The most horrific abuse yet seen

Animals Australia has recently returned from its biggest and most comprehensive investigation yet, having deployed investigators to document and report on some of the most horrific abuse yet seen inflicted upon Australian animals during the ‘Festival of Sacrifice’ in Jordan, Kuwait, Gaza and Malaysia.

In all of these shocking cases and most likely many more, Australia’s so-called regulations failed dismally yet again, to protect these animals, with sheep being stabbed, beaten, whipped, trussed, and crammed into car boots for hours in 50 degree temperatures in Jordan and Kuwait. The sheep were brutally killed in filthy street bloodbaths and cruel markets banned by Australia’s regulatory system, practices from which Australias’s ESCAS system was implemented to protect them.

The ABC’s Lateline program exposed this hideous abuse last Wednesday night, and you can see it here (and a warning, it shows harrowng and distressing vision):
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2014/s4112678.htm

Even before the Festival began, Australian sheep (above) can be seen in Kuwait being trussed and thrown onto the red hot surface of a trayback utility, sheep so visibly distressed that they are panting heavily and drooling, and it only got worse.

In Kuwait, yet again, after multiple complaints to the Department of Agriculture about this same violation of the rules time and time again, Australian sheep were yet again found at the notoriusly brutal Al Rai marketplace, banned on cruelty grounds by Australia’s ESCAS system. Their Australian ear tags are routinely removed to prevent identification and tracing, another requirement of ESCAS, yet they show ‘ear notching’ unique to Australia. The practice enables the department to all but dismiss the complaints on the grounds that it cannot trace or identify the animals, and Animals Australia’s Campaign Director Lyn White, a former police officer, remarked that it is ‘akin to removing fingerprints from a crime scene’. All this activity continued just a couple of blocks from Meat and Livestock’s offices in Kuwait. Similar evidence was found in Jordan, with sheep being hacked to death in filthy streets before baying crowds with children clapping and jeering. The sheep have arrived there after weeks on an old Third World rustbucket, crammed three to a square metre, mired in their own filth for the duration, only for the hapless survivors to face this.

As Lyn White said on Lateline, the sheep were not legally meant to be there, any more than the cattle found in Gaza and Malaysia being stabbed to death In filthy street bloodbaths, cheered on by more baying, clapping crowds including children. The ESCAS system requires that all animals exported from Australia are to be slaughtered at ‘approved facilities’, yet after multiple complaints filed with the Department of Agriculture over the last 18 months, the violations of the rules continue unabated, as does the hideous and obscene cruelty. The biggest exporter implicated is Jordanian-owned Livestock Shipping Services.

Over 20,000 sheep were transferred from Bahrain to Pakistan in 2012, where they were clubbed, stabbed, and buried alive in one of the most brutal animal massacres ever shown. Despite the best efforts of Independent MP for Denison, Andrew Willkie, there has been no outcome to any investigation of that matter. The dreadful deaths of the cattle illegally transported into Gaza horrified the nation, and continued until last week, when LSS claimed that there were ‘no surviving Australian cattle in Gaza’, and we must thank God for that.

The Department of Agrriculture has had 41 complaints referred to it since ESCAS was implemented, with some self-reported by exporters because they knew that investigators were there. Added to these countries, they have ‘self-reported’ breaches in Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Israel in the last couple of weeks.,

In Malaysia, the horror continued, and it is not the first complaint about Malaysia. Australian cattle were subjected to brutal roping slaughter in filthy streets, a long way from any ‘approved facility’.

This Australian steer had his legs trussed, and his neck brutally hacked, before cheering, jeering crowds In the back streets of Kuala Lumpur, as has been the case with all these brutal street slaughters, and still the children are clapping and cheering..

As Animals Australia says, everywhere it has looked, Israel, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mauritius, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Gaza and all the other countries to which Australia sends these pitiful shiploads of misery and suffering, they have found gross violations of the rules, including animals being ‘leaked from supply chains’, and in the majority of cases, the exporter has been Livestock Shipping Services. Its former container ship, built in 1980, M/V Maysora, registered in the Bahamas has been permitted in just recent days, to load sheep, cattle and camels in Adelaide and is now en route to Fremantle for more. How does this happen?

It happens because the Department of Agriculture and Minister Barnaby Joyce are compliant and I believe complicit with the exporters. Typically, an investigation takes 8-12 months, and it’s just business as usual in that time, and the usual outcomes are that the ‘animal/s could not be identified’ (because the ear tags have been removed), so the complaint is dismissed. Alternatively, if there is a finding against an exporter, the exporter tells DA what it will do, and that is the end of the matter. Business as usual again. The worst that has happened to even the most delinquent, recidivist exporters; never a single penalty of any meaning or substance. DA has proved this time and time again, but never more so than with the granting to LSS of another permit in recent days for the Maysora to take more tragic victims to the Middle East to more of this torture. As well as the sheep and cattle, it also has camels on board, and it unlikely that modifications would have made to a ship so old to accommodate camels.

More recently, DA has taken to issuing its ‘notices of non-compliance’ to actual ‘supply chains’ in these countries, meaning that it neatly side-steps penalising a single exporter at all.

This is not a debate about religion. Australia exports animals to non-Muslim countries, including Vietnam (from where four complaints have been filed), Russia, Israel and the Philippines, and they are no better. Barnaby Joyce has announced ‘new markets’ in Saudi Arabia (which has refused to sign up to the regulatory system), Iran, Cambodia and China. It is rumoured that Barnaby Joyce, aided and abetted by Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon and the wider Labor Party, are busy dismantling ESCAS, or at the very least making it even more meaningless, to be replaced by an exporter designed and administered system called ‘Trace’.

And you can bet that there will be nothing about animal welfare there, or a framework for complaints.

Nor is this awful trafficking in living, feeling beings contributing anything of much significance to the Australian economy. The trade in live animals is just 0.4% of Australia’s exports and the trade is frozen/chilled meat to every one of these countries is worth 16 times more. It destroys jobs in Australia, handing over meat processing and downstream sector employment to other countries, and these atrocities are the result. As well, after more than three decades, and with millions of taxpayer dollars thrown down this sewer, we still see these horrors with distressing regularity. And make no mistake, the trade begins and ends with the minority of farmers who supply it.

One of the excuses they give is that they industry is ‘educating’ people in these countries, and clearly they are not very good at it, so where have all those millions gone? The valid argument against that would be if you had children going to a school where there is a paedophile, would you keep sending the child there so that the paedophile can learn not to abuse children? Or it’s like selling a car, they are not responsible for it after (in their own words) ‘the cheque has cleared’. Yet they claim, hand on heart, that they ‘love their animals’. God save any that they don’t love, on that analogy.

The Liberal/National party politicians will back this trade to the ends of the world because many of them, including the likes of Joe Hockey, Malcolm Turnbull, Warren Truss and others have substantial cattle or sheep farming interests. Senator Back, who has not been a veterinarian since 1988 is a vocal spokesman, and has a brother who works as an exporters’ veterinarian. No Liberal or National party politician will lift a finger to end this horror. In Tasmania, Federal Labor Member for Franklin, Julie Collins, having viewed the evidence, no longer supports the trade, but no Labor Party members are allowed a conscience vote on anything, so in the end they toe the party line. Independent member for Denison Andrew Wilkie has never backed away from speaking out about this evil, wretched industry.

If you think this is wrong, please write, or talk to Tasmanian MPs – all Senators, Labor and Liberal, and Senator Jacqui Lambie, and House of Representatives members Eric Hutchinson (Liberal, Lyons), Andrew Nicolic (Bass), and Brett Whiteley (Braddon), and include Julie Collins (Franklin) and Andrew Wilkie (IDenison). Once they see that it will cost them votes they may re-think, otherwise they will be facing remarkably short careers in Federal politics. They are all, with the exceoption of Mr Wilkie, only about their own political self-interest.

Suzanne Cass

Stop Tasmanian Animal Cruelty
Phone 0420 988221
PO Box 252
BRIDGEWATER TAS 7030
www.stoptac.org
www.liveexportshame.com

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