The ethical and pragmatic way to solve this problem is to pass an Act forcing Animals Australia, the RSPCA, PETA, and anyone who agrees with them to fund all the costs of the measures they advocate. End of problem.

The ABC is a disgrace of partisan bias and should be abolished. In the debate over animal exports, not once did they identify the real issue, namely, why the advocates of higher standards should not pay for them themselves. For example, many Indonesian places lack the equipment we have here for handling cattle safely: cattle-races and cattle-crushes and head-bails.

Instead of calling for other people to be locked in a cage to try to force them to pay for the animal rights' activists own values, those activists need to put their money where their mouth is.

What's a cattle-crush cost? $5,000? The RSPCA could have sent 20 of them to Indonesia for $100,000 and it would have solved the problem.

Instead we get this nauseating moral grandstanding, calls for government to control everything; they destroyed a whole industry, and in the process causing misery and death by starvation of huge numbers of cattle. Nice. But of course they don't care about that. It's not about animal rights, it's about their real love: ordering people around.

Why governments hesitate to repeal the rubbish passed by their predecessors is a mystery. Both ESCAS and the former reporting arrangement should be abolished, on the ground that their subject matter is none of government's business.

Mencken said "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule" and that applies doubly to the animal rights activists David Leyonhjelm criticises. They are fake and phony to the core, they are nothing but power-freaks.

JKJ what a crock so what your saying is the animals rights activist shoulld pay for the tools that the meat exporters are suposed to provide? That's like suggesting Australian unions should pay for saftey equipment for forgien workers. Bascil failure of logic JKJ but par for the course.

The fact is the policeman isn't doing their job and therefore the animal rights groups are doing it.

Thankyou NSW voters for putting this guy into the upperhouse.

What is he going to come up with next mission Australia hasn't got a view on digital tv thorerefore we shouldn't listen to them about the poor?

thanks David for a good article. The whole premise of valuing animals more than humans comes from the idiotic theory of evolution. Most people are to complacent to think through how this myth is used to justify just about every evil under the sun.

I suggest live--and permanent--export of this senator-elect.

False premise in this article - we do not export women to countries where they are abused (or anywhere else). We do, however, export animals to countries where we know we cannot prevent them being abused. We can't even fly a plane load of cattle to Asia without many of them dying in transit - so many that it was above the 'acceptable level'. Imagine that being applied to flights involving humans - 'The Minister for Aviation today announced flights from Australia had no more than the acceptable level of passenger deaths'.

We don't need to be exporting live animals. If people in the middle east or elsewhere want meat we can provide it to them humanely halal slaughtered in Australia. Its not as though there is an oversupply of animal protein in the world, we have a lot of it, we can set the terms under which we provide it. As we used to.

I simply can't abide unnecessary cruelty. And I've worked in abattoirs, and hunted game meat.
Trucking patently terrified and screaming animals halfway across the country; manifestly, simply toughens the meat!
If an animal is to be bled to death to satisfy some ancient stone age ritual, then animal should be rendered unconscious first.
Conscious or unconscious, the animal will still bled to death; and, the meat in the unconscious animal, will not flood with hormones, which both darken and toughen the meat.
However, I don't believe vegan tree huggers should be policing this trade, unless they can follow a particular animal, from the farm gate to the end user, if only to satisfy that it was initially an Australian animal? And just how many times it changed hands, as a commodity, before it was exposed to such barbaric cruelty.
And if there were middlemen profit takers, then how is any Australian able to be asked to wear any responsibility whatsoever, for any subsequent cruelty!
The simple solution to this problem is to build large freezers in the host countries, and then ship only boxed meat.
I'm almost certain it would be more economical/profitable, than shipping live animals halfway around the world in extraordinarily expensive ships, or parked in some port, to force down the price, with some imaginary disease, so that in effect, we operate at a continuing loss.
The only cited reason we don't already ship boxed meat, is the fact that many of these people just do not have fridges or freezers.
Now there's something we used to build. And done on a large enough scale with exports, something we could do again! If we we just smart enough to cut out all the profit demanding middle men, and sell these items direct to the end user or household. Even if that also meant, we needed to provide a finance plan, or loan various entities, enough money to buy our products! (Kelvinator anyone, and would you like a gas or solar powered genie to go with that?)
Rhrosty.

Cobber Hound, can you explain to me why you shouldn't be forced to pay for it? It's your opinion, your values. Are you saying it's okay for people to be treated like animals?

Candide
Who's "we"? You're not exporting cattle are you?

Surely you're not using that term to refer to people who disagree with you and people who would be physically violated by the policies you advocate?

Why shouldn't you have to pay the costs that you allege are necessary?

Why don't you set up halal slaughter houses in Australia, and send the meat to the people who want it, at no extra cost?

What's your answer? Why shouldn't you be responsible for the values and costs you are trying to force onto other people?

This is not about animal rights. It's about the greed and selfishness of the power-hungry moron class, whose pretensions to care for animals are just as false as their despising their fellow-humans is blatant.

Ha Ha David, runner's got your back.

JKJ its part of their export licence that they ensure the animals are treated a certain way.

May as well have my two-bobs-worth contribution to this topic - at least on the topic of the feeling-sensitivity of the non-human inhabitants of this mostly non-human world
Please check out:
http://sacredcamelgardens.com/wordpress/wisdom/observe-non-humans-and-learn

http://animalliberty.com

Hay Rhrosty, you say "Now there's something we used to build. And done on a large enough scale with exports, something we could do again! If we just smart enough to cut out all the profit demanding middle men, and sell these items direct to the end user or household. Even if that also meant, we needed to provide a finance plan, or loan various entities, enough money to buy our products! (Kelvinator anyone, and would you like a gas or solar powered genie to go with that?)"

Mate, are you going to build the powerhouses & & the network to supply that power to run those fridges, or do you think just having the fridges will do? Lots of people can come up simple solution that can not work, when they don't know the details of the destination they are talking about.

Hassbeen that's what we should be doing, our aid should go to biulding ppower stations so fridge works so they can buy our meat. We will get more money for our product in the long run and create jobs here.

David

This is not one of your better articles.

The animals exported from Australia are, in many people’s minds, Australia’s responsibility in a way that other countries’ treatment of their women or minorities, however reprehensible, is not.

Are you seriously proposing that we should use our exports as a lever to coerce or cajole other countries into changing their domestic laws and policies? As a libertarian, I doubt you are. Instead you’re taking a roundabout path to attack what you perceive is imbalance in the ABC’s reporting. But the fact the ABC reports these issues does not in itself prove your point – you must also address supposed under-reporting of issues you deem more important, which you assert but provide no evidence for. Again, this is a rather peculiar position for a libertarian. Who precisely is qualified to determine an “appropriate” balance of reporting in a particular media outlet, even “our” ABC?

I agree the ABC can be irritatingly sanctimonious on this issue, and there are more important problems in the world. This seems to me a rather odd way to make those points, though.

The latest pretend outrage was in Jordan, it managed to show little and didn't include many important points - I disclose that I grew up on the farms of two sets of grand parents in the middle of a farming community - and that is Jordan and what Jordan has faced for the past few years.

They are being overwhelmed with an extra 540,000 refugees from the Syrian war to add to the 1.3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Iraqis. They have little outside assistance and people are literally starving.

So the ABC runs another stupid little piece about animals being killed.

I would suggest Lyn White and her silly mob take a look at the conditions for the people who desparately need those sheep to eat and survive, the sheep are dead no matter if they are sat on the couch being sung a lullaby or have their throats quickly slashed.

The latter is what my own two grand fathers did, the sheep don't even feel it.

People often do value animals more than people. Do you guys remember the murder by a Mr Asia "hit man" of Douglas and Isobel Wilson in 1979? The "hit man" was able to murder two humans but could not bring himself to kill their pet dog.

Animal activists want to shut down live exports based on footage of some cruelty overseas. There are lots of cases where pet owners are guilty of mistreating their animals. Shall we therefore ban all pet ownership?

Shooting is similarly criticised for alleged cruelty. What about fishing? Lets ban that as well, especially the "catch and release" variety, which does not even provide food for the table.

"..valuing animals more than humans comes from the idiotic theory of evolution" is an utterly insane remark.

In any case, humans are capable of treating each other no better than they do these animals but at least Zyklon B was economically more efficient than petrol fumes or bullets in those days.

While AL feels it a moral position to hold Australian farmers accountable for the inhumanity of foreigners when processing their farm product AL feels no responsibility for the psychological violence & warfare their zealotry perpetuates upon Australian farm families and their cattle.

http://www.buyabale.com.au/in-the-news/suicide-stalks-queenslands-drought-areas-help-needed-now

Cattle that have been rendered valueless by AL actions are now slowly starving to death in our north country. Is AL supporting the people damaged by their irrational logic? No way, AL's ultimate goal is much closer, the economic collapse of animal husbandry.

What will AL do when bankruptcy sales of grazing land allow Indonesian companies to buy the land, raise their cattle on THEIR land and then export them live to THEIR abattoirs in Indonesia?

AL has been aided and abetted by the unethical, propagandist, elitists at the ABC.

De-fund the ABC NOW and let them experience market forces.

An excellent post Cowboy Joe. Rooted in practical experience and straight from the heart. Good work.