“IF slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”
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Paul McCartney’s comment hits close to home this week.
Wangaratta’s Gathercole’s abattoir on Greta Road has been investigated by the meat industry regulator PrimeSafe and found to have breached essential animal welfare standards.
Footage posted online in January revealed an employee of Gathercole’s abattoir cut the throats of lambs while they appeared to be conscious and moving.
The same employee was also shown twisting the necks of animals.
In recent years undercover footage shot in foreign abattoirs has revealed that the Australian live animal export trade has been responsible for sending many cattle and sheep to a grisly and prolonged death full of suffering.
When this story broke in the media in 2011 an uproar ensued.
Yet here we are in Wangaratta with an abattoir in which animals have recently met painful and botched deaths.
What penalty ensues?
None.
Primesafe did not fine Gathercole’s abattoir because the results of the investigation will “... require them to undergo activities that will cost them”.
That is, the staff training and equipment improvement that should already exist.
Their punishment is to implement what they should already be doing.
And what has happened in the live export trade since the new regulatory system for that industry was implemented in 2011?
There have been 59 documented incidents of “non-compliance”, which is corporate speak for animal suffering.
So both at home and abroad I can only conclude that Paul McCartney didn’t get it quite right.
To create a compassionate world where animals are treated with unfailing care and respect, we need not for slaughterhouses to have glass walls but for these places of fear and brutal death not to exist at all.
— CASSANDRA POLLOCK,
Wangaratta