Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy

Abstract

The direct inspiration for this book was the temporary cessation of live animal exports to Indonesia in late 2011. This decision of the Gillard Labor government directly followed the broadcast of footage of slaughterhouse practices in Jakarta. In response to this footage, the websites of activist organisations crashed due to dramatic surges in traffic (AAP 2011a), and members of Parliament reported being deluged with calls about the show. Popular concern led some government backbenchers to advocate that the live-export industry be phased out, while competing legislative proposals emerged from the Australian Greens and independent senators to ban or restrict the practice. In the following two years, successive reports of animal mistreatment in Egypt and Pakistan sparked further unrest (Rout and Crowe 2012). A few years before these live-export scandals, PETA (USA) had led an influential campaign against the practice of mulesing in Australia, focusing particularly on the lack of pain relief during this invasive procedure. In response, in 2004 the wool industry had agreed to invest in research that would allow mulesing to be voluntarily phased out (mulesing is defined by the Primary Industries Council as the surgical removal of well-bearing skin from the tail and breech area of a sheep, and is performed to prevent insect infestation; Primary Industries Ministerial Council 2006, 17). Between these two controversies, xvii by 2014 it appeared that a significant shift in the political balance over animal welfare standards had emerged in Australia. Since then, however, it is possible to see a shoring up of the preexisting status quo towards policy regarding the treatment of animals. The government’s decision to temporarily halt live export negatively affected the operations of exporters and tested Australian–Indonesian relations, with wider implications for co-operation between the two nations that spilled over into debates about border protection and asylum seekers. However, exports resumed in 2013 and the live-export sector has since benefited from free-trade negotiations that look set to grow this agricultural subsector in Australia dramatically. In the same period, key members of the sheep industry abandoned their commitment to PETA to phase out mulesing in favour of a longer-term strategy of research and breeding (Jepson 2012). And although animal welfare activists have enjoyed other victories, such as a 2014 ban on the use of cages for chickens and pigs in intensive production in the Australian Capital Territory, this occurred only after the last of these industries had been paid by the ACT government to leave the jurisdiction. The policy landscape may shift, but one thing is constant: Australians’ attitudes to animals are complex and contradictory. In 2013 Australians directly consumed hundreds of millions of animals as meat while lavishing money and affection on their companion animals, 25 million of whom reside in 5 million (or 66 per cent of) Australian households (Animal Health Alliance 2013). Australians spend $8 billion annually on this subclass of favoured animals – four times the total amount individuals gave to charitable causes (McGregor-Lowndes and Pelling 2013). Another case that unfolded during the writing of this book captures this complexity. In 2014, following a slight rise in the small number of shark attacks (AAP 2014), the Western Australian government implemented a program of shark culling. In response, the public rallied to the largest pro-shark protests in Australian (and possibly international) history (ABC 2014). That sharks, the focus of a common, visceral phobia that is often seen as being hardwired and is far beyond a rational estimate of the actual risk of attack (Ritter et al. 2008, 47), mobilised so many, shows how complex our political relationship with animals can be. Millions of domesticated animals go to their deaths Animal welfare in Australia xviii annually in Australia largely unremarked, yet a small number of sharks prompted vigorous protests. These events demonstrate the difficulty of policy-making around animal welfare and protection issues. Add a scarcity of scholarship on policy-making pertaining to animal protection in this country, and the political response to animal protection issues in Australia cannot be readily explained or understood. The status quo Where do animals fit in the Australian political landscape? If, as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued, we are the sum of our actions, then the overwhelming majority of Australians would appear to support the idea that non-human animals should be subordinated to human desires. This status quo is what Joy (2010) calls ‘carnism’: an ideology that normalises animal use whether or not it is necessary for human survival. In giving a name to the ideology of animal use – just as those who avoid animal products are called vegetarians or vegans – Joy highlights a previously ‘unmarked category’. That we usually have no names for such categories reflects the tendency for the characteristics of the powerful (be that whiteness, maleness or adherence to a ‘normal’ diet) to neither have, nor need, a specific designator. This is an irony that sees the privileged as invisible, with only deviations from the norm marked out by special terminology. The assumption that the status quo is simply ‘normal’ conceals the power relations behind it. In the case of humans and animals, the persistent subordination of the species with which we share the planet is driven by two forces. The first is inertia. The consumption of animals and animal products often occurs in the most intimate of settings, and forms the pattern of our daily lives and habits. Here Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus is useful: the dispositions and preferences individuals acquire through formal and informal socialisation. These are powerful predictors of human behaviour because they are recreated inter-generationally and over time come to constitute ‘our culture’. The second is the political economy that alienates many of us from the source and character of the products and services we consume. Over the past hundred years, development has been marked by Introduction xix a shift in employment towards specialisation and away from primary production. The effect of this is to obscure how goods and services are produced. While this is clear in the psychological avoidance many people demonstrate regarding where their consumer products come from, it is also demonstrated across the economy, from labour standards to the ‘outsourcing’ of industrial pollution to developing nations (Shell 2009). And yet this culture of domination is neither absolute nor unchallenged. Almost as long as our species has claimed the status of ‘civilisation’ there have been those who have questioned the status quo. Pythagoras’ (c500 BCE) followers are commonly associated with religious vegetarianism (Walters and Portmess 2001, 15), and the ‘Pythagorean diet’ was a common term for vegetarianism as recently as the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, movements have waxed and waned that challenged the environmental, health, spiritual, and ethical appropriateness of our use of animals. Since the 1970s a renewed set of political movements has refreshed and rearticulated a range of challenges to the political economy of carnism. Promoting incremental or radical alternatives to established human–animal relations, these groups have opened up a new political dialogue around social and industrial animal use. Yet most individuals in our society maintain a complex and ambivalent relationship with animals, based on often quixotic criteria. The intimacy and affection that some species are afforded is matched by an apparent ruthlessness towards others; animals with complex mental states and social capacity are treated as little more than machines, reengineered to move from birth to plate in a way that is standardised, homogenised and designed to reduce observable diversity and individualism (Probyn-Rapsey 2013, 240–1). While these inconsistencies often frustrate activists, the shifting and contradictory attitudes of the public towards animal protection also confuse those in animal-using industries. Many in industry see urban-based activists as mawkish and out of touch with the realities of animal husbandry, and are frustrated by the gap between the stated concerns of their customers regarding standards of animal treatment and their willingness to pay higher prices for food and other products (Phillips and Phillips c2010, 161). Concern for animal welfare can be Animal welfare in Australia xx sporadic, appearing seemingly randomly and – as was the case with mulesing – from both domestic and international sources. These contradictions, and a range of other factors, make the policy process surrounding animal protection difficult to understand and hard to control. The wide range of contexts in which human and animal interests intersect and clash make simplified policy responses impossible, with oversight and administration often spanning multiple boundaries (jurisdictional, administrative, and paradigmatic). The fragmented nature of the animal agriculture and animal protection communities means that participants often have a limited view of the policy process. Elected officials who are placed between competing demands are often not engaged in protection issues on a systematic or ongoing manner. With the devolution of many standards-setting and monitoring activities into industry, public servants have only partial engagement with the scope and implications of welfare legislation. The objective of this book, and the primary research behind it, is to better understand the policy-making process surrounding animal protection in Australia. The importance of this task is apparent to many animal activists: given the pervasiveness of animal use in Australia, they recognise the incredible scale of the practices they wish to abolis