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One Voice’s investigation into a 5-star pound: the industrial slaughter of cats and dogs

One Voice’s investigation into a 5-star pound: the industrial slaughter of cats and dogs

One Voice’s investigation into a 5-star pound: the industrial slaughter of cats and dogs
11.12.2023
One Voice’s investigation into a 5-star pound: the industrial slaughter of cats and dogs
Domestic animals

The third part of One Voice’s investigation into pounds in France. After having condemned some peoples’ abuse, we have wanted to understand how those who are regulated work, “good in all respects” in the eyes of local councils who give them the task of “cleaning” public streets of animals that are wondering around or are strays. It was horrific there. This time legally.

Within pounds, they get the very best. Our investigators infiltrated one of the best rated “animal centres” in France to confirm what is referred to as the “management” of cats and dogs that are lost, abandoned, or born on the streets. Following our investigations at SIVU 47 and Passerelles, two establishments that are merrily circumventing regulations, it was important to have an idea of “best practices” within this sector.

Public “service”

The organisation where we led the investigation prides itself on its website as being exemplary and as doing everything possible for the happiness of its “residents”. You had to make yourself very small and film with a hidden camera to get a clear picture.

Around once a week, a packed truck drops off its load: rams, wallabies… you can find all kinds of animals inside. But mainly it is many cats and dogs, rescued from the roadside with no “owner” in sight, who end up there.

Delegated by the local council to ensure a public service remit, this private company is funded, as in most cities in France, by local taxes. Its role: to rid the local territory of stray animals, the responsibility for which lies with the mayor. The law in fact states that the town councillor can, by decree, place them in a “drop-off place suitable for taking them in and keeping them”, with the caretaker bearing the cost in cases where the “owner” does not come forward.

“Suitable drop-off place”

What actually is this? Rows of tiny concrete kennels, dogs abandoned in their own excrement, cats stored in transport crates at the back of dark rooms, an upside down infirmary… This was the spectacle witnessed by our investigators when they entered the “standard” premises where the animals are shut up.

In this world full of anxious barks and plaintive meows, new arrivals are quickly brought up to speed. No staff to reassure them, lavish them with an affectionate gesture, or even just some attention. Only their peers are there to tell them about the less than warm environment.

At least the bowls are full here, of course, but under what conditions? Incomprehension, stress, and cries for help are everywhere. Tearful and terrified looks are behind each wire fence. Only a few still express a little bit of joy when they hear the sound of footsteps. No doubt they still believe in human friendship and in a bright future. Not for long…

Death row

Because their days are numbered. After the eight-day time period, if no one has come to reclaim them, most of them are killed. At an industrial rate, even. We have to make way for the next lot and above all do the maths: it is a very profitable activity.

Our investigators filmed everything: the terror of those condemned, the capturing of dogs with a lasso allowing them to them bite themselves, the administration of lethal doses by a robotic and violent veterinarian. Abandoned by everyone except their traumatised cell neighbours, dozens of perfectly healthy animals die every day on this death row before being eliminated.

Into a skip

During this investigation, our investigators crossed paths with many of them, each more endearing than the last. However, they found them in the form of corpses, killed mercilessly, guilty of not having been loved.

Regularly, the pound employees pile the frozen or still warm bodies into a huge container to send them to the slaughterhouse. The curtain then falls for the final time on these trampled, massacred, and completely invisible lives. A way that is as efficient as it is discreet for the State to erase the tragedy of abandonment, mistreatment, and straying with public money rather than funding a proper policy to fix the problem.

Stop the code of silence!

Rally with us to break the deafening silence surrounding these cover-up mass killings. Our investigation is there to shed light on them and call them out. We demand transparency about what is happening right now, every day, in our country’s pounds where thousands of animals are killed legally on the assembly line. As long as our leaders put up with it or prefer to turn a blind eye, they remain complicit in scandalous practices even though solutions exist. Elsewhere in Europe, they take care of their animals. France must take inspiration from them!

One Voice will not stop campaigning for our country to commit to a large-scale neutering programme to resolve the issue of feline straying and ban the online sale of animals, one of the main sources of abandonments and slaughters in pounds.

It is high time to call on our leaders to take action. What is the project? Taking in animals or getting rid of them? Faced with inhumanity, what do politicians do? Are they even aware that thousands of cats and dogs are killed every year? To ensure that they are, share our videos with your elected representatives: mayors, MPs, regional presidents, and the Minister of Agriculture. And sign the petition below to demand an end to the code of silence and euthanasia in pounds.

Sign the petition

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Stray animals: France opts for massacring at pounds

Stray animals: France opts for massacring at pounds

Stray animals: France opts for massacring at pounds
11.12.2023
Stray animals: France opts for massacring at pounds
Domestic animals

Although the French State appears insensitive to the tragic fate of thousands of stray animals, this is not the case for our European neighbours.

To “clean” their streets, France has chosen a “strategy” of large-scale slaughtering. When an animal is seen wandering, town councils are in charge of involving the services of a pound. Once captured, they are kept for eight days in a cold kennel, as shown in our latest investigation. After this time, if they have not been claimed, they can be taken in by an association. But there are too many stray or abandoned animals for them to have any hope of finding a family. When the time period has passed, being slaughtered at a pound is what awaits them. Deaths by the thousands, in the greatest secrecy, even though solutions exist, as proven by our European neighbours.

For years, we have been fighting to raise awareness about the plight of stray cats and so that our leaders will finally take measures to stem this tragedy. Faced with a lack of action by the government, we are obliged to initiate legal proceedings to make things happen, while our neighbours are acting in concrete terms to stop abandonments.

Countering mass slaughter: neutering…

In September 2022, Greece implemented the “Argos Programme”, allocating a budget of 2.9 million euros to help town councils to improve stray animal welfare.

In Luxembourg, to reduce the number of abandoned cats, some towns offer individuals financial aid to get their animals neutered.

On the other side of the border, Belgium made neutering cats obligatory in 2018. An initiative that also applies to pet cats as well as street cats and which has borne fruit in just a few months: ‘euthanasias’ in pounds due to a lack of space have reduced by half, going from 37% to 13%. The Belgian government has gone further by offering grants to towns for neutering stray cats, but also by providing help for vulnerable people for the care of their animals.

… because killing an animal is indeed a criminal act

In Italy, since a law passed in 1991, stray cats and dogs’ lives have been protected. It is strictly forbidden to kill them for population control purposes. Only genuine euthanasias that are for medical reasons, in the case of incurable suffering, are authorised and must be carried out by a veterinarian. In 2018, the Italian court of cassation even confirmed the conviction of those responsible for illegal killings, who had executed dozens of animals without medical necessity and out of pure convenience.

This is a long way from what happens in our pounds, where animals can be slaughtered after eight days in freezing conditions… Solutions exist, and we are asking the authorities to finally take the necessary measures. Sign our petition for an end to massacres and demand the implementation of an urgent plan to put an end to the suffering of millions of stray cats with us.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Animal testing: investigation from One Voice in Mauritius into long-tailed macaque breeding farms

Animal testing: investigation from One Voice in Mauritius into long-tailed macaque breeding farms

Animal testing: investigation from One Voice in Mauritius into long-tailed macaque breeding farms
28.11.2023
Animal testing: investigation from One Voice in Mauritius into long-tailed macaque breeding farms
Animal testing

The island of Mauritius is one of the main countries dealing in monkeys for animal testing. By infiltrating this secret environment, our investigators are able to bring back exclusive footage and witness statements on the scandalous practices.

There are seven breeding ‘farms’ set up on the island of Mauritius, as close as possible to the natural habitat of the primates that they sell for the global animal testing industry. Each year, Bio Culture, Noveprim, Biodia, Biosphere, Les Campeches Ltd, Cynologics, and Le Tamarinier send more than 10,000 long-tailed macaques to laboratories in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain, and… France. Within the European Union, our country is in fact one of the main importers of these primates that are actually classified as in danger of extinction on the IUCN’s red list of endangered species.

A risky infiltration

Officially, these monkey factories can be ‘visited’ if we rely, of course, on their management services that are used to presenting them in their best light. We preferred to go behind the scenes to observe the way they function as closely as possible and to unveil the daily reality for the animals that are held prisoner here. At the cost of an enormous risk, our investigators managed to infiltrate six of them. What they discovered confirms what we suspected, along with our partner Action for Primates who put their information together to prepare for this investigation: many monkeys are regularly caught in traps in the forest in order to feed the breeding farms with ‘fresh meat’ and maintain genetic diversity.

Captured in the wild

The information provided to our investigators by whistle-blowers who wish to remain anonymous is clear… Curled up behind the mesh of the nets, long-tailed macaques have often been imprisoned for several days before the trappers come to collect their traps from the depths of the jungle. Famished and thirsty, the adults and babies only have the strength to grasp hold of each other in a desperate gesture… And it is without the slightest resistance, terrorised, that they let themselves be violently caged in transport carriers. Humans mock their distress.

Put into quarantine

When they arrive at the breeding farms, the little monkeys are brutally taken out of the carriers. Grabbed by the tail and neck, their arms pinned against their backs, all of them are isolated in turn in cages that are just as minuscule as they are bleak. Their whining or resolute silence is met with laughter or indifference from the staff. Then quarantine begins… And this is just a taste of what is to come.

Killed unless they are good for breeding

Before long, the prisoners are tattooed with an identification number. They are also subjected to an array of tests to check their state of health. Those injured during the capture, or those who are infertile, sick, or have been affected by a simple skin condition are killed without batting an eyelid: they are just a piece of rubbish. As for the others, they are sent to the ‘enclosures’, where there are already dozens of other monkeys enclosed, to be used for breeding. We are showing their miserable living conditions where stress is palpable everywhere. Due to overcrowding in the cages, epidemics are rife, particularly of bovine tuberculosis. The employees then start the mass slaughters: up to 200 monkeys per day!

Babies for laboratories

Theoretically, the first generation babies escape testing in the European Union: subjecting F1 macaques to tests has been banned in the EU since November 2022. But in practice… hardly anyone worries about it and the labs even less so. In all cases, primates are condemned to being kept captive and suffering for their whole lives.

We already know – thanks to the documents we had access to and then to the evidence we have gathered regarding the Silabe platform, linked with the University of Strasbourg – that the little monkeys were exported in batches of a hundred in France at the young age of one and a half years, and this investigation has told us that they are torn from their mother’s arms from the age of 6-8 months to get them used to contact with humans early on and to be docile.

Impregnated as intended, they are then ‘ready’, whenever requested, to fulfil orders to be subjected to painful procedures in our country, in Europe, and across the Atlantic.

Finishing with this scandal!

This investigation follows our constant action to put an end to the use of macaques in laboratories. We have already made Air France put a stop to transporting them. We need to go further. Strengthened by our latest revelations, we are counting on public policy-makers to take responsibility and change the situation.

For years, MPs have expressed their concerns to the European Commission on the subject of trapping wild macaques in Mauritius. Others must follow their example and our leaders must not retreat from animal testing lobbies. They often hide behind a mask when they come forward to better impose their laws. For example, they often say they are ‘CNRS researchers’ rather than clearly stating that they are Gircor* representatives… Help us to call on the authorities to put an end to the importation, trade, and use of long-tailed macaques in France and in the European Union, sign our petition!

*Groupe Interprofessionnel de Réflexion et de Communication sur la Recherche [Interprofessional Focus and Communication Group for Research]

Translated from the French by Joely Justice