Hillside's Investigation. No Prosecution in Sight..Typical

Why did RSPCA not prosecute?  They had plenty evidence...FSA ''did not want them involved''  so it ends up with no-one being prosecuted for blatant cruelty...we all remember the video. It makes a mockery of the people who have taken the trouble to obtain the evidence. Let's not forget a posse of 13...yes, that's right. 13...arrived mob-handed to take John Spicer off in a squad car. But of course, John was/is a harmless elderly gentleman. Hmmmm.

By 2012, we were rescuing an escalating number of horses from slaughter. In fact from January up until November of that year we had already given sanctuary to an exidence (nore than they normally have in fact) tra 300 horses, ponies and donkeys including some of those you can see above.  We decided to find out exactly what we were saving these horses from and launched one of Hillside's most in-depth investigations into the UK's largest horse slaughterhouse  - The Red Lion Abattoir in Nantwich.

During our eight-week investigation, we filmed over a hundred hours of footage, on which we captured evidence of horses suffering immense cruelty and abuse while they were being killed there.  Our footage showed many breaches of animal welfare regulations and yet, to date, despite three slaughterhouse workers immediately being suspended following release of our daming evidence -  STILL NONE HAVE BEEN PROSECUTED.

On completion of our investigation, both the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the RSPCA immediately contacted us with a view to prosecuting the cruel offenders.  The FSA were adament that they didn't want the RSPCA involved and promised to fully review our evidence themselves with a view to prosecuting the slaughtermen and abattoir owners.  However, over a year after we had submitted our footage to the FSA, they admitted they had not even watched it!   With no sign of any forthcoming prosecution in sight, we now believe the FSA did not want the embarrassment of this being brought to court.  We think, on this occasion, the RSPCA WOULD have taken legal action against the abattoir as it would have been a high profile case.

Footnote 1...
You may be interested to know that, although 18 months after our horse slaughterhouse investigation, no action has been taken against the perpetrators - and delaying tactics were used by the FSA while they thought public interest would wane - a woman who phoned the Red Lion Abattoir, after our footage was released, telling the owners, in no uncertain terms, what she thought of them, soon found herself in court, being fined and given community service for harrassing them!!!

Footnote 2...
You may be surprised to learn that Chairman of the Food Standards Agency, Tim Bennett, was once the President of the National Farmers' Union.  We have to ask how somebody can go from protecting the interests of farmers to protecting the public from farming malpractices.


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They always seem to shy away from prosecuting bigger concerns.
If that was Granny Jones her feet wouldn`t have touched the floor.