Sink or Swim

"It’s easy if you just jump in. It feels like you’ll either sink or swim out there on your own, but I think in their own way, everybody swims."

New Commandments for a New World

Tonight I stumbled upon this amazing video. Everyone's good friend Christoper Hitchens critiquing the ten commandments and then stating his own replacement for our modern world. Such a poignant list.

There is no god

Maybe I'm an arsehole, but this picture I took in Dymocks today makes me happy.

Live Export

For anyone that hasn't heard about it already, at the start of last week Four Corners and Animals Australia exposed the gross mistreatment of Australian beef cattle in Indonesian abattoirs. In the wake of this exposé, came a targeted campaign aimed at banning the live export of these cattle, in the hope that Australian cattle will not feel this level of suffering again.

The Gillard government’s reaction to all of this has been fairly admirable. Initially, they banned Australian cattle from being sent to twelve abattoirs in Indonesia deemed to be unfit for Australian cattle and this week, they have followed it up by halting live export to Indonesia for up to six months until the proper treatment of Australian cattle can be guaranteed. Animal welfare has been made paramount.

Obviously, the meat industry is not happy with the loss of income and some people are quite worried about how this will affect their rural communities. The Mayor of Cloncurry in outback QLD, went as far as saying that ‘Once again, it doesn't really matter about the old fella in the bush.’ In another article, Grazier Mike Thompson makes the ignorant comment that, ‘we've got a Government who's run by academics, no-one's ever felt what it's like to be in business and be vulnerable to going broke, because they'd all feel like the north end of Australia does at the moment - sick in the guts.’

In contrast to the government's response, some people seem ignorant of the fact that this is primarily an animal welfare issue. They fail to realise that their loss of profits does not excuse suffering. In one article I read, they interviewed a property owner who claimed that we should be more worried about how fish are treated on trawlers, ‘How about those people go and put their cameras on a trawler. They have ... cruelty to fish every day of the year. They are just dropped on the deck to die, run out of breath, suffocate ... something that you would never do to cattle.’ Because a cow being alive after having it's throat slit is really any more humane than what he described and even if it was, one example of worse suffering does not make other suffering exempt from inquiry.

As I write this, I am reminded of one of Al Gore's stories in The Inconvenient Truth. He talks of how his family used to be tobacco farmers, but when they found out about the harmful side effects of smoking, they left the industry. He claims that they felt a moral obligation to remove themselves from what is essentially a blood trade: profits reaped off the back of suffering.

He obviously uses it as an analogy for the moral duty we all have to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels and embrace a cleaner future, but I think his point is very poignant here too. What these farmers and their champions are failing to realise, is that they are part of a blood trade. If I ignore my own personal beliefs here and say that slaughter in Australia is a just and humane way to slaughter an animal, they are still part of a blood trade by sending their cattle to Indonesia. Their profits are created through the endless suffering of Australian cattle in Indonesia. They have a moral obligation to protect these cattle and if that can't be done, they can find their income (or lack of income) elsewhere.

What makes this all the more sinister (and really makes me feel for the farmers and livestock workers now caught up in this), is that Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) has been working in Indonesia to improve the conditions for Australian cattle, for the last decade.

The Four Corners program showed that they have sent auditors to some of the same abattoirs that Four Corners and Animals Australia visited. However, their auditors came to the conclusion that the animals were treated quite well. A decade of 'improvement' and the conditions shown by Four Corners still exist.

This complacency indisputably shows that MLA does not care about the treatment of these cattle. I'm sorry, but it's not the Gillard government who sold out these farmers, like MLA are claiming, it's actually quite the opposite. Through their continued inaction, MLA has shown that they do not care about the welfare of Australian cattle and they have failed to create an environment where decent treatment of these animals would allow for a healthy long-term industry for everyone involved. If they’d done their job properly in the first place, Four Corners would have had nothing to report and so many people would not be in hot water right now.