It attracted little attention, but a recent Productivity Commission report contained a damning indictment of the way Australia establishes animal welfare laws in agriculture. The commission’s Regulation of Australian Agriculture devotes a chapter to how animal welfare legislation is made in Australia, and it doesn’t make for comforting reading.
Why are a bunch of economists interested in animal welfare? For a start, any regulation adds to the cost of doing business. But the PC also believes there is an intangible, but very real, benefit to the community from knowing that the animals they consume have been treated humanely, which offsets the cost of regulation. In the PC’s eyes, animal welfare is about balancing the benefits to the wider community and the costs to industry of standards for the treatment of animals.
This evades a more fundamental ethical issue of the treatment of animals, by placing the entire issue in an economic framework — but to do otherwise would take the subject out of the PC’s frame of reference.
The PC sees several problems with the current means of establishing animal welfare laws. One is that previous efforts to establish a uniform national set of minimum standards have failed; another is that the Abbott government abandoned the issue altogether in 2013, meaning there’s been no national leadership since then. But the two big problems are that industry plays too great a role in determining animal welfare standards, and there’s a lack of hard evidence informing them.
Standards for different agricultural industries are set by officials of agriculture departments reporting to agriculture ministers, and they’re advised by Animal Health Australia (except for livestock-slaughtering establishments, which are the subject of a different process), a non-profit company run by agriculture departments and livestock industry associations, which supposedly consults with “other stakeholders”. The PC devotes many pages to detailing concerns about the dominance of industry in the standard-setting process. “Despite changes to the process, concerns continue to be raised about its independence and transparency,” it says, and goes into detail about standards for poultry and religious slaughter. The poultry standards development process is dominated, it says, by industry groups with very little representation from animal welfare groups. And the omission of religious slaughtering from standards draws a sharp rebuke.
“The Commission sees no legitimate reason for unstunned (religious) slaughter to be excluded from the standards and guidelines development process. Also, the rationale for the exemption is questionable. The animal welfare risks associated with unstunned slaughter … demonstrate that it is a matter that should be on the table for public discussion.”
The commission also notes that the process that examined the issue of mulesing, and whether pain relief should be required for the mulesing of sheep (which many wool growers currently don’t bother with), concluded that the imposition of a total cost of $33 million over 10 years on the wool industry, or 45 cents per sheep, was too high — a conclusion only understandable given the process was dominated by livestock associations and agriculture departments.
[Yes, I hate the Cup — and for damn good reason]
The commission also struggled to find the use of hard evidence in standards development, citing, among others, an example of a biased paper used to determine standards for bobby calves (the calves born so that cows will continue to produce milk; they are slaughtered a few days after birth). Nor is there much effort made to establish community views about animal welfare.
Whereas in Europe regular polling is used to determine community attitudes, here the primary means of input for the community is via the arcane Regulation Impact Statement process for individuals standards. Even key agricultural industry groups like the National Farmers’ Federation believe there should be more work done to understand community views, if only to avoid what the industry sees an kneejerk, emotive responses occasioned by programs like Four Corners.
To address both the bias inherent in the current system and the lack of empirical data in the development of standards, the commission wants an independent Commonwealth body not merely to conduct animal welfare research, but to set standards as well. It would be called the Australian Commission for Animal Welfare and be composed of representatives from livestock industry, animal welfare and veterinary science groups and legal and ethical groups. The idea isn’t a new one; Labor proposed it shortly before losing government, and the Greens have tried to introduce it via a private member’s bill.
Predictably, the agricultural industry opposes the idea of an independent body, including Animal Health Australia; a new body, they claim, would lead to additional red tape and “not produce effective outcomes”. That appears to confirm the commissions’s concerns about the current process: industry likes it just fine the way it is, because they get to control it.
Thanks for this article. I would like to see more articles on the callous treatment of animals in mainstream Australian animal husbandry and the feeble response of governments.
As soon as you start this subject you wind up with a mob who are remote from the reality (for example most consumers). Calf slaughter yes, no excuses, but how do you think you get $1.00 a litre milk? Sheep mulesing interests me as I was a woolgrower for 30 years and yes we mulesed sheep. I also have had injuries at least as severe and more. I would rather that than flystrike. We would have used anaesthetic if such a thing had been cost effective and available. It was not. As it was we made every effort to minimise infection, yard time, time in the cradle and skill of the operator. Our loss rate was about 1:3500 and handling injury rate about the same. I think with current sheep prices 45 cents would be OK though. It was a bit different then. My dad hated mulesing time and so did I, but we hated the flystrike worse.
It’s all about “does the public want to continue to eat meat and dairy at all?” Has anyone asked the steak-holders? (pun intentional, I guess I’d go to hell, if I believed in that nonsense)
The early merino sheep in Australia was fine wooled but not heavily wrinkled. I think it was the grotesquely wrinkled Vermont ram that sent sheep breeders into raptures of obtaining more wool per sheep and thus heavy wrinkling became the standard for pedigree merinos. Wrinkles were bred in and wrinkles can be bred out. Other breeds of sheep do get flystruck but only the merino is mulesed. The mulesing operation is bloody and horrific. I have recently seen a herd of dairy cows with amputated tails – dreadful. I’m glad that we have stopped cutting off dogs and horses tails.
Currently the agriculture industry is protected by the near-blanket ignorance of consumers.
There is a market for humanely treated livestock but it requires brave producers to test it commercially. Perhaps the types of egg production would indicate the potential for ethical practices. Some consumers are prepared to pay three times the standard cost for a dozen genuine pasture eggs.
I think it’s indicative of some attitudes within the industry that they are more intent on embarrassing Ludwig’s/Labor’s intervention during the live cattle fiasco : than going after the “regulator” that was caught out, not regulating, that allowed that barbaric abuse to evolve.
Thanks Bernard, for producing the best article I have ever seen that promotes subsidies. Why? because price has everything to do with it. In the UK, France, US, in fact all of Europe they subsidise their farmers which takes care of animal welfare issues. It’s just absorbed into price paid for produce.
Farmers in the UK make a living from farming as little as 300 sheep. The sheep are locked away at night and sometimes have their own cubicles during lambing, they have special shelter sheds, regular vet inspections, excellent feed mixes etc. Try doing that in Australia. Over here farmers need to farm at least a 1,000 head of sheep to get anywhere near the same income as their counterparts overseas and they are doing 3 times the work. Make it worthwhile financially and I am sure farmers would even tie pick ribbons in the sheep’s wool if it keeps everyone happy. But do you want pay the same price for lamb as the Brits? I don’t think so. Case closed.
Spot on Syd. Apparently Australia is one of the few countries in the world that does n’t subsidise it’s rural production. It seems other nations are aware of the value of independent food production and valuable export markets but not Australia. I agree that animal welfare standards should always be a top priority in farming. It’s a no brainer, but who is going to pay for it? Could it be that farming subsidies equals higher animal welfare standards? Strange bed-fellows indeed, but lets see how serious they are.