Livestock lobby targets Shephard

(First Edition)

PRESSURE on the Government to influence the European Union's policies on the export of live animals from the UK and throughout Europe increased yesterday.

A mass lobby of Parliament by animal activists yesterday, and the release of new secretly filmed evidence, shot in France and Italy, will pressurise Gillian Shephard, the Minister of Agriculture, to rethink the Government's attitude to EU animal welfare law.

The lobby, organised by the UK presure group, Compassion in World Farming, highlighted what it called the 'the suffering endured by the millions of animals who are shunted around and out of Europe every year'. Last year the UK contributed 2 million animals to a trade which involves livestock transported on what CIWF calls 'appallingly long journeys, simply for them to be cruelly slaughtered in some distant abattoir'.

As the agriculture war between London and Bonn intensified over the German ban on British beef, new fronts in the war of ideals involved Holland, France, and Spain where, CIWF says, laws to protect animals are 'a sham'.

The CIWF campaign wants the livestock transportation limit to be eight hours. Such a move would mean most UK livestock having to be slaughtered in Britain.