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Living with animals

By Edgar Crook - posted Wednesday, 20 February 2008


Australia seeks to condemn Japan for the killing of a few hundred whales. Japan gives dubious scientific reasons for its whale catch. If Australia was benefiting from killing whales, one can imagine how it too would lie in the face of world opinion, as it has done when world concern is raised about mulesing and live exports.

Australia, from all the evidence, is at war with its animals. It is an unceasing slaughter unprecedented anywhere else and it continues with public support and participation. It is no exaggeration to say that most interactions between Australians and animals that share the land, including domesticated animals, involves some violence or ends with an animal being killed and/or eaten.

Animal cruelty is seemingly no longer acceptable when it is visible in the cities and towns and when visited upon pets. But when it occurs in the bush or on farms it is condoned, supported and taxpayer funded, irrespective of what animal it is committed against.

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The bush ethos or myth posits that true blue Australians consist only of a small minority who live in the country rather than in the city. This view that has been foisted on generations of urban Australians still has enormous power. Today there are few people who challenge the country lobby. City dwellers may subsidise their farms, their loans, their crops, their machinery, their fuel, their water, their entire community infrastructure, give flood and drought relief, yet it is apparently not acceptable that we ask them in return to adhere to even the most rudimentary standards of animal welfare.

Their only response to this is to say that we fail to understand their country ways, are divorced from nature and are overly sentimental, and then to boldly state that they in fact care for animals more than we.

Aside from the 3 per cent of Australians who do not currently eat meat, the rest lead lives that cause quiet misery. Across Australia all communities combine in the fulsome support of the meat industry. The Australian consumption of meat has always been among the highest in the world, and it remains of the highest cultural significance: the barbeque being the apotheosis of Australianness.

We have low levels of animal welfare standards on our factory farms so that pigs, for example, may endure the mental and physical torture of close confinement throughout their lives. And even the most minimal standards are rarely if ever checked, the only real checks being carried out by a handful of Animal Liberation volunteers - facing violence and prosecution for doing so.

We also happily mutilate and kill sheep in the millions and transport thousands large distances to be killed elsewhere. The shooting of ducks, the hunting of feral animals with dogs all continue. Fishing, although it is now known to be cruel, remains hugely popular.

The hope for the future is not that Australians will suddenly develop a new set of moral standards when it comes to other animals, but that climate change will force them into re-assessing their behaviour.

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It is now known that the animal industries are uniquely bad for the environment. The unsustainable raising of millions of animals for meat, is destroying our land, wasting our water and polluting our air and waterways. If we can move away from meat, then the numbers of farmed animals will decline, and there will be more space for our other wildlife which will hopefully mean less slaughter all round.

Australians will not need to learn to love animals, but they could by some miracle learn to live peacefully beside them.

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About the Author

Edgar Crook is a Senior Librarian at the National Library of Australia and the author of the following: Vegetarianism in Australia : 1788-1948 and Vegetarianism and veganism in Australia : an annotated bibliography.

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