Published 06/07/2009

Let's be clear about the bad and sad news first. To the best of our knowledge, all the pigs in Egypt have now been killed. It is hardly a consolation to know that, after our initial protests, the Prime Minister ordered an end to covering the pigs with lime and dumping them in mass graves in the desert and said the remaining pigs should be killed in slaughterhouses. You can read an eyewitness account from one such Cairo slaughterhouse by our Head of Campaigns.

Following intense pressure from Compassion in World Farming and WSPA on the Chief Veterinary Officer of Egypt at the recent OIE (World Animal Health Organisation) meeting in Paris, he agreed to meet in Cairo with a small delegation of OIE officials and a representative of the welfare groups. This was all very ironic and tragic too, as Egypt signed up to the OIE standards on humane killing for disease control over four years ago - and yet was blatantly ignoring their commitment.

WSPA's Africa representative attended this meeting on behalf of the welfare groups in Cairo on 6 July. The Egyptian government said it would get its veterinary officers trained in humane killing and the OIE offered to assist in making this happen.

Mock Visa Applications

Thanks to the number of mock Egyptian visa applications that were posted by supporters, we were invited to meet the Egyptian Consul in London. He has promised to do his best to get further commitment from the Egyptian government.

Without your help, this meeting would not have happened so a huge thank you to everyone who took part. Over 2,000 "visa applications" were downloaded from this website, together with nearly 1,000 from the site of our Dutch Compassion office.

If you haven't done so yet, please take part now - we must keep up the pressure.

Next steps

Compassion believes that it is urgent that these slaughter training plans get underway at once, so that the terrible scenes of mass pig killing are not repeated with chickens or other species.

We also believe that it is urgent that Egypt adopts a first-rate animal protection law. We have offered the services of our own in-house legal expert to assist with drafting any such law and we shall continue pressure from this office.