The Sinking Ship: The Romanian Sheep Transport Disaster and the Climate Crisis
By Mia MacDonald, Brighter Green, and Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media
As we write, efforts to save some of the 14,600 sheep who were not drowned or suffocated when a transport ship capsized in the Black Sea off Romania have just ended. Slightly more than 250 sheep are likely to have survived. The pitiable scenes of animals packed together, frantically trying to escape, drew the world’s shocked attention, even during the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. Ire and remorse came from unusual sources. A statement by ACEBOP, an association of Romanian livestock companies, lamented the loss of “thousands of innocent souls” who’d died “for no clear reason.”
The immediate cause of what happened to the vessel, the Queen Hind, en route to Saudi Arabia, isn’t yet clear (improper loading of the ship has been mentioned). However, the deeper reasons for why an accident like this could have occurred are apparent, if you look. Every year, millions of cattle, sheep, and goats are transported in huge containers to and from various regions of the world. Some travel thousands of miles over many days; some ships contain as many as 85,000 animals. These sheep, cows, and very young calves, among others, are transported live so they can be fattened for slaughter, or freshly killed once they arrive to meet religious restrictions, or for their meat to be frozen and sent on to yet more destinations.
Transporting animals alive or dead, sick or healthy, in trucks, trains, and boats across vast distances is what passes for efficient food delivery in this globalized world. Many die en route. Usually, the fate of these “innocent souls” is ignored, their deaths simply an unremarkable fact in a global supply that there’s little interest in slowing down. Romania has become a popular embarkation site for sheep destined for slaughter in the Middle East, and the value of European Union live exports of farmed animals has more than tripled since 2000.
The ultimate reason why those sheep met their watery doom is because we rear and eat them and other domesticated animals in huge numbers (the “seafood” hauled in probably numbers in the trillions). Increasingly, these animals are confined by the thousands in enormous factory farms (in August, China completed construction of a facility in Vietnam that will raise an astounding 300,000 pigs annually), out of sight, out of mind, and beyond ethical consideration.
In addition, billions more animals die each year along the food chain before their time: whether they are “bycatch” trapped by fifty-mile-long fishing lines, or they expire from or are culled because of zoonotic diseases, or they’re ground up for fertilizer (as male chicks routinely are in the egg industry). Even though many of these fish, birds, and mammals are themselves barely beyond infancy, their premature deaths barely affect the bottom line. After all, they’re easily replaceable, as are thousands who’ve just drowned off the Romanian coast.
Due to the efforts of photojournalists, rescuers, and activists, when events occur like the sinking of the Queen Hind we see the animals — their fear, their need, their absolute vulnerability and, among the survivors, their resilience — and we have a chance to confront our complicity in their life and death (Usually most of us still consider “livestock” interchangeable, indistinguishable, meat-on-the-hoof.) Perhaps we, too, like ACEBOP recognize the pointlessness of the sheeps’ death and echo the quasi-religious reference to them as “innocent souls,” evoking the language customarily applied to human maritime disasters.
The graphic images of the sheep drowning or suffocating in the cold Black Sea waters arrived on our screens the same day another UN report was released describing how far our governments and industries are from meeting the Paris climate accord’s goals of keeping temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. (Current estimates are a rise of 3.6°C by that date.) Pound for pound, sheep are the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs); but animal agriculture as a whole is a significant contributor (at least 14.5 percent) to GHGs globally. It’s also a major facet in massive biodiversity loss due to land-use change, such as clearing forests and other vegetation to make way for pasture, or the feed crops required.
Scientists are attempting to adjust the feed and genetics of sheep to lower their environmental and GHG impacts. But increasing temperatures will lead to more heat stress for farmed animals, meaning more will have to be reared indoors. This almost certainly compromises their welfare, uses more fossil fuels for heating or cooling, and supplies more opportunities for zoonotic diseases to spread.
Perhaps the sheep who survived the Black Sea waters will be allowed to live out their lives at a sanctuary, as advocates are requesting, instead of being put on the next transport vessel. Perhaps the disaster will lead to some concrete changes, like reducing the number and density of sheep, calves, or cows loaded for long-distance transport. Perhaps the EU and other governments will move closer to banning live exports, as growing numbers of their citizens demand.
But although welcome, these measures seem like rearranging the deck chairs on a ship that’s already sinking. Starting Monday, the planet’s countries will gather in Madrid at COP 25 to assess the progress, or lack thereof, toward arresting the climate crisis. The lessons of the Queen Hind for us couldn’t be clearer: We need to turn the ship around.
This means a commitment to phasing out industrial animal agriculture by 2050; investing massively in the burgeoning field of plant- and cultivated-meat and dairy alternatives; and stopping the expansion of monocultures of feedstock and instead protecting and restoring biologically diverse ecosystems for the vital services they provide.
If we fail, not only will there be more heart-rending disasters like the capsizing of this sheep transport ship, but we’ll all at risk of being in deep water — literally.
Mia MacDonald is the Executive Director of Brighter Green. Brighter Green is participating in COP 25 in Madrid. Read Brighter Green’s research on climate change and animal agriculture here. Jo-Anne McArthur is a photojournalist and author and is the founder of We Animals Media, a media agency focused on the stories of animals trapped in the human world. For more of McArthur’s work on animals in transport, click here.
