03/06/2026

San Cristoforo and Librino, May 2026: seizures, fines and a database that doesn’t add up. A snapshot of an area where the traceability of equines is systematically lacking.

On 28 May, officers from the General Prevention and Public Rescue Office of the Catania Police Headquarters, in collaboration with the ASP Veterinary Service, discovered and seized three ponies being kept inside an unauthorised building in the San Cristoforo district. The animals were hidden in the dark, in a dilapidated building, without microchips or any registration. The attending vet deemed the conditions to be indicative of mistreatment. The operation had begun with a search for ponies believed to have been involved in an illegal race that had taken place in the preceding days: the checks led first to the seizure of an initial animal in an unauthorised stable nearby, then — through a metal grille — to the discovery of the other two, locked in the darkness of a building deemed structurally at risk of collapse.

Forty-eight hours earlier, on 26 May, the Carabinieri from the Catania Librino station had inspected a breeding farm in the neighbourhood with the support of ASP veterinarians: three horses present compared to seven listed in the National Equine Database, a registered owner listed as deceased, unupdated changes of ownership, and an animal without a microchip or health check. Fines totalling €1,450 and an obligation to regularise the situation.

Two operations, two neighbourhoods, the same week. And the same underlying issue: a database that does not reflect reality, animals that exist in reality but not in the records, or that exist in the records but not in reality. It is precisely in this discrepancy that the illegal supply chain – illegal racing, illegal keeping, and illegal slaughter – finds its advantage. Inefficient traceability is not a bureaucratic dysfunction: it is the condition that makes everything else possible.

IHP has been documenting this mechanism for years. It did so with the story of Evenafterall, a thoroughbred who moved from racecourses to Sicilian illegal racing via unrecorded movements. It did so with Sacher and Muffin, seized in December 2024 in the same San Cristoforo neighbourhood and now safe in the province of Arezzo. It is doing so by acting as a civil party in the Perugia trial concerning ‘ghost’ horses sent for illegal slaughter with the complicity of those operating the National Database.

The three ponies from San Cristoforo have been entrusted to a specialist facility. The question that remains unanswered does not concern them: it concerns all the others who find themselves in the same conditions in buildings that no one has yet opened.