His visit could hardly echo the news better. While L214 revealed the deplorable conditions of a rabbit farm in Brittany, the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau was able to see the French delay during a visit to Madrid. “Sometimes we are less ahead or less advanced… We are moving forward on these subjects, it must be done with concern for animal welfare and respect for employees,” he said during a press conference. with his counterpart, conceding that “the Spaniards have taken a step a little further”.
The Spanish government on Tuesday approved a measure obliging slaughterhouses to install video surveillance systems within two years to ensure that animals are not mistreated before they are killed, claiming to be “at the leader in Europe in this field”. Cameras should cover facilities where live animals are located, including unloading areas, conveyance corridors and areas where animals are stunned and bled to death.
“We need to control and move forward on these video issues in slaughterhouses”
In France, an experiment was carried out on a voluntary basis, but the presence of cameras in slaughterhouses is not compulsory, to the chagrin of defenders of the animal cause. “We need to control – what we do at the Ministry of Agriculture and in the services – and control more and more, to modernize the tools (…) and to move forward on these questions of video in slaughterhouses”, procrastinates Marc Fesneau, even evoking “a rising demand from employees”.
According to him, some of them “don’t even dare to say that they work in slaughterhouses anymore”. But the minister warned: “it is not video surveillance, in the sense that we do not come to monitor people”, because “nobody would accept in his work to be monitored”. “As long as it is the product of a dialogue, I am in favor of it,” he concluded.
Although he indicated that “each Member State of the European Union (was) free” to do as he wishes, his Spanish counterpart, Luis Planas, who was at his side, specified that in Spain , the measure had obtained “the full support of the sector” and that it constituted “recognition of the very high standards of quality and traceability of all agri-food production and the meat sector in Spain”.