20/07/2020

In a statement sent to the Public Prosecutor c/o the Tribunale di Tempio Pausania, IHP lists a number of issues - including eye witness reports from passengers on the same ferry – asking for all those responsible to be identified.

Transport company: as we stated in our previous press release, the law quite clearly places on the transport company the responsibility of constant due vigilance of the welfare of the horses in transit, and that this vigilance must be even more stringent in cases of journeys lasting longer than 8 hours, with the added obligation of using specific monitoring guidelines.

Transport company and Captain of the ferry: these share equal responsibility for the regulations cited above for the simple reason that the Captain is considered to be the ‘transporter’ while the animals are physically on board his ship.

Owner of the horses: while this person is not legally responsible for the on-board transport of the animals, we ask ourselves how come those horses travelled on the same day as their races took place, given that it is common practice (and, we would add, common sense) to travel them two days prior to racing, given the length of the journey, in order to give them time to recover. Furthermore, from the press statement issued by the owner, he was present both at the loading and offloading of the horses, and therefore knew full well that they travelled in the hold and not on deck.

Eye witness reports confirm that during the night the air in the hold was virtually unbreathable and this probably not just because of the heat: it would seem that the lorries, including the one containing the horses, were loaded tightly nose to tail, and that alongside the horse box there was a refrigerated lorry – which is known to consume oxygen, and increase the heat in the surrounding area, while the refrigeration unit is functioning. It appears that it was only after much insistence and dispute that someone (and this was neither the owner nor the driver) managed to persuade the below-decks operatives to switch on the ventilation system. But as witnesses affirm, this apparently was done for just a couple of hours, after which the hold returned to a totally airless area.
The ferry company and the Captain have all declared that all the horses were alive when the lorry disembarked and that therefore their deaths would have been ascertained immediately. We would like to know how they will prove this version of events, given that from the outside (according to our eye witnesses) it was virtually impossible to actually see inside the horsebox.

One last question we consider needs investigating: why, having noticed there were four horses dead, would the owner and the horsebox driver not immediately have called the police, choosing instead to leave the port of Olbia and head for the Chilivani racecourse (a distance of over 70 km) with four dead horses on board, plus risking the lives of the remaining five, more than certainly exhausted, horses? This does not seem to us to be a credible way of dealing with the issue.

We trust that the Prosecutor’s Office will leave no stone unturned in ascertaining the facts leading to these deaths, and that certain types of horse transport will be explicitly prohibited in the future.


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