Animal Liberation !

To most people, cruelty to animals is abhorrent.  In the days when the horse was the most common means of transport most people treated this servant kindly and shunned those who treated their animals badly. The horse was seen as a valuable asset.

In todays world, that veneration of animals has passed to the dogs and cats we welcome into our homes.  We have laws to protect their way of living and it is not uncommon for an unkind owner to be hauled into court and heavily fined should a flagrant breach be detected.

It now seems that animal liberation has turned its sights onto the farm industry.   A  " movement " has emerged that is fast gaining momentum to the point that adherents have started to wear a form of uniform and adopted a colour code in the way they dress.  The objective has passed from merely drawing public attention to alleged cruelty to physically invading farms and animal processing facilities, tearing down fences and setting animals loose in the public domain.

This movement got under way when it drew attention to sheep and cattle being transported to overseas markets.  They were crammed into ships with little ventilation as it travelled through the tropics and many died and were cast overboard for the following sharks to digest.  Even worse, on arrival some overseas abattoirs were almost medieval in the way they processed livestock with their killing and processing of meat for the retail trade.   This was captured on smuggled film and shocked audiences in this country.

Animal liberation has now degenerated into a movement that has cast all forms of farming as inherently cruel. It objects to any form of animal confinement and its members seek to destroy basic farm practices by way of invasion and the dismantling of farm procedures in the name of  " freedom ".   It is now common for farmers to find hundreds of such uniformed people rampaging on their farm, destroying equipment and driving stock either onto nearby roads or onto other people's property.

This has become so serious that new laws have been passed to inflict heavy fines on individuals and drastic fines on their organization should they continue farm invasions.  Destroying farm equipment is a crime and inflicts financial loss on an industry that is essential to our food supply.   These animal liberation followers are usually vegan and have extinguished meat from their diet and seek to impose this outlook on the rest of Australia.

We have the good fortune to live on a vast continent capable of feeding the world.  We are a farming nation and the produce from those farms is one of the ways that we are able to sustain our standard of living.  That seems to be under threat from people with a vague notion that all farm animals should enjoy a similar lifestyle to our household pets.

This militant approach needs to be brought under control.   The law applies to these animal liberation people equally with the farmers who make their living by producing the food we eat, and farming has been part of the culture from the time people appeared on this planet !