A quick morning look at the situation at the border keeps us busy without time to eat or drink for almost five hours! We inspect 14 trucks trying to make their way to the border – the second lane is blocked by parked trucks, as usual. Animal transporters wait for more than one hour to enter the border area. Two drivers call the police to help remove the blocking trucks, but we do not see any coming. We inspect cattle from Estonia, Germany, Czechia and Slovakia, and document problems with filthy bedding and dirty water troughs. Even though the temperature is a little bit lower than in the last few days, it still exceeds 30˚C and animals cannot drink when water troughs are full of straw and faeces. On two trucks, we see hungry animals eating very dirty straw. Some had their last rest 900km earlier and are exhausted. We are also concerned about headspace. In three cases, it is so bad that the ceiling rests on animals’ backs. The drivers lift the deck and the roof after our intervention. It is still not perfect, but at least the heifers are not rubbing their backs against steel. We detect a pregnant heifer from Germany with a deep open wound on her backside, which has obviously been left untreated.
