Dear friends and supporters,

As inspectors, we are frequently faced with serious animal suffering. You want to save these animals and take them home, or you become angry or even burst into tears. And even though there are some rescued chickens in our garden now, it doesn’t help to solve the big on-going problems. To really help all animals, we will have to put our emotions into action. Positive action. That way the industry will move with us and welfare will be improved on a large scale, for all animals. That's why we train chicken-catchers, livestock transporters and the highway police and we work with slaughterhouses to get improvements into place right away. Of course, we continue our inspections unabated. We might be friendly and polite, but we also remain critical and sharp!

EonA trains highway police: fines handed to livestock-transport companies

Polish horse slaughterhouse reduces animal suffering

A large horse slaughterhouse in Poland has made several important adjustments following our visit that has led to much less suffering. The restraint box where the horses are stunned has been modified. Many of the draft horses did not fit in to the box, so the back door would come down on their backs and cause them to panic and fall. Now the box has two back doors, one 20 cm longer for the bigger horses to now fit in without the pain and panic caused before. Also noise-reducing measures have been taken, which has greatly reduced the stress in the raceway and stunning box. The pneumatics and metal dividers and chains have all been insulated or coated with plastic. The slaughterhouse was checked upon dozens of times in recent years by retailers and government agencies - oddly enough none of them noticed these various animal-welfare issues. Major improvements were made after our visit. The slaughterhouse manager said that the visit of EonA had opened his eyes. He is willing to further reduce the suffering of the horses. It goes to show Eyes on Animals is necessary inside the slaughterhouses! Read more.

European campaign against animal transport huge success!

Several animal welfare organizations, including Eyes on Animals, launched a major international campaign against long-distance transport of animals to third countries. A campaign film was published with the latest footage of EonA and AWF | TSB, which also showed images of sea transport. Watch the campaign film here (warning shocking images).

Both the British newspaper The Guardian, the Belgian news website HLN and the Italian news EcoAvant devoted extensive attention to the images. Also our colleague Iris Baumgärtner was heard on the Swiss-Italian radio Laser about our inspection work together.

Furthermore the young bull "Billy" has become the figurehead of a large campaign against long-distance transport. The Austrian bull, who suffered from severe respiratory problems and dehydration, was on board a truck waiting at the Turkish-Bulgarian border during one of our inspections there. Because our team called in a veterinarian, Billy was given medical attention and recovered.

Billy is featured this month in a poster hung up in numerous bus stops all over from Dam Square in Amsterdam to Sint Janskerkhof in Utrecht. His face confronts thousands of passers-by with the plight of farm animals during transport.

EonA improves the welfare of poultry during catching and loading

After more than a year of 'tough dialogue' with the poultry industry, EonA finally succeeded: Rondeel – an egg producing company – has decided that they are going to develop a new way of catching based on the Swedish method we have been teaching (keeping birds upright instead of grabbing them by their legs and stuffing them into crates while upside down). Their decision comes after a project we initiated with Rondeel and the catching company Den Ouden Oirschot last January when, during our practical training, we caught and loaded 3500 Rondeel chickens in the more humane Swedish way. Before the birds were caught and loaded, we gave the chicken-catchers and the Rondeel manager the theoretical part of our animal-welfare course. During loading we were there to supervise and help out. Read more

For decades and decades all over the world, chickens raised commercially are caught by their legs and inverted, thus this change to upright catching by Rondeel is a major step forward that we achieved for the welfare of chickens. We will now do our best to convince other egg labels, such as Demeter, SKAL and the “Beter Leven” to follow this good example!

EonA featured in excellent French TV documentary

Our team has a small budget, with which we still manage to achieve a lot. But we would love to do more for the animals: more inspections, give more training courses to the highway police and possibly an additional inspector to help us with the heavy workload. Can we count on your support?

The Eyes on Animals team