If they were genuinely concerned about animal welfare they would have acted on the abuse immediately and reported incidents to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and/or the SPCA.
Instead they went to the media weeks, possibly months after the alleged incidents and went to the media. Now they are calling for webcams in every shearing shed:
. . . But Federated Farmers meat and wool chairman Toby Williams said the proposal amounted to an overreach.
“It would also be incredibly expensive and impractical given we have tens of thousands of woolsheds scattered across rural New Zealand with over 25million sheep shorn each year.
“I don’t think Peta have really thought this idea through properly. Who would pay for the installation and maintenance of the cameras? And what is the problem they’re trying to solve?”
Associate Agriculture Minister Andrew Hoggard said neither he nor his colleagues had “any appetite” for Peta’s proposal.
“There’s roughly about 30,000 sheep and beef farms in the country, in theory. So that’s a hell of a lot of cameras. Who the hell’s monitoring them?
“So, from a practical point of view, it falls down even before you get to the philosophy of do we really want to be spying on citizens?”
Mr Hoggard said the Ministry for Primary Industries would investigate the complaints dispassionately.
However, he said the industry had many measures in place to address animal welfare concerns.
“No shearing gang’s going to want to have a reputation that they do a poor job and they don’t look after animal welfare, because then farmers are going to be less than reluctant to contract them in to look after their sheep.
“So there’s a whole bunch of self-policing, effectively, that occurs through natural market forces.” . .
I don’t know any farmers, or shearing gang, who would put up with mal-treatment of sheep for both welfare and financial reasons.
Shearers pride themselves on their work and farmers wouldn’t countenance shearers who mistreat their stock.
Prices for strong wool at the moment don’t usually cover the cost of shearing and losing a sheep through injury would add to the loss. Sending badly cut or bruised stock to the meat works would incur the risk of stiff fines from the works’ vets.
Shearing is a necessary part of animal welfare. Without it, unless the sheep are Nudies, or other breeds which grown hair instead of wool, the wool would keep growing causing the stock to overheat and making them more prone to getting fly-blown and cast.
The videos and call for cameras is part of an on-going anti-animal agriculture campaign which has included doctored videos showing badly bloodied sheep.
Their end game isn’t better animal welfare, it’s an end to animal agriculture.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
It is part of the communist agenda to destroy capitalism. PETA to destroy animal farming, together with Climate Change Alarmism to destroy all crop farming and stock-farming by serious reduction in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is needed for plant and grass food. These people are treasonous and I trust they are all on SIS watchlist; I hope to see them in court being tried for treason with mandatory life in prison. There are more ways of killing a cat than with a machine gun.
All sensible comments Ele. Up to this point, letters to the editor following my own condemnation of PETA in the Post of 6 January have shown a lamentable ignorance about farming and livestock handling. Some want sheep kept under cover (!?); imagine 24 million sheep in sheds. One other brought a Middle East farmer's management system as an example where most of such have half a dozen sheep and fit them all on the back of a ute. Unbelievable. Comments on this site are generally similarly misinformed, and they hide behind anonymity. There are bound to be rat-bag shearing gangs round the country, but my experience of 50+ years in research on livestock ectoparasites, stints in shearing sheds and many visits to farms, and handling sheep, have shown the PETA examples must be in a vanishingly small minority. The overwrought comments by this bunch of zealots seems aimed at trying to adversely affect our economy and parallels could be drawn with activist groups currently trying to screw our social structure.
It's PETA that needs to be monitored with cameras and tracked 24/7.
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