Law is still an ass for creatures

For hundreds of years, cock-fighting was considered a sport in the UK and remained legal until people concerned with animal welfare successfully campaigned to have it outlawed in 1895. Today, the treatment of many animals by humans is still under scrutiny, from the use of animals in circuses, rodeos, and scientific experimentation to the breeding of animals for food.

In Australia, while there are certain laws in place to dictate how animals can be treated, there are still many practices that take place that legislation does not adequately cover. The challenge of bringing about animal welfare law reform has been taken up by manager of the Northern Rivers Community Legal Centre, Angela Pollard. After attending a workshop about ‘animal rights as a social justice issue’ at an animal rights conference three years ago, Angela was inspired to take up the cause.

“I recognised the importance of changing community attitudes to bring about change in how we treat animals,” Angela said. “I came home and ran a community forum to see if there was interest in the issue and packed out the room.”

Angela and animal rights advocate Amber Hall set up an animal law group that’s now been running for 18 months. Lawyers, law students and animal carers have been involved and the group has already run two animal protection workshops and is about to run another one on companion animals and their impact on wildlife and the rights and responsibilities of owners. The next workshop focuses on educating people to keep their dogs and cats from prowling at night and causing injury to wildlife.

“The solution is not to tie up a dog for too long and to supervise them,” Angela said. “People need to be responsible and not buy an animal if they can’t provide for it. You need to make sure that as well as giving it food and water, you give it exercise and interaction. You have control over that animal – it has no choice and you have moral responsibilities and a legal duty of care.”

While the animal law group is run by volunteers, Angela would like to see them take on more animal protection issues and start challenging current regulations with legal test cases.

“We’d like to challenge why people can run a rodeo or challenge battery hen farming practices,” Angela said. “The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act prohibits using animals in such competitions but, because of the lobbying of powerful groups, there is a regulation that specifically excludes rodeos.

“Many of the current codes of practice are not enforced, are regulated by the industry itself and get the seal of approval from (the department of) Primary Industries. There are no uniform legislative standards, it’s just a mish-mash of codes of practice with few legal enforcements.”

Later this year, the animal law group intends to hold a forum on live animal exports. The issue has also been taken up by Page MP Janelle Saffin, who moved a motion in the House of Representatives to ban it.

“The local meat workers union also supports the ban because local jobs are lost,” Angela said. “Local abattoirs will shut down as a result of sending the animals overseas live, instead of killing them locally.”

When sheep are exported overseas, ships can hold up to 100,000 animals and a death rate of 2% is expected each journey, which can translate to thousands of animals.

“Before they make it to the ship, the animals are trucked, often in the heat, with long periods without food or water and then are delivered into a feed lot and fed pelletised food they have never eaten before,” Angela said. “Some never learn to eat it or digest it and they stop eating. On the ship, they are put in small pens and stacked high. There is a risk of blindness and respiratory problems from faecal dust and ammonia fumes from urine. If an animal dies, it may not be found for some time, given the cramped conditions. Dead sheep are put into the ship’s grinders.

“There are few legal cases that provide guidance on what is unreasonable treatment of animals in agriculture, despite there being cruelty laws. Is it right and just in law for a chicken to live in an A4-sized space, sharing a cage with three others for its whole life, where it cannot stretch its wings, perch or nest?

“We humans have an assumption that animals are objects, but we need to recognise they have needs. We need to change how we value animals, and base the value on their intrinsic worth and not about what we can make out of them. If we actually practised the Five Freedoms which have been adopted by the RSPCA and the Federal Government’s Australian Animal Welfare Strategy (and currently in draft as a United Nations declaration for animals), we would go a long way to relieving their pain and suffering.”

Just as we can look back on the past and realise things that were acceptable years ago are no longer acceptable now, Angela hopes that in the future, we will look back on these practices and wonder

how we could have ever done them. She urges people to use their consumer power and make decisions to not support industries they don’t like.

“Know where your meat comes from,” Angela said. “If you buy something made in Australia, ring the producers and ask them what is in it; they take it seriously. Woolworths is now selling free-range chickens because of consumer feedback. If you buy meat, ask the butcher where the meat came from. If it’s from a feed-lot where the animals are penned in with no ability to exercise, tell the butcher you don’t want to buy it.”

Angela believes that the loss of small farms and the rise of large-scale animal farming practices have caused some cruel practices to take place in the interest of producing meat more cheaply. In the production of chickens for meat, some large farms have tens of thousands of chickens packed into barns, and the producers may get paid as little as 55c per head.

“They have been bred so that they grow to full size for eating in 42 days,” Angela said. “They suffer physical pain as they build up meat and their skeletons and bodies can’t cope. Many become lame and have bone fractures.”

When it comes to pig farming, Angela said only about 5% of pigs are farmed in free-range conditions. The rest are intensively farmed.

“The sows spend their whole lives in sow stalls which are so small that they can only walk back and forward one or two paces at most,” Angela said. “When they are pregnant, they are put into a small farrowing stall where all she can do is just stand or lie down. They are often lame after all this and when the sow can no longer reproduce, she is butchered.

“Imagine spending your short life not being able to walk around, with no stimulation. Scientific research has shown that pigs are as intelligent as dogs, if not more so.

“It is legal for male pigs to be taken away at an early age, their tails cut off and their eye teeth removed so that they don’t bite each other. They are desperate for entertainment and stimulation and biting each other is their only activity. When dogs are left alone at home, they get bored and eat the couch.”

Executive Director of Animal Liberation Mark Pearson chained himself to a pig stall in 1996 to protest about the cruel way sows were chained up with metal collars on pig farms. As a result of his and other activists’ actions, the government declared a ban on the tethering of sows in piggeries that year.

Last year, after concerted campaigning, it was agreed to have the practice of keeping female pigs in sow stalls banned by 2014, which according to Mark is still too far away.

“People need to write letters to retailers like the big supermarkets and tell them they don’t want to support those industries,” Mark said. “Coles last year said they will phase out stocking pig meat products from farms with sow stalls over a three year period. This helped to change the industry; Australian Pork Limited then put up a motion to phase out sow stalls.”

Mark believes that if people could really see what is going on in the meat industry and not just hear the marketing spin, people would not be happy to stand by and accept current practices.

“I think kids in Year 10 should see an abattoir,” Mark said. “They could go along, smell the blood, see the truth about the slaughter of animals, and then go and make their decisions about eating meat based on accurate unemotional information.”

When Mark went to a battery hen farm to document the conditions there, he saw sick hens, four to a small cage, with their heads trapped in the cage wire. They hadn’t been able to reach food and water and were slowly dying from starvation. Because they were standing on a wire floor, the hens had nowhere to nest and Mark discovered that one of them was nesting in the corpse of another dead chicken.

“A hen will work hard to lay an egg and get to a nest-like environment,” Mark said. “It’s a natural desire; so they lay an egg in a decomposing corpse and then the egg rolls off into conveyer belt. No-one knows that egg was lying on a corpse for days and it was put into a carton and off to Woollies. People need to take more responsibility to stop these things happening.”

Angela Pollard agrees and is keen for people to support small farms that engage in free-range practices. The problem is, there is no mandated definition of what free-range actually is, and standards vary from farm to farm.

“We need to get a proper legal definition of what free-range is,” Angela said. “I encourage people to go to farmers’ markets and buy direct. If they don’t give you a business card and offer to let you come and look, don’t buy the product.”

Local animal advocate, Amber Hall also believes we should adopt a food labelling system for products that contain animal parts, to give consumers an informed choice so that they can purchase cruelty free products.

“It would certainly change our consumer habits,” Amber said. “It might mean we eat less meat or it might mean that we eat meat that has lived well and died well.”

If you are concerned about an animal being abused, you can ring Animal Liberation’s animal cruelty hotline on 1800 751 770 and they will investigate the complaint. If you are reporting a case of cruelty, be clear, report what condition the animal is in and take a photo with your mobile phone or camera. If it’s your neighbour and you know them, Mark suggests you have a chat with them, as they might not be aware and not doing it deliberately.