Cows Make Crappy Sailors

Safely transporting animals at sea has been a difficult problem ever since Noah accidentally penned the lions next to the unicorns.   For livestock at sea, voyages have pretty much always been dangerous, even if lions stayed on their side of the boat.

From the earliest day, sailing ships frequently carried caged animals to provide food for the crew.  Sheep, chickens, and pigs were the most common, but by the 17th century, merchant ships were larger and more efficient, providing enough space for even cattle.  Ships of the line needed large crews and didn’t have much space, but still managed to haul just enough livestock to supplement the meals of the officers.  The rest of the crew ate salted meat or did without.

Still, there were difficulties—the animals died frequently, succumbing to diseases brought on by tainted water, rough treatment, and lack of exercise, but the most common reason for the livestock perishing prematurely was because the ships ran out of proper forage for the animals.  The exception to this were the pigs, who frequently were fed the same daily rations as the crew. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the crew wasn’t very happy to learn they were only fed as well as the pigs.

Among the host of reasons why the United States was victorious in its revolution against the British was the near impossibility of Great Britain’s supplying its Army with enough food to mount an offensive against the rebel army.   In 1775, the British mounted the largest attempt to supply an army in a foreign land until the African campaign of World War II.  A fleet of cargo ships carried hundreds of tons of food and 4,000 head of sheep and pigs.  It was a magnificent attempt and a tragic failure.

After a storm delayed the fleet, only 148 animals reached the Americas alive.  The only food stocks to survive the trip were sauerkraut and porter, the latter greatly diminished by a thirsty crew.  (No mean feat when you consider that each of the crew was already rationed a gallon of beer a day.)    

For decades, the cattle that ranged across the Argentine pampas were only consumed locally, with just their hides and tallow being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe.  This changed dramatically in the years 1876-77 when the fist refrigerated ships began shipping hard frozen beef to France.  Ten years later, there were more than four dozen such ships operating between Buenos Aires and Great Britain and merely a decade later, there were almost 300 such ships.  (Railroads largely killed off the American cowboys, but in Argentina, the gauchos were the victims of refrigerated ships.)

Today, with flash frozen food processes and high-tech refrigerated cargo ships, you would think that such problems are exclusively the interest of retired historians with an overly eclectic taste in reading material.  Unfortunately, animal losses while being transported at sea is not only still a problem, but losses happen more frequently than in the eighteenth century.

Last December, the Elbenik set sail for Turkey from Spain loaded with 1800 bulls bound for special slaughterhouses where the cattle would be killed, butchered, and prepared as halal to meet the dietary requirements of Muslims.  The ship should have made the journey in only 11 days, but the Covid pandemic closed ports and left the ship stranded at sea for 90 days.  Despite humanitarian efforts by the Greek navy, the Elbenik ran out of fodder for its cargo and the bulls slowly starved to death, their bodies being thrown overboard and left to rot in the coastal waters off Turkey.  By the time the ship finally made her way back to Spain, the 1,600 bulls still clinging to life were so sick that authorities were forced to euthanize all of them.

Today, the live animal trade is a $18 billion a year industry, transporting an estimated 2 billion cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens.  Far more often than you would think or wish, those animals die in transit.  To be fair, in any large group of animals, a few would die under the best of circumstances.  Australia, whose regulations are pretty much the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to setting up animal safety guidelines, requires adequate food and water, safe and sanitary enclosures, and the presence of a veterinarian on long voyages.  While Australia tries to keep animal losses to 0.05%, they actually average 0.11%.  For other countries, the averages are much, much higher.

Outside of Australia, there are almost no requirements for safely shipping livestock.  To put this bluntly, a shipload of sheep and a shipload of wool sweaters have exactly the same international shipping regulations.  

While any delay in a ship’s completing a voyage—whether it is due to an overcrowded port or an engine failure—can result in a ship’s running out of food for the animals it carries, this is not the only way animals can perish at sea.  Unless the animals are shipped from Australia, the animals are likely to be caged in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and with inadequate ventilation.  One UN health agency reported that the average conditions on such ships were “ideally suited for spreading disease.”—some of which diseases can be transferred to humans.

And you may not believe this, but no life preservers or lifeboats are built to meet the needs of a 1,700-pound steer.  For livestock, every maritime emergency is a reenactment of the sinking of the Titanic.

Last year, 6,000 cattle and 40 crew members perished when a cargo ship sank off the coast of Japan.  The year before, 14,000 sheep were lost when a docked ship caught fire.  Far more regular, however, are the losses due to mechanical breakdowns that delay a ship’s arrival in port, thus starving the animals.  If a ship’s water-making system breaks down, if there’s a water leak in the fodder storage area, or if a ship’s engine develops a problem that forces the ship to travel at a slower rate—any of these relatively “normal malfunctions” can result in the livestock dying..

In 2015, a livestock carrier capsized off the coast of Brazil, causing loss of all 5,000 cows loaded aboard.  As the photo to the right shows, many of the drowned cattle washed up on shore.  

Most present-day livestock carriers were converted from aging container ships and are no longer able to compete with newer and much larger ships.  The Elbenik, for example, was 53 years old when the bulls perished and the vessel had failed several safety inspections in recent years.  According to one study, due to age and lack of maintenance, livestock carriers were twice as likely to sink compared to the average cargo ships.

The problem is extremely difficult to regulate as the animals usually die in International Waters and few international bodies like the UN or the EU want to deal with the problem as many of their constituent nations are engaged in either the export or the import of livestock.  Australia, the only nation to tackle the problem, has established strict guidelines and regulations to insure animal safety, but the cost of implementing these reforms has made it cheaper for their customers to buy from those competing nations with fewer restrictions and a larger appetite for profits.  The only nation currently considering similar regulations is New Zealand.

Perhaps it is time that all the developing nations act together. Banning the import or export of livestock for human consumption would be a good start.  Transporting livestock for breeding purposes, racing, and for other commercial purposes could continue.  A century and a half after the invention of refrigerated ships, there is no longer a real need for continuing the cruelty of shipping live animals on unsafe ships.

There is a simple reason the problem still exists—a cargo hold full of sheep are just not very photogenic.  Take another look at that photo of the beach covered with dead cows, but this time imagine them standing up in a crowded cargo hold.  That image is not very photogenic, it is not the kind of thing that Greenpeace will show on a commercial begging for your donation.  You might donate money to save the whales, do you care if 14,000 sheep drown?