Meeting with Cuppers, livestock-truck manufacturer, NL

 

Today Eyes on Animals together with Herman Klompjan (livestock driver and from Consultancy Animal Welfare Transport) visited Cuppers, a Dutch company that builds and repairs livestock trucks. Our reason for today’s visit was to encourage them to be sure that all the livestock trucks they build provide easy access to the animals during transport. Why? Because the EC 1/2005 law requires it and because quick and easy access is important to provide first-aid or euthanisia for ones that become unfit or injured. Additionally, easy access allows for the proper feeding and manual watering of animals forced to go on long journeys. Since months now we have been trying to convince the EU and Dutch authorities to better enforce this, and meeting directly with the makers of livestock trucks to discuss the importance. Having access on the sides also means that when the livestock trucks are parked tightly in between others, for example on a sea journey by boat, the driver or vet can still access the animals if there is an emergency.

All the livestock trucks that Cuppers make, even the air-conditioned sealed ones have inspection doors that can be opened on the side. This is already a big advantage compared to other companies that often do not build any side-access doors in their air conditioned vehicles and rely on camera-surveillance to see if the animals inside are ok. Cuppers is not a fan of cameras because he says you have to be able to hear the animals too. The smallest size of their inspection doors are 50cm x 32cm – bigger than at other companies but as seen in the photos above and below, still not big enough for Lesley from Eyes on Animals or Herman Klompjan to get in.

 

Cuppers is already planning to make their minimum-size access doors on their air-conditioned and forced ventilation trucks larger. They say that even their clients are making this request now. The rest of their trucks had perfectly suitable access – either larger doors on the side or medium-sized ones combined with a roof that can be raised (with side railings to prevent animals from falling), so that the height of each floor could easily be increased to 1.5 metres so a vet or driver could walk in via the back.

 

During our visit Cuppers showed us some other developments to improve welfare that we found very positive:

• Extendable loading ramp so animals do not have to climp up a steep inclination. This drastically reduces stress during loading. It also had good solid lateral protection and anti-slip pads. 

 

• Installing screens on openings to avoid injuries to the legs or noses of animals getting caught between the floor and side walls when the floors are raised. We have seen serious injuries caused by this risk time and time again (see photo on left taken last year by us) and such screens prevent this. We are going to promote this adaptation to all transport companies we know of, here and abroad, that transport smaller animals like sheep and pigs. It makes a world of difference as the pain these animals felt, and the fact that it was difficult to help them once their leg was already crushed, was horrible to see. 

 

•  Easy and quick protection of poultry in year-round. Cuppers has installed two types of side-tarps on their poultry transport vehicles – one to keep direct sun away on hot and sunny days and the other to keep the birds away from freezing winds in the winter. Because both are permanently fixed onto the top of the vehicle, the driver can decide on a day-by-day basis which one to use, as sometimes there are still very cold days in the spring, and hot days in the fall! We will promote this to chicken poultry companies in Europe but also in Canada, where currently the government is in court fighting against a major poultry processing company for transporting poultry in below freezing conditions without protection resulting in thousands arriving frozen to death.

We would like to thank Cuppers for the discussion and tour of his plant and congratulate him for being innovative and open-minded. Cuppers has confirmed that he likes our idea to stick rubber padding on all points where metal bangs against metal on the truck, to reduce noise. Banging metal creates additional stress to the animals, and rubber is always a practical and cheap solution.