Animals are not usually killed on the farms where they’re kept, so they have to be moved to slaughterhouses, called abattoirs. As slaughterhouses get bigger and fewer in number, animals are transported longer and longer distances before being killed. As a result, hundreds of millions of animals are trucked around Europe each year. Unfortunately, some are transported even further afield, to different countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

So why are animals exported? The answer is simple – money. Most of the sheep that go to France and Spain and other EU countries are not killed immediately, but are allowed to graze for a week or two first. So they can recover from the journey? Because people feel sorry for them? No – so that the dealers can claim they are Spanish or French sheep, label them ‘Home Produced’ and sell the meat at a higher price.

The laws which govern how farm animals are treated differ in every country. For example, some have no laws about the way animals are killed while others, like Britain, have slaughter regulations. Under British law, animals must be made unconscious before they’re killed. Frequently this doesn’t happen or the regulations are simply ignored. However, the situation is no better and may be even worse in other European countries where there are virtually no controls. In Greece, animals may be beaten to death with hammers, in Spain sheep often have their spinal column severed with a screwdriver, and in France animals’ throats are cut while they are still fully conscious.

You’d think that if the British were really serious about protecting animals we wouldn’t allow them to go to countries where there are no abattoir controls of where the controls are poorer than in Britain. Not a bit of it. It’s perfectly okay for farmers to export live animals to any country they choose, to be killed in ways which are forbidden in their country or origin.

In 1994 alone, about two million sheep and 450,000 calves were exported from Britain for slaughter. About 70,000 pigs were also exported. However, pigs often die en route – generally from heart attacks caused by fear, panic and stress. Not surprisingly, all animals find being transported stressful, whatever the distance travelled.

Just try and imagine what it must be like to be an animal which has never known anything but the pen in which you have been kept of the fields in which you graze. Suddenly, you’re prodded and poked into a lorry and driven for hours on end. Often you are separated from your own herd and forced together with animals you don’t know – unnatural behaviour for most animals, and very distressing.

The conditions in the lorries are often disgusting too. Most of the lorries used have metal trailers of two of three tiers. The urine and droppings from the animals at the top fall on those below. There is no water, no food, no bedding, just a metal floor and tiny gaps in the sides for ventilation.

When the lorry doors slam shut behind them, animals are on the road to misery. They may travel for 50 hours or more, be starved, driven crazy with thirst, be beaten, kicked, punched, dragged by their tails or ears or prodded with electric goads. Animal welfare organisations have tracked many lorry loads of animals and in almost every case, they found that the recommended journey times were exceeded and the recommendations about rest periods, feeding and watering were ignored. There have also been numerous news reports of whole lorry loads of sheep and lambs being left in the baking sun without water until as many as a third of them died from thirst and heat stroke.

Animals are crammed together, bounced around and frequently in pain. According to the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), more than two-thirds of all sheep and lambs are bruised, some badly, by the time they get to the abattoir, and up to one million chickens are injured every year as a result of their heads or legs becoming caught in the transport crates. I have seen sheep and calves so crowded together that their legs stuck out of the ventilators in the sides of lorries, obviously causing great distress. Independent organisations say that animals are sometimes crushed to death.

For those animals exported abroad, this nightmare journey may also include being transported by plane or shipped by ferry or boat, sometimes on rough seas. Conditions here can be particularly bad with lack of ventilation leading to overheating and death from heat stroke or lack of water.

It’s certainly no secret how exported animals are treated. Many people have witnessed it and some have even shot video as proof. But you don’t have to search out ill-treatment with hidden cameras; it’s everywhere for everyone to see.

I have watched sheep being punched in the face with full force because they were too frightened to jump down from a lorry. I have seen pigs kicked and stamped on as they were forced to leap from the upper tier of a truck to the ground two metres below, just because the unloaders were too lazy to put up a ramp. And I have seen them break their legs on landing and then watched as they were dragged and kicked into the slaughterhouse. I have witnessed boars having their snouts broken with an iron bar because the fear and overcrowding had made them bite each other. ‘It stops them thinking about fighting,’ said the man who did it.

But perhaps the most horrible sight I have ever seen was in a film made by the organisation Compassion in World Farming, which showed what happened to a young, fully-grown bull that had broken his pelvis on the transport ship and was unable to stand. The handlers applied an electric cattle prod to its testicles and delivered a 70,000 volt shock to try and force it to stand. When humans do this to other humans it is called torture and the world condemns it.

I made myself watch as for 30 minutes the men continued to shock the crippled beast and each time they did it, it bellowed in pain and scrambled at the deck, trying to stand. Eventually, they shackled a chain to the bull’s leg and hauled it up with a crane, dumping him on the quayside. An argument between the ship’s captain and the harbour master followed and eventually the bull was hoisted back up and dumped on the deck of the ship, still alive but barely conscious. As soon as the ship left the harbour the poor creature was dumped in the sea to drown.

British courts say it is quite legal to send animals to face this kind of abuse and claim that there are regulations in all European countries governing how animals are transported. They claim that European inspectors check on their treatment. But what is written on paper and what happens in reality are very different things. The truth is that the people who are supposed to do the checking admit that they have never carried out a single check throughout the whole of Europe. A European commissioner confirmed this in answer to a question in the European parliament.

In 1995, many people in the UK were so disgusted by the trade in live exports that they took to the streets. They protested at British ports and airports such as Shoreham, Brightlingsea, Dover and Coventry, where animals were being shipped or flown to other countries. They even tried to stop the lorries loaded with calves, sheep and lambs from reaching the ports and airports by direct action. Despite the fact that public opinion in support of the protestors, the British government refused to ban the trade.

Instead, it announced with a big fanfare that the European Union had agreed regulations which would, for the first time, control journey times of animals in Europe. In fact, all that had been done was to give official approval to what was already happening. For example, the journey time for sheep was set so that they could still be transported without a break for 28 hours – the time needed to truck them from northern Europe to southern Europe. There were no proposals to improve inspections so even if transporters continued to break the new regulations, there’d be no one to check on them.

But the fight against live exports hasn’t ended there. Some protestors have decided to continue the struggle by challenging the British government in the courts, including the European Court. Others have continued to protest at the ports and airports, as well as at the farms where the animals are bred. Still more have tried to make the world aware of the plight of exported animals.

As a result of these efforts, it is likely that live exports from Britain to Europe will one day be stopped. Ironically, a scandal about a deadly disease called BSE (or mad cow disease) stopped the export of calves from the UK in 1996. The British government had finally admitted that people were at risk from eating beef infected with BSE which was widespread amongst British herds, so not surprisingly, other countries refused to buy British cattle (for more on BSE, see pp. 94-96). It is unlikely, though, that the trade between European counties will end altogether in the foreseeable future. Pigs will still be sent from Holland all the way to southern Italy, and calves will be sent from Italy to veal crates in Holland. Their meat will still be sold in Britain and around the world. This trade in misery lies at the heart of eating meat.