There has been quite a stink in Australia over the cruel slaughter of cattle sold to the Indonesian meatworks. The footage shown was of people who had no idea how to do their job.
The stink has caused the Australian government to impose a complete ban on ALL exports of cattle to that country. The greens and non-thinking animal rights mobs have of course scented blood, and are now pushing for a complete ban on all live animal exports.
So the government is going to engage in collective punishment rather than actually go after the “bad eggs”. Indonesia relies heavily on “wet markets”, which is to say non refrigerated meat sales, as poverty puts refrigeration out of reach for many.
Its quite plain to me most of the people making decisions have never been involved in animal handling or slaughter. I have killed/butchered many hundreds of sheep back when I was shearing/woolpressing, depending on the size of the team usually one or 2 per workday. I havent slaughtered any cattle, and only a couple of pigs.
Heres some basics on animal handling and slaughter.
1: To move stock you have to scare it into the direction you want it to go. You dont ask it politely, if you can “trick” the stock with blinds or bluffs then good. Stock generally hates going from light to dark, smell of blood, loud noise and stripes of light and shadow.
2: Stock is much easier to slaughter if it isnt “whipped up”. When you are working with knives the last thing you want is animals kicking around.
3: Slaughter is slaughter, it isnt nice or clean. Even done properly it looks “nasty”.
4: Stressed meat is tough meat, the less panicked the beast prior to slaughter the better the meat should turn out.
5: Animals have to be bled as quickly as possible, preferably with the heart still beating, and be hung upside down to drain better.
6: Cruelty is very much in the eye of the beholder, I have had dozens of people assist in moving stock who thought using polly pipe/dogs and sacks on the sheep was “cruel” quite gladly use all 3 after trying to “gentle” sheep into a shed for an hour or so.
7: There is no money to be made in damaged or dead stock, you can’t eat it, sell it or breed it. So in generally cruelty is STUPID in the context of farming and stock handling. The non thinkers seem to belive companies/farmers are indifferent to stock losses, this is bullshit, every dead or unsaleable animal costs money. Companies are formed to make money, dead stock costs money. Therefore companies tend to invest in solutions to stock losses,
My basic sheep killing was knife “stick to behind the windpipe, cut forward, then cut back and break the neck, all up less than 5 seconds. The sheep would then bleed out and be hung, after a couple of minutes the body would be skun and gutted then left to set overnight. Breaking the sheep up into cuts of meat would take 20min to 1/2 an hour per animal.
Amount of suffering?
Less than 5 seconds with the neck broken, unless you believe it feels pain past a broken spinal cord.
The Tizona Group 
June 22, 2011, 11:40 pm at 11:40 pm
That first vid was indeed a bit different to what we all saw on 4corners. Very surgical, clinical.
And there are many reasons to be concerned about fundamentalist Islam and Islamic terrorism, but halal killings ain’t one of them.
People worried about the barbarity of halal killings shouldn’t be. Even a primitive halal kill in some backwater, is a relatively quick and humane slaughter.
What we saw in Indonesia was NOT halal.
This is halal, in its most basic form.
So no need to bag on Coles and Woolies for the meat we consume possibly being halal.
Rallying against genuine Islamic threats is one thing, and we sometimes wonder why the moderates don’t speak out.
Sometimes I wonder, as with the ordinary Aussie in the carbon debate, how can they?
Have they been alienated in a similar fashion to climate sceptics? Has their voice been hijacked, too, but vested interests and radical activists?
June 23, 2011, 11:09 pm at 11:09 pm
When I was about 12, we did a school excursion to see chickens being slaughtered on an industrial scale. It was quite interesting to watch (about 1/3 of the kids were from farms, and like me, they’d been sent out to the chopping block with an axe and a chook and made a nice mess of it). The chooks were strung up by their feet on a moving chain, then their heads were dunked in an electrified tank (which stunned them totally) and as they came out of the tank, their head went into a V-shaped knife which lopped it clean off.
The odd chook would fail to get its head wet, and thus avoid the knife entirely, but most were despatched very quickly before they knew what was going on. We then went on to see them being plucked and gutted and so on.
If you tried to do that sort of school excursion today – to show kids the reality of where their food comes from – the usual suspects would have a pink fit. But they won’t bat an eyelid at their kids playing violent video games, or watching movies like Saw.