When Prime Minister Gillard defended the resumption of live exports to Indonesia, she was questioned by Greens MP Adam Bandt in Parliament about the use of stunning.
Bandt preceded his question with a claim: “In Australia, animals cannot be slaughtered unless they are stunned first because it is the humane thing to do.”
Gillard replied that [stunning] is widely used by not compulsory.
I’d be pretty sure that most Australians, like Bandt, assumed that we pre-stun animals in our slaughterhouses. Why? Because decades of meat industry spin combined with slaughterhouse secrecy means that people assume Australians do the right thing but don’t really have the foggiest what actually happens because there is no transparency in slaughterhouse operation.
In my judgment, it’s clear that large slaughterhouses in Australia use best practice pre-stunning. Here’s a YouTube clip of what looks like best practice. There is a mountain of stainless steel and a captive bolt gun that enables accurate placement of the stun and a rapid follow up if the first doesn’t do the job.
But our Prime Minister is correct that pre-stunning is not mandatory. Almost nothing in animal welfare legislation is mandatory. So it’s not clear what happens in remaining smaller slaughterhouses and with those practicing religious (Halal and Kosher) slaughter and not pre-stunning.
Why isn’t stunning compulsory? Almost nothing is compulsory in animal welfare legislation in Australia. It may come as a surprise, but our animal welfare legislation is really to protect our livestock industry, not their animals. Here’s how it works.
The RSPCA has wide powers to prosecute cruelty. But there is always an escape clause in welfare legislation which protects animal industries from prosecution if they are obeying a Code of Practice. In the SA legislation, it’s Section 43:
Nothing in this Act renders unlawful anything done in accordance with a prescribed code of practice relating to animals.
In Victoria, the relevant section is 6(1)(c). The Codes of Practice are then drawn up to protect livestock industries from whatever it is they want to do and to ensure the RSPCA can’t touch them except where cruelty is unsanctioned ... which usually means unprofitable.
Can a farmer stick an angle grinder in the mouth of a sheep? Absolutely. Farmers got it added to the Model Code of Practice for the Welfare of Animals: The Sheep to protect themselves from cruelty prosecution ... and it’s still there.
So the Model Code of Practice for the Welfare of Animals: Livestock at Slaughtering Establishments suggests that stunning is to be encouraged but doesn’t make it compulsory which protects people who, for whatever reason, don’t wish to do it.
Religious slaughtering without stunning is currently in the news, but only because of Indonesian footage. We have no idea what happens in our own slaughterhouses. In the absence of transparency, my estimate of our practices is rather different from Adam Bandt’s and based on a longer history of close observation of our animal industries.
Animal protection activists have frequently obtained footage inside factory farms showing that Australian factory farmers don’t do the right thing. As long as it is profitable, Australian chicken and pig producers, for example, are content to have many animals in pain for long periods.
Factory farmed chicken meat production is a global industry which operates pretty much the same everywhere and chickens who can walk properly at the end of their six week growing period are the exception. Most have some level of walking difficulty, with more than a few being lame.
So the norm is 24x7 pain for many birds. They are bred and fed to ensure their musculature grows as rapidly as possible, which means it grows too fast for their skeletal system and the only thing the industry worries about is that not too many die before they can be killed.
All this is well known to animal activists, but footage of animal handling at slaughterhouses is much harder to get. The best practice footage, linked to above, is a clear exception and even it avoids showing the animal up close and personal at the point of the stun.
Slaughter-houses don’t generally want customers to see how their food is produced and the animal production industries are models of mendacity with campaigns of misinformation from beginning to end. Images of happy hens and chickens in farm yards are common, but you won’t see a pig meat advertisement featuring a rape rack for artificial insemination of a sow or a sow stall so small that the sow can’t even turn around for weeks on end.
The chicken and pig meat industries profit from raising animals in pain. The dairy industry rips calves from their mothers at birth and may truck them long distances to slaughter on day seven. Our northern cattle industry has been happy to ship to people who mistreat animals.
All meat industries mislead about animal treatment in their advertising. Does your supermarket have a live video feed from factory farms, feedlots, cattle trucks or slaughterhouses over the meat section?
A decade ago, when the ABC famously obtained clandestine footage of possums being killed in a slaughter house in Tasmania, they had to fight all the way to the High Court to get the right to show it.
The footage showed animals clearly alive after stunning and workers going about their business with a calmness indicating that this was perfectly normal. These Tasmanian workers were clearly as unconcerned about the cruelty as any of the Indonesian slaughtermen featured in the Four Corners documentary.
Such footage should serve as a warning to those who considered that Indonesian slaughtermen were somehow worse than Australians. There is a long history of psychology experiments demonstrating that most people will acquiesce in brutality with very little pressure. Peer group pressure is usually more than enough and religion has long fostered the abrogation of ethical thinking by edicts and commandments.
There is no shortage of scientific proof that religious (Halal or Kosher) slaughter involves more suffering than proper stunning. For cattle in particular, even the best of techniques which kill without stunning leave the animal conscious of its agony for a minute or more. With poor technique, the mind shudders to quantify the suffering. The Tasmanian footage indicates that bad stunning is no better than no stunning.
But I don’t believe it is the intention of any of these religions to be cruel. On the contrary, when the Halal and Kosher religious standards were set, they were very much ahead of their time. They were once best practice. But we can now do better. Many Muslim leaders understand this and have no objection to pre-stunning. It is a better way of achieving what was always a shared goal ... minimising the suffering of the animal.
Of course, as a method of minimising suffering, nothing beats being a vegan, but for those whose taste buds trump any considered moral position, then stunning is better than non-stunning.
It’s time Australia joined Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand and now the Netherlands which have simply outlawed killing without pre-stunning. New Zealand has since caved to Jewish pressure on chickens but has held firm on large animals.
To rise to this level, we must close the loop holes, ensure every Australian slaughterhouse achieves best practice, and rewrite our codes of practice to protect animals instead of livestock industries.
We have to stand up to those small religious factions who are stuck on a questionable interpretation of the letter of their faiths rather than sticking to the spirit which is intended to minimise animal suffering.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
"If there was no Schapelle Corby there, in a Balinese prison, we'd still be doing it."...
Bob Carr says releasing Indo kids convicted of people smuggling has nothing to do with Corby...
Off to @SkyNewsAust to explain on #sportsline why NSW will beat Qld. One reason is we're much less sooky about life. The other is...
RT @AustProtParty: Depressed Leftie @ToryShepherd laments Aussie anti-immigration sentiment, says we're haters & intolerant redneck... http://t.co/DLssoRYP
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Who murdered the Arts degree?
Have we murdered the liberal arts education? That was the final question on Monday night’s Q&A…
Australia, you have nothing to fear but fear itself
Hansonism’s back – and we’re not just talking about Pauline appearing as a sometime…
Wilkie is poking around on the wrong gambling issue
Andrew Wilkie has okayed a lame version of the government’s pokies legislation, which he yesterday…
Nosebleed Section
choice ringside rantings
From: They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
Michael S says:
"A teacher at Geelong Grammar had criticised her for using words that were too long, which had left her confused and had made her doubt her ability to write essays. She became ''quite distressed'' when her English marks began to fall." I can sympathise. My scholastic mentors conveyed to me a causal relationship… [read more]From: Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone
Change Up! says:
I have no problem paying my taxes. As a single, childless person on a very decent income, I can afford it and not have my life severely altered. Plus I understand that my taxes paying for things like schools, childcare and infrastructure is ultimately a good thing. A better community is better for me… [read more]Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented