The sheep in Pakistan. Image: Animals Australia here
Sheep and newborn lambs swimming in a sea of excrement and urine – Cormo Express
Photo: http://www.liveexportshame.com
JOINT MEDIA RELEASE – AGAINST ANIMAL CRUELTY TASMANIA (AACT) and STOP TASMANIAN ANIMAL CRUELTY (StopTAC)
BAN LIVE EXPORT RALLIES NATION-WIDE!!! Outrage for the Animals…
Rally to be held Saturday October 6 at 12 noon, Franklin Square, Hobart – Keynote speaker Andrew Wilkie, Member for Denison
On Saturday, October 6, caring Tasmanians will gather to protest about Australia’s shameful live export trade at Franklin Square at 12 noon.
A series of tragedies in recent weeks which have befallen animals doomed to the atrocity that is the live export industry have horrified the Australian community. 10,000 Australian sheep, who had been in transit for 8 weeks, have been brutally butchered in Pakistan after being rejected by Bahrain on ‘disease’ grounds. 10,000 more still await their fate. Those already killed are reported to have died by stabbing, clubbing and burying alive, and the remaining sheep are reportedly not being provided even with food and water in the cattle feedlot where they are contained. Hundreds have simply disappeared.
Also in the last month, a shipment to Kuwait was rejected for the same reasons, and those animals were stuck on the ship for an extra week, several hundred more were found in a notoriously brutal market being brutally killed contrary to all the government’s new regulations, and Australian breeding animals, for whom there is NO regulatory protection, were found to be dying of heat exhaustion, dehydration, starvation and neglect in Qatar.
‘It is time that the Australian community raised its collective voice and demanded that politicians respect their views’, said spokesperson Suzanne Cass, who is helping co-ordinate the rally with AACT. ‘The government can no longer be disingenuous enough to think that we don’t know what is happening to our animals, both on their long and rigorous journeys, and in the hellholes to which farmers and exporters send them. Enough of the sob stories from the farmers, who breed these innocent animals, only to send them off to known torture’.
‘The Federal Government has given the two exporters concerned in the rejected shipments permits to re-load THE SAME SHIPS last week – ships that were rejected on disease grounds, when it should have stopped these exporters trading pending a rigorous and independent investigation being CONCLUDED.
‘Expert veterinary advice informs us that animals already ill are loaded into conditions rife for the transmission of known diseases – and this makes the trade inherently unsafe, as well as being egregiously cruel. Animal welfare in live export is known to be directly commensurate with the value of the animal, and vets who have spoken out about the trade attest to the fact that mortality statistics are grossly misrepresented’.
AACT and StopTAC both insist that the live export industry cannot be trusted with the welfare of a single animal – and nor can the Gillard government, which essentially has the regulator investigating itself, and has no penalty of any meaning or substance available to it, no matter how critical the violations of the rules.
‘We hope that many decent, caring Tasmanians will join us on Saturday’, said Ms Cass and Mr Lang.
Earlier on Tasmanian Times: The Silence of the Lambs
First published: 2012-10-02 05:00 AM
