Guarded convoys carrying HK$100M ($12.9M) of racehorses "will be tracked every step of the way when the VIAs (very important animals) are whisked through the Shenzhen Bay border checkpoint" and on their way to the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s new "state-of-the-art training facility" in Conghua, near Guangzhou, according to Noel Prentice of the SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST. Jockey Club officials will spend the next 18 months "testing all security and safety procedures in the transportation and care of the horses" before the HK$3B ($390M) facility -- "a cross between Andorra and Alcatraz -- is up and running." GPS tracking, security details, vets and "highly trained personnel" will ensure the four-and-a-half-hour trip from Sha Tin to Conghua (and return) goes "without a hitch." All personnel "will be searched and horse trailers scanned for any smuggled goods and then sealed before leaving Sha Tin." Once the horses arrive in Conghua, "they will enter a disease-free zone where bio security measures are heightened because of the risks and lack of quarantine and animal controls on the mainland." Towering electric fences will keep other animals -- and humans -- away, "while the entire complex will be under 24-hour surveillance with 1,600 cameras around the 150-hectare facility" -- more than twice the size of the Sha Tin complex. Jockey Club Head of Veterinary Clinical Service Christopher Riggs said that bio security gates and airlocks, disinfectant washes and human screening "will be in place to ensure a disease-free and secure environment." Riggs said that each convoy -- "up to four or five specially designed lorries where horses are housed in tubes" -- will have a security detail in front and behind. A vet will also be in the convoy, "along with dedicated grooms, and the horses watched on video the whole time" (SCMP, 12/10).
