Ada Cole the founder of the ILPH

In the Spring of 1911, Ada Cole stood on the docks in Antwerp, Belgium. The sight that met her eyes led to the ILPH’s foundation. In the midst of the bustle of a busy dockside she noticed old and work-worn British horses shuffling off a cargo boat on their painful journey to be pole axed in a Belgian abattoir. What she saw that day horrified her so much that she began a campaign that was to consume her for the rest of her life.

Ada’s efforts in raising public awareness to the export of horses for slaughter came to fruition in 1914 with an Act of Parliament, which amended an 1898 Government Order and prohibited the export of horses unless a veterinary inspector certified the animals “to be capable of being conveyed and disembarked without cruelty”. It also stated that every vessel carrying horses should carry a proper humane killer.

Ada Cole worked as a nurse during the First World War and was arrested for helping allied prisoners escape. She spent three months in a German prison under sentence of death and it was only the armistice that saved her. In January 1919 at the end of war, at the age of 58, Ada left Belgium to return to Norfolk

In her absence, not only had the 1914 Act remained unenforced, but also it had failed to be enacted. She lobbied tirelessly for a carcass trade and sought, above all, an act of Parliament that would finally put a stop to the traffic of British horses for slaughter abroad.

During this time another society had been formed independent of the RSPCA or Ada Cole’s Old Horse Traffic Committee, as it was then known. At first it was called the National Council Against the Export of Horses for Butchery and later became the National Council for Animal Welfare.

Ada recognized that this new society had the money and social influence that she needed and eventually, in 1927 the two societies merged becoming the International League Against the Export of Horses for Butchery and subsequently the International League for the Protection of Horses.

For the next three years Ada worked tirelessly attempting to bring in her own Bill but when the RSPCA supplied humane killers for the notorious Parisian slaughterhouse Vaugirard, the Government rejected Ada’s bill on the grounds that the problems no longer existed. She was exhausted, felt beaten and on 17 October 1930 she died in her room next to her office at the age of 70. Seven years later the Exportation of Horses Act, drafted by Sir George Cockerill, first Honorary Director of the ILPH (1931-1957), came into being. This Act established the principle of Minimum Values - that no horse under a certain value could be exported live from Britain - which fulfilled Ada Cole’s dream and has effectively ended trafficking in live horses from Britain to this day.

Since then her charity, the ILPH, has grown to become one of the world’s leading international equine welfare charities.
Ada Cole, is the founder of the International League for the Protection of Horses, Ada Cole campaigned for horse welfare, as a campaigner her campaign for minimum values led to Ada Cole rescue horses from the stables on the docks of Antwerp, Ada Cole has to be considered one of the leading Horse Welfare figures.