Australian sheep dragged off a ship upon arrival in the Middle East

Australian cattle aboard the ‘Maysora’ for the Middle East

These cattle have had their throats slit whilst fully conscious: Middle East

Cattle strung up prior to having their throats cut

The Dead – Middle East

 

What is “Animal Welfare”?

To understand the true objectives of animal welfare organisations and the ordinary people who object to the ways some animals in society are treated, one has to undertake the following exercise.

First... rid your mind of all your current views about animal distinctions and class. Free your psyche of the ideas you may have held for many years about there being a difference between farm animals, domestic animals, companion animals, pretty animals, not so pretty animals, animals you may be afraid of or animals you just don't like.

Now.....what do you have left? You only have animals. That is the fundamental idea behind animal welfare. An animal is an animal is an animal; to put it simply - "a mouse is a cat, is a rabbit, is a cow, is a sheep, is a snake, is a pig, is a dog".

All these animals have the same things in common.
They all feel hunger, they all feel thirst and they all feel pain.

This is the ethos of animal welfare organisations and they do not distinguish between animals. Cruelty to a dog is cruelty to a sheep is cruelty to a rat - it is all just cruelty.

There can be no exceptions to cruelty. If a companion animal such as a dog is not permitted to have its tailed docked then the same rule applies to a lamb and that line should never be crossed by any group or political party or individual in our society.

Animal welfare to animal people is about the animal perspective not farmer perspective, horse racing perspective, breeder perspective or laboratory perspective etc. Animal welfare is not about what’s best financially for the farmer or breeder; it’s about what’s best for the animals. This entails their treatment, handling, health, transport and ultimately their death.

Those who use animals such as farmers, animal breeders (dog, cat, horse breeders) laboratories etc view animal welfare only in the context of maximising profits and minimising costs and effort to produce these profits. Animals are seen as the commodities which put money in the bank.

Those of us who are involved in animal welfare are under no illusions that humans will ever reconsider and surrender what society feels is an animal’s place in the food chain but we do ask and expect that the animals which provide farmers and animal users with a livelihood be treated with humanity and compassion and not denied the basic rights to ensure their welfare and well being.

It is also a fact that laws in Australia protect certain ‘farming practices’ such as cutting the tails off piglets, cutting their teeth, castration, mulesing of lambs, and debeaking of chickens all without anaesthetic by calling them animal husbandry techniques. If you were to do these things to your dog or cat, you would face prosecution. So why do farmers get away with it?

They get away with it because the Government/s turns a blind eye. What makes money for the farmer is claimed to make money for the country (as is the case with the recent Hassall Report, which ignores the REAL losses in jobs, GDP and household income), the general public is cocooned and do not see the acts of cruelty which farmers tell them are only undertaken in the best interests of their animals.

As an example, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) showed the world convincingly that in fact these cruel acts do not need to be done at all. Their efforts showed the whole world just why mulesing is really done – essentially to save the farmer money and time. You will find further explanation on mulesing, debeaking, live export, castration and other cruelties as you read on

Firstly let us explain what basic ‘rights’ EVERY animal should have as an absolute minimum.

Animals should not be denied, at the very least, the right to the “Five Freedoms” (as defined by the Brambell Committee in the UK in 1965).

The Five Freedoms are:

1. Freedom from hunger and thirst: by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour;
2. Freedom from discomfort: by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area;
3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease: by prevention through rapid diagnosis and treatment;
4. Freedom to express normal behaviours: by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind; and
5. Freedom from fear and distress: by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

We also expect that animals should be treated with respect and protected from painful and terrifying practices and procedures. We think that most of the community agrees with statement.

To farmers, animals are a means of making money, and their “care” should cost as little as possible whilst their productivity is driven to the maximum. “Animal Welfare” is not actually considered. What is important is making money. It is no coincidence that when a farmer practices positive animal welfare it is only because the results will earn extra money.

Practices and procedures on a farm that would attract prosecution if they were carried out on “companion” animals are carried out as a matter of routine on thousands of farm animals every day.

These practices in fact breach Animal Welfare legislation in every state and territory, but are protected by “Codes of Practice”, developed by government, the livestock industries and often the RSPCA, all working together, which provide exemptions from prosecution under cruelty provisions. Whilst non-compliance with a Code of Practice can support a cruelty prosecution, compliance can also form the basis of a defence.

The community expects more and the farming-transport-live export industries want you to take them on trust, to believe in what they do, that they are looking after the interests of the animals they use.

Animal welfare is not ‘extreme’. It is what good communities do to take care of their animals. We believe Australian society can now see through all the false and misleading statements coming from the farming industry. The simple truth is their greed is what drives the farming industry and animal welfare is not their priority.

Farming practices in Australia permit and endorse numerous animal husbandry techniques (as they prefer to label them) but we shall refer to them by their true name - mutilations.

Following are some examples of ‘surgical mutilations’:

Breech strike

Flies strike mostly in summer. This is when the sheep need to be checked every day and for those sheep who are not mulesed, careful monitoring must be undertaken. Again this adds to production costs and is therefore not favoured by producers.

Those who are aware of this practice find mulesing totally abhorrent; animal welfare groups find mulesing completely unacceptable because there are alternatives. If you did this to your dog or cat, you would be prosecuted. Mulesing is performed because it can be done by anyone, it is cheap, and there is no after care. Lambs can die of shock, septicaemia, or starvation if their mothers reject them. The mustering of ewes and their lambs is very stressful and as a result, mothers will abandon their young. Crutching is more frequent shearing of those areas of the sheep which are prone to flystrike is an alternative to mulesing but again the cost factor comes into the profit margin making it an unattractive alternative for most sheep farmers.

Combined with one or some of the other alternatives which include chemical sprays, breeding for wrinkle free sheep, biological control of flies and more intense monitoring of animals at crucial times would totally eliminate mulesing. Mulesing is outlawed in the UK for the barbaric procedure that it most certainly is. Flystrike does occur in the UK.

Animal advocates, along with society oppose mulesing and believe that good animal management practices will prevent flystrike. However, the procedure remains legal. A trial of a new analgesia has been undertaken recently in Western Australia which proved to be successful. Not surprisingly, the farmer involved thought that at 80 cents per lamb it was too cost prohibitive, which is typical of the mentality. This is a clear demonstration of the attitude of farmers in regard to animal welfare versus production and profit margins.

read more on mulesing - http://liveexportshame.com/mulesing/index.htm

A further method of reducing the incidence of flystrike is ‘pizzle dropping’. Male sheep may soil their underbelly and therefore the fleece, diminishing its value, so the tissue between the body and the penis is cut to enable the penis to hang down away from the body. Pizzle dropping is not practiced widely.

Tail docking of lambs is undertaken on virtually all lambs in Australia in order to reduce flystrike which would be attracted by urine and faeces staining. The tails may be removed through cutting with a knife or by the application of a tight rubber ring. Neither procedure is carried out with anaesthesia , analgesia or by qualified veterinary professionals.

It is common practice that male lambs will be castrated, usually referred to as ‘marking’ at the same time they are tail docked. Similarly, either a knife or a rubber ring will be used. If a knife is used the scrotum is cut and the testes removed, or, if a rubber ring is used, the testes will drop off once the rubber ring has cut off the blood supply and the tissue has atrophied. Both methods cause obvious and prolonged suffering.

Live Exports

Australia exports millions of sheep, cattle, goats, deer, camels and horses to the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asia every year, who are subjected to unspeakable treatment in all stages links of the live export chain. Farmers support the industry because they are able to get a few extra dollars, usually for wethers (castrated rams) passed their wool production prime.

Society finds the live export trade totally unacceptable because it deprives every animal of every one of the five basic freedoms. Terrified animals are crammed into trucks, off loaded into feedlots where they are forced to adapt to unnatural food, then they are re-loaded and taken to ships.

These ships are almost all 20 years old or more and over two million animals have died during the shipboard stage of the process.

M/V “Bader III”

M/V “Al Kuwait”

 

Animals die terrible deaths from “inanition” (starvation), dehydration, heat exhaustion, pneumonia (from breathing ammonia fumes from their own excrement and dust from the pelletized food), disease and trauma from inappropriate or deliberately cruel mishandling. Those who survive the journey are unluckier still.

Swimming in excrement on the M/V “Cormo Express”

Sick cattle on the M/V “Maysora”

 

They arrive in countries where summer temperatures are often 45 degrees or higher. Many are blind from the dust from the dry feed pellets and salt sea spray or lame due to injuries caused by numerous loading and unloading handling or from standing for weeks in urine and faeces.

They are brutally handled, hog-tied, slammed into boots of cars, and dragged mercilessly to slaughter while they are fully conscious.

Slaughter in Bahrain

 

Stabbing cattle in the eyes and lashing their leg tendons is common in Egypt

 

Slaughter in Kuwait

These animals are subjected to inhumane treatment and torture which most decent people would agree is totally unacceptable. Such treatment is not tolerated and is illegal in Australia and most other enlightened’ societies’ but because there are a few more dollars to be made by the farmer (and too many politicians are farmers), live exports continue.

No animal should have its life end in a filthy, disease-ridden ship, be thrown down a chute to be macerated (often still alive), or be thrown overboard to drown or be brutalised in a foreign slaughterhouse.

In spite of the arguments of religious and cultural preferences, the Middle East imports more than 50,000 tonnes of frozen Australian meat every year. This makes government and industry claims that these markets will only accept live animals a fraud in the community. As for the “no refrigeration” argument, how does the freshly slaughtered meat get to its customers, or are we to assume that these millions of animals are eaten “on the spot” immediately after slaughter?

Animal Transport

Every day, tens of thousands of farm animals are transported from farms to feedlots and saleyards, wharves or abattoirs. They are crammed into pens on multi-tiered trucks. There is little to no enforcement of the numbers of animals these trucks are to carry per pen. They are “curfewed” (This means they are deprived of food and water) for various periods prior to transport.

At saleyards animals often are left without food and water for extended periods. At feedlots, they are crammed together with little or no opportunity for normal exercise (much less normal behaviours such as foraging). Most do not provide shade from heat and cold extremes. Animals are routinely transported from Western Australia to the Eastern states because the price might be a few cents a kilogram more in that market.

The farmer, not wanting to pay any more for transport than is absolutely necessary, is not overly concerned with the animal welfare ramifications of any of this.

Typical sheep transporters

Intensive farming of pigs

The powerful pig farmers’ lobby insists that it is for the welfare of these sensitive, intelligent (pigs are known to have the cognitive ability of a three year old child) and clean animals that they spend most of their lives in steel and concrete crates hardly larger than their own bodies. They tell us that living in their own waste, suffering wretched misery, going effectively insane, having their teeth cut, their ears notched and their tails cut off without anaesthetic minimizes “aggression” and is in their (the pigs’) best interests.

If pigs lived as intended – outside wallowing in mud, able to forage, able to build nests for the birth of their young, tooth cutting and tail hacking would be unnecessary, since it is this intense confinement which manifests itself in these types of behaviours.

The other major concern is that intensive piggeries are a breeding ground for all manner of diseases; given pigs are prime incubators for human diseases. The feeding of antibiotics to pigs is, we have been told, common place. It should be a concern for all consumers that eating intensively farmed pork and pork products is creating a tolerance in humans to combat super viruses such as “golden staph” as human resistance diminishes with the ingesting of the antibiotics fed to the pigs.

The “lucky” ones can move one step back or one step forward

Animal advocates find intensive pig farming totally unacceptable because it deprives pigs of all of the five freedoms in the name of economic gain. We are fully aware that these animals live short lifetimes full of suffering and deprivation. Their frustration becomes so extreme that stereotypical behaviours such as bar biting, head swaying and screaming are commonplace, and the only time they experience fresh air and sunshine is when they are loaded on to trucks to be taken to slaughter. During their confinement, which for about 350,000 breeding sows in Australia is most of their lives, they develop heart disease, bone and leg and foot pain and deformities. In addition to this inhumane confinement, surgical mutilations are carried out routinely upon piglets and breeding sows are denied physical interaction with their young. All of this is, of course, unspeakably cruel. Sow stalls are banned in the UK and are being phased out in the EU because of the growing awareness of animal cruelty issues so obvious in type if intense farming.

No chance to interact with her young

Castrating piglets

De-beaking