Live Export of Farm Animals

Abstract

Every year livestock producers send millions of cows, pigs, sheep, and other farm animals on international journeys to slaughter in foreign lands. This “live export trade” is valuable and widespread—worth roughly $21 billion a year to the estimated 109 countries that engage in it. But, as the trade has expanded over the last century, it has also become a source of increasing public controversy due to the abuses that animals often suffer in the trade. This chapter documents the history of the trade, its current state, and the nascent legal framework that regulates it. I argue that the legal framework has failed to address the animal welfare problems associated with the trade. Several more promising international legal solutions exist to ameliorate problems associated with the trade—particularly working through international institutions and adopting a live export treaty. But only one reform will end the cruelty associated with the trade: abolishing the live export trade itself.