Ontario man Manfred Loerzel’s livestock shipment business is still up and running after being fined twice for inhumane transport of horses.

Last year, Canadian Food Inspection Agency fined him and his company, Loerzel Farm Transport Inc., $26,000 for causing the deaths of two horses during transportation. The agency’s investigation suggests the trailer that his company used had projections that injured the horses, which violates the Health of Animals Act.

According to the agency’s prosecution records, that act brought in $297,000 through fines since 2011, the highest among other regulations. And of all the eight cases, four are about inhumane transport of horses, and Loerzel’s company are involved in two of them.

Allison Danyluk Roff, a veterinarian with the agency’s office in Regina, does road checks on livestock trailers along two local highways. “The most common noncompliance in my opinion is overcrowding,” says Danyluk Roff, “and people often mixing different classes of horses together in a trailer, they could get aggressive.”

Heather Clemenceau from the Canadian House Defence Coalition, says the group is working on an access to information request to try to identify more of the ill-treatments to horses during shipments.

She says in one such incident, a horse fell down the trailer after the driver hit the brake suddenly. However, the driver continued on to his destination knowing the female horse was down, which left the horse suffering in pain for more than six hours.

Clemenceau says in other cases, horses coming in from the U.S. are left too long without feed and water. Canadian Food Inspection Agency staff check and seal loads of horses at border checkpoints. The agency says the horses should remain on the truck overnight so their staff don’t have to cut the seal and reseal again. But this could leave the horses more than a day without food. Canadian regulations allow horses to be transported for up to 36 hours without a break.

International horsemeat supplier

Horse shipments along the Canada-U.S. border have been increasing since 2006, when the American government initially banned horse slaughter for human consumption. As a result, the number of horses slaughtered in Canada in federally and provincially inspected establishments has more than doubled from 2006 to 2008.

The Canadian Horse Defence Coalition identified four major Canadian slaughterhouses, where live horses imported from south of the border are being killed.

According to figures from Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Canada exported 13,960,034 kilograms of horsemeat last year. Canadian Meat Council says the major markets include Switzerland, Japan, France, Belgium and Kazakhstan.

Bankrupt farmer gets fresh start with livestock transport business

Former Ontario farmer Loerzel declared bankruptcy in 2005. According to his Statement of Affairs document, he owed $799,000 to 44 creditors, including a finance company, a farm equipment company, a cell phone carrier, a car dealer and a bank. However, at the time of the bankruptcy, he had only $3,601 worth of assets to pay his creditors.

Loerzel owned two farm properties together with his parents before running into debt, and he got the sole ownership after the death of his parents. However, the TD Bank seized and sold the two properties in 2003 and 2004 after he lost a business contract.

A year after filing bankruptcy, Loerzel was cleared from all the debt because his creditors recognized he had no money to pay back his debt. Loerzel also gets to keep most of his assets, including household goods and his 1994 Ford car as those items are deemed of little value. The $100 his had on hand before declaring bankruptcy was used to cover the fee to file claim with the Office of the Superintendent and Bankruptcy.

According to records kept by Ontario government services, Loerzel incorporated his livestock transport company, Loerzel Farm Transport Inc., in 2007. But two years into his business, veterinary inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found through their routine inspections that the trailer his company used had sharp angles that caused injuries to a number of horses and death to two horses. In 2010, during similar inspections, the agency staff once again concluded Loerzel’s company did not provide an adequate mode of transportation.

However, it wasn’t until three years later, when the Ontario Court of Justice in Windsor finally registered two convictions against both of the incidents, and struck down a total fine of $72,000.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency declined to give more details on the two cases. And the Ontario court of Justice says there’s no record of Loerzel’s company being fined.

Whether Loerzel paid the fines or not remains a question. But his company, Loerzel Farm Transport Inc., is still registered with the Ontario government with an active status.

Canada exports horses for slaughter too?

An article on the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition website, dated October 18, 2012, says draft horses from Alberta being shipped to Japan from Calgary International Airport are jammed in wooden crates to the point that they can’t stand.

The group says since 2009, it has been receiving anonymous footage showing horses being loaded into trucks with electronic prods and transported to the airport.

The article reveals draft horses from Canadian producers have been routinely shipped to Japan via airports in Calgary and Winnipeg. And they get slaughtered in Japan for horse sashimi, which is a Japanese raw meat dish, once they grow bigger and meet certain weight limits.

However, on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s website, horses exported to Japan are only identified as for permanent stay or racing. Among the more than 30 countries that buy live horses from Canada, only the U.S. has a category that says for “immediate slaughter.”

In the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition article, it quotes a 2008 Alberta Horse Welfare Report, saying the horses exported to Japan are worth $20,000 each.