Hidden agendas !

Over a year ago the live cattle export industry in northern Australia came to a halt after an ABC TV programme showed cruel practices in several Indonesian abattoirs. Later, there were suggestions that animal welfare people had paid abattoir workers to deliberately distort what viewers saw to serve their own ends.  As a result, exports were temporarily banned, relations between Australia and Indonesia harmed - and the legitimate cattle industry in this country was badly damaged.

Here we go again !    This week the ABC ran another film segment that showed cattle in several Indonesian abattoirs being killed without pre-stunning.  That has been a demand by the Australian government, and it certainly has been adopted by the leading abattoir groups in that country, but perhaps it is time for a reality check.

For thousands of years the method used to start the process of preparing all forms of meat for human consumption - was to cut the animals throat to allow the carcass to bleed out.   It is only in the past few decades that animal welfare proponents have insisted that the animal be pre-stunned to save them from the fear factor.

The situation in Australia is very different from that in Indonesia, where there are thousands of villages that slaughter and prepare their own livestock, as opposed to large central abattoirs.   One of the reasons is lack of refrigeration to allow centrally killed meat to be processed and distributed.   Lack of refrigeration means that meat must be killed, processed, cooked and eaten within a time frame of hours - rather than days or weeks.

It is unreasonable for a developed country like Australia to dictate how cattle and pigs must be pre-stunned by a costly process in village abattoirs, when we condone the slaughter of all forms of poultry by having their heads chopped off to bleed their carcass.   Surely that same fear factor applies.

This weeks ABC film clip has resulted in a more measured approach.   Instead of rushing headlong to stop exports, the government is wanting all the background information as to just which abattoirs were involved, and whether these receive cattle from Australia.

No doubt Indonesia will agree to Australian pressure and make pre-stunning compulsory in it's high volume big city abattoirs, but it would be both unpractical and impossible to extend that demand to every village butcher - who may kill and sell a carcass just once a week.

It is also worth considering the threat to one of our biggest employers of people in the northern part of this country, just to satisfy the sensibilities of  some animal welfare people who want to change the world - and outlaw a practice that has been the norm since the time that the Pyramids of Egypt started construction !