Animals' Angels is in Greece for the third time. We are documenting whether animals are still being transported in the high temperatures. We measure temperatures of 35 °C in the afternoon with peaks up to 49 °C. Nevertheless, lambs from Romania are still transported through this heat.
We find Dorothea and Alexandra inside the trucks, with their long fleece, breathing heavily. It must be exhausting to be forced to stay in contact with your companions. When the only thing you need is fresh air, to feel relief. Or when your only desire is to rehydrate, but drinkers are turned on only for one hour –or the drinkers are too far and you must walk through the crowd to reach them, but you are without strength. In fact, we only saw David grabbing one of the metal drinking nipples installed on the truck and spilling water from it. We always feel a little relief when we see that some drivers turn the water system on, even if the law requires it for only one hour. Even though we are aware that most of the animals are not able to reach them, because there are too many animals compared to the number of drinkers in a truck and often the animals do not even recognize them or don’t know to use them as they never had it at the farm.
We complained again asking Romania to stop exporting lambs to Greece in July and August, because of extreme heat. We asked the Romanian and Greek authorities to activate animal welfare controls of transports at borders. We informed the European Commission, after seeing how much the animals were crammed and gasping in the trucks. We must say that this summer, we saw less transports than last year. We need to believe that this is also due to our presence on the roads and our constant pressure.
