This follows an incident on Wednesday when three cattle escaped from the exhibition centre and fled through the city in a state of stress. Two children were injured. OLMA is Switzerland's largest public fair.

One of the escaped animals was finally shot by a gamekeeper. The attempts to catch the animal were futile and the animal was very aggressive and stressed, the St Gallen city police reported on Thursday.

+ Two children injured by cattle at Swiss fair

PETA wrote in a statement on Friday that high noise levels, crowds of people“and aggressive guests” put the animals at the fair under enormous stress.“We demand that the organisers finally remove animals from the programme and focus the fair on vegan and sustainable agriculture,” the statement continued.

“We are not planning an OLMA without animals”, Katrin Meyerhans, head of products, OLMA Messen St Gallen, told Swiss public broadcaster SRF. Animal welfare is a very high priority for those responsible for the fair, she said, adding that animal husbandry is constantly monitored.

+ Is it ethical to have big cats in the circus?

The reasons why the cattle were able to escape from the exhibition centre are still unclear to those responsible at OLMA, Meyerhans explained on Thursday when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency.“We are reviewing our procedures at the OLMA animal exhibition and, if necessary, making additional structural and organisational adjustments to ensure that such an incident does not happen again.”

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at ...

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo certified by the Journalism Trust Initiati

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at ....