An angry villager accosted me outside my house as I came through my front door. ‘You’re wrong about those horses,’ she called. By which she meant the 123 horses taken from a farm down the road by the RSPCA.
‘They were never fed!’ she shouted at me. ‘They were starved! We have been trying to help them for years!’
I sighed. ‘Just a moment, please,’ I said, putting my handbag in the car. I walked over to where she was standing. ‘Look, those horses were all fat if anything. I’ve got leaked photos of each one of them taken by vets in RSPCA custody days after seizure. They look perfectly fine. Would you like to come in and see the photos? Come on, I’ll show you.’
‘No!’ she screeched. ‘You’re wrong! They were being fattened up for meat! They were being live exported to France in the middle of the night!’
‘Sorry, can we just go back a bit?’ I said, as politely as I could. ‘You’re saying the horses were both starved, and also being fattened up for meat?’
‘You don’t know!’ she screamed.
‘Look, not one of those horses had a passport,’ I explained. ‘The farmer had no papers. You can’t get a horse into the French meat market without papers.’
What I didn’t say, for the lady was beside herself already, was that it is not illegal to live export horses to France. You don’t have to do it under cover of darkness.
If a horse hasn’t had the common painkiller phenylbutazone, which most horses have, and if this can be verified with its passport, then a horse can be sold for meat at a rock-bottom price.
The potential for live export of horses because of free movement of equines between Britain and France is one of the reasons thick, ignorant Brexiteers like me want to come out of the EU.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in