On May 12th, the Japanese Cabinet officially announced that the Director-General of Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters (the Prime Minister) ordered Fukushima governor to euthanize all of the farm animals in the no go zone by permission of their owners and apologized to the farmers in this area.On May 9th We gave the first signature list to the stakeholders with lawmakers. Thanks to you, sire pigs in the no go zone will be relocated to safe areas. We will continue to collect signatures until May 22th.
We are urging the Japanese government to capture as many healthy farm animals as possible and relocate them to public or private farms after radioactive decontamination procedures have been carried out if necessary. While a very large number of farm animals in the evacuation area have already died due to dehydration and starvation, some farm animals are roaming and are presumably still healthy. Also cannibalism is occurring at some of the farms.On May 2nd, 28 horses were transferred to safe areas. None of the horses had confirmed radiation exposure.
On April 26th the Fukushima government started to euthanize farm animals that were severely ill, injured or in distress by permission of their owners within a 20 km (12 mile) radius (the no go zone) of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. There are 376 farm animal facilities holding 870 dairy cattle, 2500 beef cattle, 100 horses, 30,000 pigs and 630,000 chickens. The number of animals to be euthanized is uncertain. ( Photos copyright: Dr.Imamoto.)
