Day 2 of Eyes on Animals International TASKFORCE Meeting

Today was our second day of our TASKFORCE meeting. We were today also accompanied by a Canadian camera team from a large national TV channel. We explained to the foreign participants some of the recent successful campaigns we had helped work on in the Netherlands- namely the phasing out of pig castration. A significant number of Dutch supermarkets have agreed to stop selling meat from castrated pigs. As a result, roughly thirty percent of male Dutch piglets are now no longer castrated and the number keeps increasing. Several slaughterhouses in Holland and also Toennies Fleisch, the large pig slaughterhouse in Germany that supplies many Dutch supermarkets, have made huge efforts to switch over to slaughtering intact male pigs instead of castrated ones. Varkens in Nood explained the wise tactics they used to put pressure on the supermarkets to make this change and Eyes on Animals explained the situation in the field (for the farmers that stopped castration and the slaughterhouses that are able to detect boar taint now at their plant). In the evening we brainstormed together about what animal welfare issues were most urgent and how we could best work on them together, in order to attain some results for the animals in all of our countries.