The trial of merchants, veterinarians and wholesalers in butcher’s shop has been helping to reveal, since Monday, January 9, the illegal practices that lead laboratory horses to the plates of consumers.
By Luc Leroux (Marseille, correspondent)
On the phone, two makeign are talking about a truck charged with seventeen horses, ready to go for a slaughterhouse in Poland.
“Hi Robert. We are bored with five or six [horses] … they do not want to make us the [carnets] health [intra -community exchange] because there are not the [sheets of] treatments medication. Could you do them?
– Yeah! When do you want to do it? “
In the hearing room of the Marseille Criminal Court, the president, Céline Ballerini, continues the broadcast of the telephone listening recorded by the gendarmes in 2013. The conversations draw the contours of a vast fraud which made it possible to kill In Narbonne (Aude), Equevillon (Jura), but also in Spain, Italy and Poland, hundreds of horses unfit for human consumption.
The maneuvers used are revealed over the interrogations of defendants. Seventeen are present out of the twenty-five which are judged for a massive recourse to false administrative and health documents, as well as for a deception of butchers and consumers on the substantial qualities of marketed meat.
Regulation expert
Breeds on a checkered flannel shirt, Robert Brondex, 68, evacuates in two words his professional career: agricultural worker at a cattle merchant, then horses trader on his own in Chambéry. “I bought my first horse at 13.” He is also a half-time Bouvier, at the Chambéry slaughterhouse. On listening, we intend to join Patrick Rochette, wholesaler in meat in Narbonne, about “a good little haflinger mare who has no papers”. “The [transponder] chip, I’m going to put it on,” he said. But he is looking for an identification book. In this environment, we are exchanged from dead horses passports that can be used for undocumented animals, with the only concern that the breed and the color of the dress are close.
This is what happened with bibiche and blueberry mares. The latter, which Robert Brondex had sold to Patrick Rochette on the Beaucroissant cattle fair (Isère), was shot in 2009 and his passport was used to shoot Bibiche, several years later.
“All life was the hassle with the horse papers,” said Patrick Rochette in front of the judges. On the listening, we discover it as a real expert in the regulations and great manitou of equine documents. “These mares, if they do not have papers, I can arrange for export,” he reassures a correspondent. For another, it is a question of replacing the “owner card” of the horse, which excluded it from the slaughter. The advice is exchanged: for export, it is recommended to say that it is for breeding, suggesting that horses will be sold to individuals or clubs and, on the way, it is enough to “check the slaughterhouse box “.
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