Horses drinking in front of a mountain of corpses of other decaying equines; animals extremely emaciated or wounded, to such an extent that the bone of their hock is bare. The images shot in Argentina by the NGOs Tierschutzbund Zürich and Animal Welfare Foundation (AWF) between August 2019 and October 2020 are terrible. In particular the videos in the “acopio” of Santiago Temple in the province of Cordoba, these meadows where the horses are gathered before their passage to the slaughterhouse .

In France, the Welfarm association relays the alertviandechevaline.fr petition to demand from Brussels the ban on imports from Argentina, but also from Uruguay, Canada or Australia, as Europe has already done for Brazil and Mexico. On several occasions, the Argentinian press has denounced this type of horror camp which allows the sale of stolen horses or horses treated with drugs banned in Europe such as phenylbutazone.

“No traceability as it exists for beef”

In France, horse meat is a very small market which causes great suffering. Only 9% of the French are hippophages, fans of flank steak, shank, tenderloin, horse rib, sirloin … This is traditionally the case in the North. The animals which appear in the videos, slaughtered near Buenos Aires, are “probably sold in France”, believes Adeline Colonat of the NGO Welfarm who insists that “for horse meat, there is no has no traceability as it exists for beef ”.

In the twelve Hauts-de-France supermarkets she visited, she only found horse meat “Made in France” once., if not Argentinian horses, in most cases sold in cans of the Equinox brand, linked to the Argentinian slaughterhouse Lamar, also pinned by the NGO AWF. In six supermarkets, labels do not indicate the origin or only the mention “Elaborated in France”, which amounts to the same thing. Be careful with the words “Belgium”, warns Adeline Colonat. According to her, the flat country is a hub. “Belgium imports horse meat outside the European Union (EU), then re-exports it within it,” she says. Thus 98% of Australian horse meat imported by Europe is destined for Belgium. The remaining 2% are imported directly by France. “

“Repectful life”, a contested label

In Europe, including under the battering of animal rights activists, manufacturers have acquired a “Repectful life” label coordinated by the Belgian Meat Federation (Febev) and set up by researchers from the university. de Louvain to guarantee “the welfare of the horses they consider a priority”. “The participants are precisely the slaughterhouses of Lamar, Land-L (Argentina), Bouvry (Canada), Clay Meramist (Australia), that is to say the slaughterhouses where the NGOs TSB and AWF have filmed the worst horrors for eight years. », Insists Adeline Colonat who regrets that the controlled establishments are warned.

Michael Gore, the administrator of Febev, regrets “his controversies”. He assures us that “cameras are being installed in particular in Argentina”. The federation is also working with the independent company SGS, which will carry out unannounced checks. “But the visits of researchers from Louvain are announced, because it is a process of continuous improvement on the transport, the handling of animals, or the slaughterhouse”, explains the representative of Febev.

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Belgian academics, for example, are monitoring the Land L slaughterhouse, which was subject to several checks in 2016 and 2019. The 2019 report gives it a satisfactory rating and displays photos of this facility near Buenos Aires showing horses in good shape. nourished and healthy. “But it is here, in 2020, that two horses lying on the ground, bruised, bloody, agonizing the whole night were filmed,” notes Adeline Colonat. European Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides, while acknowledging the problems, rejects the ban on imports of horses from the country of the tango