4,000+ Qatar-Bound Sheep from Australia Die Within 30 Minutes Aboard Vessel Due to Heat Exhaustion

YouTube/World Society for the Protection of Animals Australia

The heatwave took its toll on 4,179 sheep that died aboard the vessel Bader III on the way to Qatar from Perth. The Herald reported on Thursday the incident which actually happened in August 2013 aboard the exporter Livestock Shipping Service's (LSS) Bader III vessel.

The live export animals were kept inside the ship for 21 days, the very same vessel last weekend where animals were loaded even if the temperature reading that day was 44 degrees.

LSS, based in Jordan, is the being probed by federal agencies over two violations of live export rules in Jordan and Gaza. It took only 30 minutes for the 4,000 plus ship to die when temperatures went up in the Gulf of Aden.

Greens Senator Lee Rihannon described the August death of the sheep as the worse animal disaster at sea in recent past and an example of the failure of the federal government of Australia to regulate the live animal export trade.

Had the incident happened in Australia on the way to a slaughterhouse, those who are involved would have been prosecuted, the senator said. She pushed for an end to live exports and instead suggested to ship the commodity as chilled box meat exports.

However, LSS, in a statement, insisted that it loaded the animals based on Australian standards, but the sheep nevertheless died due to heat exhaustion despite the use of heat stress risk modeling computer software to assess the trips of the firm to the Middle East and northern hemisphere.

However, Animals Australia Director Lyn White said LSS battled a government order to provide the sheep with 10 per cent more space during high-risk trips from Perth to the Middle East during summer.

She said that even during a regular Middle Eastern summer day, the temperature could be in the 40 range which risks the lives of animals. Ms White added, "The suffering of these animals is too horrific even to imagine. In these temperatures, the ship would have turned into an oven, with these thousands of individual sheep literally baking alive."

LSS is insisting it complied with the Department of Agriculture's directive to boost minimum space requirements in its next voyage in Nov 2011, which yielded a low death rate of 0.02 per cent.

Ms White also rejected suggestions to ban live export and shift to chilled meat box exports due to strong cultural preference for freshly slaughtered meat for Middle Eastern nations.