration has spread from burgers to lasagne.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) says information so far “points either to gross negligence or deliberate contamination in the food chain” and David Heath, the food and farming minister has said there is “every probability” criminality was involved.

The Met confirmed on Friday that it has met with the FSA. Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, is holding an emergency meeting with heads of meat retailers and suppliers in London on Saturday. “I fear it may be a conspiracy with international implications,” he said.

Food businesses have been told to have test results on all their products with the FSA by next Friday but Paterson is expected to tell MPs in a statement on Monday that some suppliers have been complaining to departmental officials that they have come under pressure from supermarket suppliers to cut corners.

Hospital food, school meals and baby food being tested amid fear of ‘conspiracy with international implications’

Schools have also been warned by the Department for Education to check their food suppliers and Number 10 admitted it could not rule out that horsemeat may have been served in hospitals. At least one baby food manufacturer has ordered emergency tests but said it was confident in the security of its supply chain.

UK authorities, who were working with the Garda and government in Ireland, have asked French police to investigate particular contamination at Comigel, the French plant responsible for producing Findus lasagne found to contain up to 100% horse DNA. Ministers has also asked the EU’s law enforcement agency Europol for help. Inquiries since the scare first broke last month originally centred on Ireland, Britain and suppliers in Poland. Horse DNA has also been found in products in Sweden and Spain.

Mary Creagh, Labour’s shadow environment minister, wants the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) to be involved. In a letter to environment secretary Owen Patterson, she said: “I have been given information about British companies who may potentially be involved in the illegal horsemeat trade. I am keen to share this information with the police to ensure that a full investigation can be made into any criminal activity.”

The investigations into possible criminality are thought to involve not only what has happened at factories and slaughterhouses but the wider pan-European horse trade. Animal welfare charities have long warned that lack of supervision in the transport of live animals has meant there is illegal activity. Continue reading at Guardian.co.uk >>

WE SAY

This has been a long time coming. Finally what we have been telling anyone who would listen is being exposed.

The EU has been lobbied and warned, who have palmed horse advocates off with passport systems and equine documentation forms that are easily forged if they exist at all or with the right horse.

The Int’l Fund for Horses began its campaign in 2008 and were later joined by concerned citizens and horse lovers of other countries as the word spread. None of the governments lobbied including the US would allow a ban on horse slaughter and the horse meat trade. Not only that, but State politicians in the US are working to return horse slaughter for human consumption to US soil. This is highly reprehensible and totally irresponsible.

Maybe now the right action will be taken. For people who like to eat horse meat — so what, we say. It is not like there is nothing else available for them to eat.

RELATED READING

Tuesday’s Horse
– 100% horse meat found in UK frozen lasagne
– No honor in horse slaughter or drug documentation system it uses
– Shocking neglect of horses revealed at abattoir amid row over horse meat burgers
– Traces of horse meat found in burgers

No honor in horse slaughter or drug documentation system it uses

by VIVIAN GRANT FARRELL

Frenchman with a platter of horse meat on the hoof artwork.

For those who eat horse meat, you will never really know how safe, or how toxic, it is.

The reason is that the documentation containing a horse’s medical history demanded by slaughterhouses is so easily forged. In some cases, it is allegedly absent altogether.

A whistle blower pointed out that a slaughter horse without the necessary paperwork can be given the documentation of another slaughter horse who was killed during transport, or died in a feedlot. This is just one example. They are all very easy to do.

Why do slaughterhouses require a horse’s medical history before killing him for his meat, particularly for human consumption? The answer is because of the laundry list of drugs a horse may be administered through his lifetime that can make his meat lethal for humans to consume.

Documentation systems, such as the Equine Information Document required by EU-regulated abattoirs in Canada and Mexico, or the passport system relied on in Europe and the United Kingdom, are conducted on the honor system almost exclusively by kill buyers, the middlemen who acquire the horses. Who monitors this? You could ask the same concerning the agents and officers charged to enforce their government’s regulations in these matters. Are they left to operate on the honor system too? It would appear so.

As we have seen demonstrated time and time again, there is no honor in slaughter.

One glaring case in point is the alarm last year by Canadian slaughter plants who decided to reject trailer loads of U.S. racehorses ostensibly because of the amount of banned drugs they are given. Yet at the same time Canadian slaughter plants blithely accepted their own racehorses who were likely given, at the very least, two of the most common drugs that bars their meat from entering the human food chain, namely phenylbutazone (bute) and clenbuterol (clen).

Because of the latest horse meat scandal, toxic horse meat is back in the news.

In an article entitled “Horse meat in burgers might not be as harmless as you think“, Camilla Smith, reporting for The Spectator blog, reminds us of some unpalatable facts concerning horse medication documentation.

In 2012 Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] withdrew funding from, and thereby forced the closure of, the National Equine Database, which held the passport details of every horse in the United Kingdom. A horse’s passport contains details of all drugs ever administered to that horse, some of which could leave the horse flesh unfit for human consumption. But the loss of the database has meant that it could now be possible for a horse to have two passports –- one with the correct details of its medical history, and one which appears to be ‘clean’ when the horse is ready to be slaughtered.

Ireland has the same problem. In May 2012 the Sunday Times reported that Irish horses with forged passports were stopped en route to an English abattoir, with the article stating that ‘hundreds [of horses] are being sold to abattoirs using forged passports’.

Wherever horses are bred, there are tons and tons of horses slaughtered or exported for slaughter for human consumption, which means there are tons and tons of potentially toxic horse meat imported, exported and eaten.

For anyone who thinks that any sort of documentation program will stop or even slow down the slaughter of horses for human consumption, we are sorry to dash your hopes. No government authority, no matter what country, is serious about the issue of toxic horse meat — they only make empty policies that make them seem to be. If any decision maker were truly serious about this issue, they would ban the horse meat trade altogether. There is only one surefire way to end it, and that is for people to stop eating horses.

Limerick plant one of only five licensed to slaughter horses

IRELAND
Cross-posted from Limerick Leader

WRITTEN BY GERARD FITZGIBBONS

What’s for supper? You are, mate. Maybe not there in Ireland, but they’re happy to kill you for your meat for Europeans to eat.

A NEWCASTLE West livestock factory is one of only five facilities in Ireland licensed to slaughter horses for meat, it has been confirmed.

The Ashgrove Meats facility in Churchtown has been slaughtering horses and exporting their meat for consumption in mainland Europe for the past three years. It is the only facility licensed to do so in Munster.

The market for horse meat has increased rapidly in the past four years, based on a surge in demand for the food in France, Belgium and Italy. In 2008, slightly over 2,000 horses were slaughtered for meat in Ireland, compared to over 12,000 in 2011.

While there is no market for horse meat in Ireland, public curiosity with the slaughter of horses has increased following the discovery of horse meat traces in frozen burgers sold in a number of supermarkets in Ireland and the UK.

In Ireland there are five facilities licensed to slaughter horses for meat – three of which are approved and supervised directly by the Department of Agriculture.

Ashgrove Meats is licensed and supervised by Limerick County Council, one of two such facilities in Ireland which fall under the auspices of a local authority, due to its medium size output.

John McCarthy, veterinary inspector with Limerick County Council, said that while horses are “not traditionally a species slaughtered in Ireland”, the process is subject to the same regulation and oversight as the slaughter of any other type of livestock.

“Obviously there is no market for the meat in Ireland, but there is on the continent, and always has been”, Mr McCarthy said, before adding that in the past 15 years “a small number of plants” such as Ashgrove have begun to concentrate on horse slaughtering as a result of a steady increase in European demand.

Horses killed at meat factories can earn anything from €100 to €500 for their owners, depending on their size and weight. The majority of horse meat produced in Ireland is exported to France, Italy and Belgium where it is eaten as cheap steaks, sausages and in other forms. Read more >>