Equine Slaughterhouses (CCTV)

Debate between James Gray and Angela Smith

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gray]

That is possible, of course, but it is hard to work out the cause and effect. In the case of horses, I suspect that it is probably because, depending on the statistics we use, only 4,000 or 5,000 are slaughtered each year in up to five abattoirs—there are none in Wales or Scotland. In other words, something in the order of 1,000 horses are slaughtered per equine abattoir spread over 50 weeks. A very small number of horses are being killed in licensed abattoirs today, and therefore there is no presumption that any of them is carrying out anything other than the highest possible standards of slaughter.

[Angela Smith]

The hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way, given that I have just delivered my speech. It is a mistake to assume that the five abattoirs kill an equal number of horses, because they do not. The numbers are very uneven. The FSA’s figures show that the best records and CCTV coverage are sometimes to be found in smaller abattoirs.

[Mr Gray]

The statistical point that I was making was not whether the same number were killed in each of the five abattoirs; it was that a relatively small number are killed across the whole of England. As far as I am aware, there is also little evidence of anything other than high standards in the abattoirs that do kill horses. We must not start by presuming that they are all bad people doing wicked things. They are not, necessarily; many of them are extremely professional abattoirs doing good things, so let us not start from the presumption that they are bad.

There is a bigger gap in the campaign that we are discussing. I think I am right in saying that the only horses that go to abattoirs are those going into the food chain, which in the UK is a relatively small number. If we presume that there are between 1 million and 1.5 million horses in the UK today, that means that 75,000 or 100,000 die every year in one way or another. Of those, only a tiny proportion go into the food chain. Again, my concern about the campaign is that we would be assuring ourselves that we were doing something terribly important about the euthanising of horses, whereas in fact we would be dealing with an extremely small proportion of those that are killed or die every year, and there may well be other abuses elsewhere that we could more usefully spend our time addressing.

That brings us to the question of horse passports. It must be remembered that the only horses that can be presented at an abattoir are those with up-to-date horse passports, in which no veterinary medicine appears. Nearly all horses, especially low-grade horses, will have had some form of veterinary medicine during the course of their life, particularly bute, which rules them out for presentation at an equine slaughterhouse.