Animal Rights in Vietnam

Animal welfare issues in Vietnam have attracted international attention, after Animals Australia released footage of cattle – exported live from Australia – being slaughtered with sledgehammers. Other footage gathered during investigation has not been released as it was deemed too upsetting. Animals Australia says the video footage is from April.

Although exports will not be banned, this is big enough news that the Vietnamese embassy in Canberra has taken an unusual step and released a statement. Of course, it does not say very much. “Viet Nam has issued many legal documents regulating the slaughtering process of livestock. To ensure the welfare of animals, the Government has set out various standards for transportation, abattoir conditions, humane slaughtering process....(four dot ellipsis embassy's own).” The statement says that approved abattoirs have been in compliance with the Australian Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System, but has forwarded the reports back to Vietnam. Of course, the problem is not approved abattoirs but the unapproved ones.   

These slaughterhouses are operating outside of official supply chains. Viet Nam News suggests that only a third of slaughterhouses in Vietnam are under government control. What the paper calls “small and non-mechanized” slaughterhouses create serious problems for food hygiene, according to a recent seminar in Ho Chi Minh City.

“State management of livestock and poultry transport and slaughterhouses cannot meet demand,” Pham Van Dong, head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development's Veterinary Department, told the paper. It is these unregistered slaughterhouses that are killing cattle in such inhumane ways; supply chain leakage is a serious issue.

HCMC-based Thanh Nien News quoted the general director of meat supplier Vissan, who said, “The image of someone using a sledgehammer to kill a cow could only be seen at a small, possibly unlicensed abattoir and thus there’s no chance it was a cow imported from Australia. ”

An unquoted source in agricultural news outlet The Land contradicts this, “There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of leakage in the system and everyone’s doing it.”

In Australia, the Department of Agriculture is investigating three allegations of cattle being moved outside supply chains. This isn’t the first time Australia has had to check supply chain leakage and allegations of inhumane slaughter in Vietnam, the department conducted an investigation in 2013 and discovered more than 90 cattle had gone missing. Vietnam is now the second biggest importer in Australia’s live cattle trade, after Indonesia, with the trade valued at some A$186 million ($146 million) a year. Australia supplies 70 percent of Vietnam’s beef now and exported 178,000 head of cattle last year.

Dog Thieves and Bear Bile

The treatment of animals is slowly becoming an issue in Vietnam  Dog thieves, who steal pets to sell to restaurants, are regularly severely beaten, or even killed, when they are caught. However, this is generally seen as more of an issue of property. Younger and more educated Vietnamese also turn their noses up at endangered species on the menu, or bear bile.

According to one Vietnamese woman, who lives in a province an hour northeast of Hanoi, attitudes to animal welfare were still somewhat inchoate. “The attitude about animal welfare may be changing a little, but not much,” she said. The woman said that there were many campaigns featuring celebrities calling for rare animals to be protected, but few were concerned with humane slaughter. “They don't care about killing animals painfully or not.”

Animals Asia would disagree. Director Tuan Bendixsen said in a statement to The Diplomat, “The rights of animals is one of the hottest topics in Vietnam right now and the country deserves great credit for hosting such a well-informed debate in its media.  We are seeing a huge upsurge, especially amongst the young, in interest in animal welfare and the demand for change.”

Of course, those who are interested are young urbanites who are unlikely to ever work in an unregistered slaughterhouse in the countryside. Yet Bendixsen pointed out that the country's top legislative body, the National Assembly, is drafting animal welfare legislation. While much legislation, from protecting the environment to the banning of smoking in restaurants, goes largely ignored it is, as activists always say, a good first step. Vietnam has signed agreements, via the World Organisation for Animal Health,  on humane slaughter.

Possibly one of the more emblematic stories to highlight animal welfare in Vietnam was the Bac Ninh pig slaughter festival, where pigs are publicly decapitated and money dipped into the blood for good luck. Animals Asia started a campaign to have the festival stopped, thanks to its cruelty. Villages, however, said that the festival was part of their heritage. The issue, and graphic videos of the slaughter, made international headlines. Though the event did go ahead it did so in a modified form and the pigs had their throats cut rather than being decapitated. Such debates over tradition have become more commonplace in Vietnam in the last decade, as while heritage is considered very important by both the government and people no one wants to appear “backwards” and the government has long tried to stamp out anything it deems too “superstitious”; spirit mediums have long had a difficult time in the country thanks to this.

Quite how the issue with the cattle is going to be resolved is not yet clear. Governments on both sides have promised investigations, but no one wants to upset trade so beneficial to both parties. But live export will remain controversial as Vietnam struggles to bring many sectors, not just cattle, out of pervasive grey and black markets.