It's not just our banking crisis that's brought Ireland under the gaze of the international media

As a countryside lover it's easy to fall in love with horses, and if you ride or look after these lovely animals its very hard to ignore the huge welfare problem we have in the horse sector in Ireland.

Today the Irish Times published a piece I've written for them on the complex and ugly issue of equine welfare and why no one is willing to take ownership of it. I really hope it brings some pressure to bear on the department of Agriculture to provide emergency funding to the horse charities this Winter or to provide a cull scheme, ideally both.

If the problem is being reported as far away as Switzerland and New Zealand, it's clear we've a crisis on our hands. If we don't sort it out our image of being a horse loving, and great horse producing nation we only have ourselves; the Irish to blame. Please, Government bodies, help us do something about it.


Piece is linked here or read the whole feature below -
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0928/1224279819356.html






The number of starved and abused horses is rising. As winter approaches and charities are forced to turn animals away, is a cull the only way to clean up Ireland's horse welfare mess? Suzanne Campbell reports

IN A STABLE yard in Co Wicklow, a small, emaciated thoroughbred mare stands dejectedly with her head almost touching the straw. Much of her coat has fallen out and her spine and ribs protrude from distended skin resembling the bare timbers of a boat.

“This mare is typical of what we’re seeing at the moment,” says Sharon Newsome, who runs the yard. “She’s starved, but actually she’s a well-bred horse.” In another time the pretty filly would probably have been in training on the Curragh – but not today.

Newsome runs the Irish Horse Welfare Trust (IHWT), a charity under immense pressure to clean up the mess left behind by the Celtic Tiger’s surge in horse ownership. While in the past decade the leisure horse industry flourished, it was racing which really expanded, as hundreds of syndicates of both elite and ordinary folk seized their moment to live the dream. From 2001 to 2006 the number of racehorses in training in Ireland increased by 22 per cent. When the economy collapsed, trainers’ fees weren’t paid and fields full of horses suddenly had no owners. Culling horses may now be the only way to reduce the number of cases of starvation and abuse.

Alongside our banking woes, Ireland’s horse welfare crisis has put us under the gaze of the international media. Earlier this month the Sunday Telegraph joined Swiss Television (Schweizer Fernsehen) and Horse and Hound magazine in airing Ireland’s horse welfare problems. To read in a foreign newspaper that a horse in Dublin “was recently found with its legs bound, sunk to the bottom of a river” is to be presented with an image at odds with the sleek and glossy one that the €1 billion Irish horse industry likes to present.

As winter approaches, welfare groups project that hundreds of abandoned and starving horses will be found countrywide. In the case of the thoroughbred mare rescued by the IHWT, her owner was an elderly man who didn’t want to part with her even when a member of the public called gardaí and asked them to seize the horse.

“The problem is that now we have no room for even seized animals – the bad cruelty cases or starved horses like this one,” says Newsome. “I dread answering the phone or looking at our email because there are so many people desperate to get rid of horses.”



Horse ownership “is like a disease in this country”, says Paddy Wall, one of the writers of a UCD report on the welfare problems currently tarnishing the sector. While in the boom years everyone wanted to be part of the sport of kings, the recession hit horses particularly badly.
Over the past two years many animals went to the sales but came home unsold or went for well below their asking price. This brought them into the ownership of people who could afford to buy a horse for a few hundred euro but not the thousands of euro it takes to keep one over its lifetime.
Since 2007, well-bred racehorses and showjumpers have started to change hands for less than it would cost to feed them for a year. A fit thoroughbred was recently sold out of a training yard in Co Kildare for €200. As this reality hit home, some owners trade them on down the chain to those even less capable of looking after them. Then last winter the crisis truly hit.
“Last year was worse than I could have imagined,” says Newsome. “The bad weather meant there was no grazing and animals were left to starve or set loose on bogs or mountains if the owners didn’t want to be prosecuted. There is no facility where they can go. We’re the only dedicated horse charity in the country, and the few local authority pounds can barely cope.”
ISPCA CENTRES HAVE also seen a huge surge in the number of people contacting them about abandoned horses. “In 2008 we had 408 phone calls about horses, then last year we had 1,100,” says the organisation’s chairwoman, Barbara Bent. “Already this year we’ve had hundreds of rescue cases. We can’t take on any more animals and I don’t know what’s going to happen once the summer grass runs out.”
It is not only to welfare groups that the crisis is evident. The UCD report, published this summer, recognises the problem is “a human one, not a horse one”, as Wall puts it. Welfare issues exist across all sections of the industry, from National Hunt racing to horse fairs. The report identifies over-production of horses, lack of traceability in the system, poor understanding of the costs of horse care, all exacerbated by the effects of the economic crash, as the key factors in bringing horse welfare to crisis point.
“This is not a popular message, but it doesn’t get us past the fact that this is a difficult situation,” says Joe Collins, co-author of the UCD report. “Energy can be spent talking about it, but it’s no substitute for action.”
Prosecuting owners for cruelty doesn’t seem to be the way to get people to buy feed for their animals. The courts can take 18 months or more to turn around a cruelty case, and the fines are small. “The legislation is a hundred years old and the penalties are too small,” says Bent. “Unless we really do something about this problem, Ireland is going to lose its good name as a horse producer – and we need to protect that name.”
Three weeks ago, on a housing estate in Co Wicklow, a welfare officer from the IHWT identified a black and white gelding left to starve in the garden of a boarded-up house. It appeared to have been stabbed in the chest. As it was being removed, the horse’s two teenage owners arrived in a highly emotional state. “You’re not taking this horse, get away from my horse,” they yelled, jostling the three gardaí who had arrived to help out the welfare officer.
It emerged the teenagers had bought the animal for €100 from a 10-year-old boy standing in the middle of a roundabout the week before. It was untrained, and neither of them had any experience to turn it into a riding horse. But the lure of horse-owning status outweighed such practical considerations.
Coaxing by the gardaí and the IHWT officer eventually won out and the two lads relented, admitting they wouldn’t be able to feed the animal. As for the stab wound and other scars on the horse’s flanks, the teenagers were adamant it wasn’t them but that some of “the other lads round here” weren’t as nice to their horses as they were.
The gelding is now awaiting a new home. His story may yet end happily, but that’s not the case for the ponies driven in harness on roads, at high speeds, until they drop dead. The over-supply of horses has diminished their value and, in a world where value brings respect, this can be fatal. The Dublin SPCA reports horses changing hands at Smithfield market for as little as €20, or being swapped for mobile phones. When an animal’s life is so cheap it’s not hard to imagine why a teenager might choose to ride it to death for sport.
At an Oireachtas Agriculture Committee meeting this summer, TDs listened to expert opinion from the horse sector predicting a disastrous winter ahead.
Some witnesses, including RTÉ racing pundit Ted Walsh, explained to the committee that euthanasia can cost up to €300 per horse in Ireland, and that many owners will therefore abandon an animal instead. If a horse has a “clean passport” – meaning that it hasn’t received drugs in its lifetime which make it unfit for human consumption – it can go to a meat factory, where it will be humanely killed. Its meat will then go into the food chain destined for Europe. However, few of the horses affected by the current crisis have passports.
One of the solutions is a cull scheme, involving a once-off amnesty whereby the State would absorb the cost of humanely destroying unwanted animals. As draconian as it sounds, to put a horse down in such a way is better than making it endure a slow death by starvation.
Fine Gael’s agriculture spokesman Andrew Doyle is adamant that a cull is needed to take horses out of the system. “There should be some sort of incentive for people to bring unwanted horses forward rather than being prosecuted later for cruelty,” he says.
Another option would be to look for a derogation from the regulations on horses going into the food chain to permit animals without passports to go the meat-factory route.
“If you do a cull for a year or so, the problem is dealt with and you won’t have to do it againsays Doyle. “It’s in our face now – we’ve a whole load of unwanted animals that no one wants to know about and if we don’t so something quickly the outcome won’t be good.”
The Department of Agriculture acknowledges the current welfare problem but its view on a cull is that it’s “not an appropriate approach as such an initiative would not necessarily result in the slaughter of the target population – ie, those horses that are most vulnerable”.
The department has approved five meat plants around the country for horse slaughter, but these facilities can only take animals with clean passports so they can join the food chain. The average horse starving on a bog or a housing estate is not the type of animal that has a passport.
While the TDs on the Agriculture Committee may call for a cull, will they have the appetite to lobby the department after the political brawl caused by recent legislative moves against dog breeding and stag hunting? Cork TD Christy O’Sullivan (FF), for one, is adamant that a cull is the only route to take.
“I’ve cross-party support on this and I want to see the problem addressed rather than get worse,” he says. “We’re all part of the problem.”
A world away from Leinster House, Sharon Newsome views the possibility of such a scheme with scepticism. “We went to the Minister for Agriculture in October 2009, with industry bodies, and told them that this problem was coming. Then we said this problem is here. Now we have a UCD report backing up the evidence we are seeing on the ground, but what is it going to take to get something done?” she says.
Ireland may be the land of the horse, but the horse welfare mess we’ve created has yet to find an owner

And I thought salmon was naturally that colour

Smart Consumer: The unpalatable truth about the salmon on your plate
By Suzanne Campbell
Thursday September 23 2010



Close your eyes and picture a salmon. Odds are that you think of a gleaming muscular fish leaping up a river in full flood. It's this image which informs our decision making at the fish counter.



We also think of salmon as a healthy food -- rich in omega-3 fish oils and a tasty source of low-fat protein. But a new book by American food writer Paul Greenberg probes into the image of salmon, revealing some uncomfortable truths about Ireland's favourite fish.
More than 99% of the salmon sitting on Irish supermarket counters and in delicatessens is farmed.



Some of it is Irish fish but most of what we eat originates in Scotland or Norway.
Wild salmon is scarce around the world and with the ban on drift netting in Ireland, it's now out of reach for most of us and will only appear on the menus of very good restaurants or in small quantities at specialised fishmongers.



The fact that we are eating almost exclusively farmed salmon doesn't seem to affect our appetites for it. What Greenberg points out is that while salmon has obvious health benefits, questions have to be asked about what eating farmed salmon does to the availability of other fish. The book also shows how our demand for cod, tuna and sea bass led to their shrinking availability.



But for Irish consumers who return to the fish counter again and again for salmon, what does he say about how healthy a choice it really is? Salmon from fish farms are artificially spawned, reared in pens with thousands of other fish all swimming tightly together in circles and fed a diet that contains colorants to make its flesh pink. There's little natural about a farmed salmon except that it's still living in water.



Even less appetising is that farmed salmon are fed pellets made from ground-up wild fish, mixed with soya and cereals -- not quite its natural diet. The pellets also contain a pigment to colour the salmon's flesh; the tone depends on the country the fish is destined for. So you'll find farmed salmon in South America very red in colour, whereas we in Ireland prefer it a soft pink.
Critics of farmed salmon find this 'Dulux colour card' approach enough reason to boycott it, but the fish farming sector claims that the colourant is nothing more than a natural carotenoid pigment named astaxanthin; exactly the same molecule that wild salmon get from eating small shellfish.



Astaxanthin is now made in a laboratory rather than by shellfish, so what are we worried about? Aren't many of the foods that we eat artificially coloured? Or is it just that colouring the flesh of live animals crosses some kind of line?



Of more impact is the colossal amount of other fish species that go into creating the fish pellets farmed salmon eat. Greenberg points out that it takes up to six pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of salmon and that part of the problem with the world's diminishing fish stocks is this hoovering up of other species to feed our insatiable appetite for pink fish.



The farmed salmon currently on our fish counters has also been genetically selected to have a quicker growth rate. Since the Norwegians pioneered farming salmon on a mass scale they've engineered a fish that has double the growth rate of wild salmon. This super salmon matures faster and dominates salmon production across the world, so much so that three billion pounds of farmed salmon are produced globally; three times the amount of wild fish harvested.
While this may be hailed as a breakthrough by fish breeders, this immense salmon production has been at the cost of the nine billion pounds of wild fish that have been caught and ground into pellets to feed them.



Greenberg points out that as humans have been farming salmon since the 15th Century you'd think we'd have got it right by now, but sadly mistakes have been made.
Blood meal from chickens was routinely fed to salmon to provide micro nutrients and only banned after BSE came to light. Fish were also crammed into cages that were too small and sea lice proliferated, affecting other species.



In Ireland, Scotland and Norway, studies found that the presence of salmon farms increased the level of sea lice infestation on sea trout. It also badly affected Irish wild salmon.
But most detrimental to the image of farmed salmon was the extent to which they were found to contain PCBs -- polychlorinated biphenyls, which came to light in a report published in 2004.
PCBs are toxins which have found their way into fish from run-off into rivers of waste from manufacturing plants. They accumulate progressively over time meaning that those at the top of the food chain -- humans -- are exposed to the highest levels.



In the research published in the journal Science, farmed salmon was found to contain higher concentrations of PCBs than its wild counterpart. PCBs were subsequently banned, but not before confidence in farmed salmon had taken a hit. Many Irish fishermen still claim that the waste from salmon cages is not sufficiently washed out to sea and affects the local environment as waste pellets and faeces fall through the nets onto the seabed underneath. The Irish fish farming sector claims it's one of the cleanest in Europe as it is located in strong Atlantic seas which quickly get rid of the waste.



How to spot the best fish over the counter -

Salmon farming will continue to grow all over the world, despite its detractors. If you want to still eat fish with strong health benefits that doesn't wipe out our future choices of seafood, here are some alternatives.

For fish rich in Omega-3 oils, buy anchovies, sardines and mackerel. Mackerel and herring have healthy populations in Irish seas and have plenty of flavour; even when grilled and served with a simple salad.

Ling, blossom and coley are cheap substitutes for cod. They are so close in flavour, texture and appearance to cod that they have been found to be labelled and sold as their more expensive cousin.

If you really want salmon, ask for salmon that's farmed in Ireland at the fish counter of your supermarket or delicatessen. 75% of salmon produced in Ireland is organically certified, so not only is the cereal feed organic, the fish component of the pellets is of a low percentage and comes from monitored fish stocks. The stocking density in organic salmon cages is also less dense.

Buy fish in M&S -- they have been rated the leading retailer for responsible fishing by Greenpeace and only stock tuna caught by the pole and line system which is more sustainable.

Look out for the Bord Bia Seafood Circle mark at the supermarket fish counter or at the fish mongers. These fish sellers are the most educated in terms of the quality and source of the fish that they stock, and can give you the best information about what's fresh, in season and how to cook it.

Suzanne Campbell for The Irish Independent



Four Fish by Paul Greenberg is published by Penguin. Suzanne Campbell's food blog is at www.basketcasetheblog.blogspot.com

How Twitter saved my bacon

Cooking isn’t easy without a cooker. This lightbulb moment struck when we moved into our new house this week and found a 90cm gap in the kitchen. So a new Smeg it is, but as the Smeg elves don’t deliver till 2014 or something, we still have a giant hole and no cooker. I did think of building a small fire in the centre of the kitchen but P intervened, suggesting that fires around small children might not be safe, I pointed out that I wasn’t a small child anymore but a teenager.


After an appeal on Twitter for solutions, a friend saw the Tweet and replied, saying she could call round pronto with a mobile hot plate. How fantastic is Twitter, I might generally discuss my current needs and wants online and wait for people to answer the call -

@campbellsuz - shoes in bits, need a pair of studded Lamboutin pumps

@campbellsuz - knackered, holiday in Peter Mantle's new place in the Bahamas please

@campbellsuz - and a new set of pots to go with my fancy cooker

It comes down to this; if you don’t ask you don’t get, and a big network of people are much better placed to help you out in such life threatening occasions as having to eat from a microwave for several weeks. So the Tweet Plea saved our bacon, or rather, cooked it. The mobile hot plate is not the prettiest item in the world– made by Prima circa 1987. It’s a flat square thing and comes with its own induction heat base saucepan and frying pan. When you switch it on it roars with the intensity of a space shuttle warming up, which frightened myself and the dog quite a bit, but overall it's working quite a treat.


I could have just used the microwave for a couple of weeks and left the good people on Twitter alone. But I have a fear of microwaves and especially with the baby’s food I go to great lengths to avoid using it. I’m certain that it’s only a matter of time before some really frightening research bursts out of Berkeley or someplace on what microwaves are doing to our health and how we’ve been nuking our food for decades now in complete ignorance (I know the truth is out there somewhere and you will find it Michael Pollan).

Plenty of people cook all their evening meals in a microwave, and no doubt they are great tools of convenience. I remember the arrival of a giant fawn-coloured Bosch microwave into our house in the eighties. It was the size of a small car, and the object of general fear and awe. It hummed and vibrated with a golden spread of light from the interior in the manner of the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones before it explodes and melts all the Nazi’s faces – a special effect that had to be borrowed from a microwave’s own effect on cheese.

Until we find out the possible murky truth about their effect on our health, I still don't like the effect they have on food - everything is roasted on the outside and ice cold in the middle. For the moment I'm sticking with the hot plate. It's not glamorous, it's not sexy, it's not Smeg. But it sure beats the microwave. Thank you Twitter.

A "back to front" dinner party, and why I'm giving up cooking

When you're surrounded by house-moving boxes and flailing through bubblewrap for wine glasses is one job too many, it was a blessed relief to have a dinner invitation this weekend and escape the mess. The worst part is agonising over what to throw out - today I finally let P ditch my t-shirt from Notting Hill Carnival 1991. Sacrilege, yes. Piece of shit garment that I was never going to wear again, yes.

So when someone tells you its dinner time at their place, the prospect of having a break from saying things like "can you Oxfam sunscreen?" to eat someone else's fantastic food is pure bliss. And to make things even better, the occasion was no ordinary meal, but a gastronomic adventure in time travel - bear with me on this.

The hostess - Francesca Walsh, not only entertains on a grand scale but puts the type of expertise and effort into technical, high end cooking that leaves most of us far behind and still hunting around for a tin of tuna.

With twelve dining, Francesca's candlelit summerhouse was the venue for her "back to front dinner party" - where all the dishes had the appearance of something from the opposite end of the meal. Complicated yes, and the type of thing best left to Heston Blumenthal. But novelty cooking has a fun factor and offers a welcome change to over-safe restaurant menus which constantly list the same ten or so dishes. It's got to the point where "beer battered cod with pea puree" sends me into a coma.

Francesca's starter was Cashel Blue cheesecake with tomato ice cream. Yes, this was a starter. To be fair, she admits this wasn't the most successful of the dishes - her comment was "Vile. Do NOT try this at home" but she's exaggerating. Blue cheese in a cheesecake is a genius idea, this one just had slightly too much of it, likewise the tomato ice cream.

Main Course was served in the form of an afternoon tea. A baked prawn mousse in the shape of a muffin not only looked the part but tasted sublime. This was accompanied by a small triangular sandwich of flat bread enclosing fresh green beans with a baked pollock fillet. A crisp round of short-cut pastry was dressed as a drop scone and topped with lump fish caviar (the jam).

And there's more. To accompany this course she served a cup of tea - a saffron and mushroom broth served in delicate china cups, this was so delicious I had seconds. By this stage I was making a mental note never to cook for Francesca again.

Dessert was soup (Back to Front dinner party ..... remember?) - The chilled raspberry and black cherry soup was accompanied by breakfast lavender cream served in egg shells. The eggs were placed in delicate silver egg cups and dressed with`toasted soldiers' of Madelaine's which sat within the lavender cream placed in the eggshells. The raspberry and black cherry soup was fantastic - really sweet flavours but with a richness and depth that suited being served as a soup.

This was following with Petits Fours - black chocolate truffles with popping candy inside. It was a deliciously smooth end to a fun meal. At this point, I felt I needed a small lie down a la Christmas dinner but my plans were interrupted by a loud rhythmical thumping in the next room. Guests paused, Petit Fours half-way to our mouths while we encouraged our lovely hostess to ignore the noise. Good job she didn't - Lily the cat was rotating steadily in the tumble dryer - having her own version of Funderland without having paid for the pleasure.

As you can imagine, full on drama ensued but Lily was retrieved and apart from a little dazed seemed in good spirits. It's just as well dinner parties like this don't happen on a regular basis. For one, how could I serve my Oliver Twist type offerings knowing that such delights exist on other people's tables, and secondly, how can you top "cat survives tumble dryer" as your evenings entertainment. So I'm throwing in the towel, just as well our dinnerware is in packing boxes, it won't be leaving there anytime soon.

Tony Blair "hunting ban was a mistake"

In Tony Blair's repentance splurge surrounding the publication of his new book, he admits that banning hunting was em, a bit of an error. Asked today if the ban was a mistake - "I think yes on balance it was in the end. Its not that I particularly like hunting or have ever engaged in it or would. I didn't quite understand, and I reproach myself for this, that for a group of people in our society in the countryside this was a fundamental part of their way of life." Blair accepted that the ban was "not one of my finest policy moments".

No sireee. The ban turned hundreds of thousands of countryside Brits onto the street to march to protect their way of life, and galvanised people who didn't feel strongly Tory to commit to vote for them. It's clearly not the morals of the issue Blair regrets but losing the labour party's rural vote for perhaps a generation. In my research for the book I came across a labour MP who smugly admitted that hunting was a "class issue" for them. It's really depressing that perceptions of class should drive a policy issue in a childish, -"we'll show the rich toffs" manner. Well they certainly paid for it in the 2010 election and will do so for lets say, about another 20 years.

Rural voters whether they cared or not about hunting saw the vote as proof that labour wasn't in touch with countryside issues- food prices, subsidies, closure of rural services and how British farming was a dying activity. The hunting ban simply galvanised all these issues together. If you talk to people living in rural Britain they still feel passionately that Labour let the countryside go to rot in this period. That's why any move in this country to ban hunting will bring about a meltdown - look at what happened with the Ward Union.

And typically, when if does happen, a proposed ban will come from urban based TDs who don't see the kind of mania this issue raises in the countryside, as it pulls all sorts of other emotions and grudges into the mix. Watch and learn Leinster House, if you don't get countryside issues right they eventually come down on you like a ton of bricks.