According to Bob Katter on ABC’s Q&A last Monday night, stopping the live export of cattle to Indonesia would add three million people to the 80 million Indonesians who currently go to bed hungry. According to Katter, stopping the trade was cutting off the protein food supply to three million people. Nobody disputed this.
Katter blamed Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) for not fixing the cruelty problem. He asserted that the cattle producers who had phoned and abused him didn’t know their animals were being treated this way.
It’s a pity we don’t have the equivalent of a driving test for politicians. Something to verify that they have basic numeracy skills before they can stand for Parliament. I’m not too concerned about literasy, what harm duz a few misspelled wurds do anyway? But get the numbers wrong and all kinds of stupid decisions are made.
On a different issue but one which cuts to the heart of having a Parliament dominated by scientific illiterates, Katter thinks 400 ppm (parts per million) CO2 couldn’t possibly make the planet warmer. He thinks he’s worked this out by some analogy where 400 ppm is like holding wire netting over your head.
I don’t think Bob is stupid, just brick ignorant of both science and his own limitations. So Bob, what if the atmosphere was 400 ppm cyanide? What would that do? Toxicologists reckon it would kill all of us. What do they know? They probably haven’t thought of the wire netting argument. Would Bob perhaps like to test his wire netting analogy with a scuba tank filled 400 ppm cyanide?
Now back to Bob and his Indonesian neighbours. Bob, if your reading ... there are 225 million people in Indonesia and the latest UN Food and Agriculture data shows that the Indonesian food supply delivers about 56.8 grams of protein per day per person with just 0.7 grams coming from beef and most of that is Indonesian beef. This amount of protein would be adequate if the food was equitably distributed, but it never is, so many Indonesians are indeed chronically hungry.
But Bob, who do you think eats beef? And who, in particular, eats beef from our cattle? Is it the poor? Is it wealthy tourists? Is it rich Indonesians? Given that beef is more expensive than rice and vegetables, we can assume that the latter two groups do the bulk of the beef buying. Will either rich tourists or rich Indonesians swell the ranks of the hungry as a result of this ban? Of course not.
Now Bob, let’s assume you are correct and that 80 million Indonesians are hungry. That is actually a reasonable estimate based on UN data on childhood undernutrition ... score one for Mr Katter. But this means that the other 145 million Indonesians aren’t hungry. If only three million of them are eating our cattle, as you said Bob, then that’s 142 million people who don’t eat them but aren’t hungry.
My God, where do they get their protein? What a mystery. What a conundrum. Maybe it’s all the chicken meat they eat? Oops no, there’s only two grams of chicken protein available per person per day. Or pigs? Not pigs either, just 0.8 grams of pig protein per day. What about fish and sea food? That’s another 8 grams.
The fact is Bob, that plant protein is the vast majority of protein for all Indonesians, and it is perfectly adequate protein if you get enough food. There is no protein shortage in Indonesia independent of periodic food shortages and of price spikes that make food too expensive to eat.
You expressed an interest in helping the Indonesians as neighbours and as a good Christian. Then how about you start by closing down our feedlots and factory farm pig and chicken sheds? These consume about 12 million tonnes of grain annually. Then Australians who have trouble switching to a vegan diet can eat their own northern cattle which could be killed here and we can supplement the 51 million tonnes of cereals which Indonesia produces and make a real difference.
But if we shut down those pig and chicken sheds, we’d need to eat more grains. Would we have enough? Currently Bob, we eat about 1.8 million tonnes of cereals and that provides more protein than all the chicken and pig meat combined. Really. That 1.8 million tonnes of cereals provide 24 grams of protein compared to the 19.5 grams from pig and chicken meat per person per day. To borrow a line from Uncle Toby’s ... cereals are Iron Man food. So we could easily shut these abominations down, together with cattle feedlots and export most of that 12 million tonnes.
You got one thing right Bob. MLA lies. The promotional video segments shown on the Four Corners program showed that they didn’t just lie a little but were deliberate and calculating in their efforts to mislead. Did they suck in any farmers with their lies? Clearly, if your reports are to be believed, the answer is yes. So who was it who fooled you Bob? Who sucked you in about the value of beef in the Indonesian food supply?
Whoever it was clearly fooled everybody on the Q&A panel on Monday. Not a single person seemed aware of how irrelevant beef was to the Indonesian food supply. MLA is at least partly responsible again. Their red meat advertising campaigns have been misleading the Australian public about the value of red meat for decades.
But MLA doesn’t just lie. MLA knows how to pick and commission the right experts to sell its story. MLA designed and installed the “restraint boxes” shown on Four Corners. These help slaughtermen get the cattle on the ground so they can hack at their necks. Here is a description from a report by one of MLA’s paid experts, retired veterinary Professor Ivan Caple, on how these devices work:
“The length of the front rope arrests forward movement of the leg and the momentum of the animal initiates a roll out towards the slope of the plinth.”
The word roll is a magnificent euphemism for the way cattle crash down onto concrete, sometimes head first. But the true genius of the design of the restraint boxes as torture devices is to have the slope onto which animal falls going down. This maximises the distance the animal falls. The splashing of water onto the animal makes the surface slippery so the animal is unstable and in total terror leading to the only part of its body that isn’t restrained, the head, thrashing on the concrete in a vain effort to rise. This really should have won an award from whatever world body rewards excellence in torture device design.
MLA needs to be abolished and the ACCC needs to prosecute them for that promotional video. It clearly and deliberately gives a false and misleading impression of the killing process. And Bob, you, like others who have been flying the protein flag lately, need to learn a little nutritional science and perhaps a little arithmetic.
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@ToryShepherd I hope that's in your piece tomorrow. Also - are you coming over this week or laaaaaater?
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