Yabby
Telling city people to go shoot sheep or take up farming seems hardly relevant to the issue. Surely if you have to move livestock in a hurry it is much easier to do it if they are already packaged and ready for shipment - given that you have had to shoot them anyway.

This notion that the blame always falls back to the consumer is a bit iffy. Sure people want more for less and that is a problem but nothing to do with meat exports.

There is a big domestic market here and if we all shopped locally and bought Australian produce. It seems weird to export meat and other food products only to have to import another country's same products. Bizarre really when you think about it. But protectionism has become a dirty word now, in the next fifty years it will probably be back in vogue when the problems of free trade in an unequal market place come home to roost (pardon the pun).

Still I don't want to digress from Belly's main topic. As far as the RSPCA is concerned they are just doing the job according to their charter which is to prevent cruelty to animals. Simply that - whether one agrees with prevention of cruelty or not.

Ralph Bennet welcome.
Hope you remain a contributor.
But can I challenge the very simple bit?
The issue is much more complex than that.
IF exporting meat from this part of our country, and these type of cattle was an alternative, why is it not done.
While we all love our sun burnt country we do not all understand it.
Towing a caravan , like a turtle home on our back, at speed in these areas, is not living there.
Long before the mining boom, and maybe long after it, we lived on the sheep,s back.
Beef exports first started with cracker cows, older or male, by product of east coast milk production.
Is it not crystal clear? if not our cattle it will be some one else?
Best fix t5he problem, not pass it on.
In a world facing food shortages ,I feel we should not kill a future source for this part of the world

Pelican, you misunderstood my points. Farmers produce primary products, which includes livestock. If you want them processed locally, why don't city people do exactly that? Go ahead, value
add, if you wish. I don't run meatworks, I produce livestock.
But I need to have a market for them, when I need to sell them.

WA is a long way from anywhere. We have a unique problem in terms
of distance. We can't just move the livestock down the road, to another meatworks. So we have 3 options to deal with drought.
Move the stock somewhere, that means ships, meatworks, trucking 4000 km to the East. Or they can land up starving in the paddocks.

Ban live exports and you will land up with dead sheep everywhere, that is the net result of well meaning people who don't understand the problems of the industry.

Yabby that is the very heart of the issue.
For the most part those complaining about live exports are well meaning but not well informed.
BUT a group within concerns me Vegans are not by nature exclusively or even likely,to be radicals.
But some are.
Leftist/Green/those just searching for a reason campaign exist.
Folk do you know,not all not most but some, live in shacks and battle till the cattle get sold.
Mostly in the early days of farming but for ever for some.
We, this country, need decentralization, governments of all colors pay only lip service to it.
Behind the producers of ALL meat, is the exporters, we export meat.
But not all meat can be exported as packed and chilled.
These markets want only live beef/ sheep and more.
So easy to say export meat not animals, but imposable to do it.

Just a thought, in the above thread I spoke of a few too many King Brown snakes.
In one case in a house.
What would the RSPCA say about a 410 blowing one away?

Do we all remember just how long the shouting went on over the Indonesian cruelty issue.
We all know just how dad that was.
And we know too we heard and saw the footage for at least a month after.
Why not in this case?
Why the silence from just days after we saw ABC again let its self be used?
I propose the reason is this.
The film was taken months before it was shown.
The story was constructed.
RSPCA should, along with the ABC find its self staring on Media Watch.
Last,we know or should,while we do not like letting animal cruelty take place ever.
Both Muslim and Jewish faith FORBID cruelty at time of death to cattle.
Why then did this take place?