Animal Cruelty

I suppose it should be no surprise that animals are treated as commodities in a food manufacturing system that uses factory farming to produce quantity of food over quality of lives. Nonetheless, it is distressing to actually see the conditions.  I will never forget seeing and smelling a massive feedlot strewn over hillsides as far as eye could see with thousands of cattle being fattened up in the last few weeks of their life. Some animals, unable to support their own weight, just sat in their own excrement.

Tasmania supplies over 90 per cent of Australian Atlantic salmon with value of over $1 billion. The colonists of the ‘Britain of Australia’ wanted to be able to fish for salmon in their new home. At first, it seemed impossible when the transportation of live fertilised eggs across the ocean failed. In 1857, the Tasmanian Parliament announced an impressive reward of five hundred pounds for ‘the introduction of live salmon’, and a Salmon Commission was formed. 

Enter settler, James Youl and his decades-long obsession with bringing the iconic salmon of his homeland to the Southern Hemisphere, a mad endeavour that stretched the limits of science and technology, and defied the accepted laws of nature.  After many years of trial and error, he took French advice and put the eggs inside moss with cool running water in a special icehouse built on board the Norfolk square-rigged wooden ship to transport them.

Today, dominated by foreign-owned companies like Tassal, Huon, and Petuna, Tasmania's Atlantic salmon farming industry in sea cages, including in World Heritage listed Macquarie Harbour and the D'Entrecasteaux Channel is worth over $1 billion annally. The relatively warmer water temperatures mean that Tasmanian Atlantic salmon can grow to a harvestable size within 16-18 months, but led to bacterial outbreaks causing millions of dead fish in 2024 and 2025 dumped in landfill.  The disease is now considered endemic in Tasmania's southern and eastern waters.  Increasing water temperatures caused by climate change will only increase stress, disease and mortality, no matter the overuse of antibiotics and fresh water to bathe the fish.  

At the same time, industrial salmon farming is having serious impacts on Tasmania’s sensitive marine habitats and threatened species. The build-up excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from fish faeces and uneaten feed falling to the seabed from the cages in surrounding waters can result in eutrophication — the concentration of nutrients in a body of water — which can cause harmful algal blooms. These blooms can reduce oxygen levels in the water, leading to fish kills and other negative impacts on the local ecosystem. Tasmanian salmon farms produce six times more pollution each year than Tasmania’s entire sewage.

In Australia, animal farming on an industrial scale causes pain and suffering to billions of animals.

As by far the most popular animal protein consumed in Australia, 700 million chickens are raised in factory farms across Australia, tightly packed with up to 60,000 birds being housed in a single shed and unable to express natural behaviours such as roaming around and flapping their wings.  Fast-growing breeds are used so that chickens grow to their full size in an average of just six weeks. This accelerated growth rate, combined with low light levels and insufficient space to move, can lead to serious health problems, including heart and lung failure, muscle weakness and lameness.  

We have known for over two decades that battery cages cause physical pain, injury and death. The extreme confinement denies natural behaviours that cause physical and psychological suffering for the hens. Hens in battery cages suffer from brittle bones and bone fractures, as well as feather loss and foot problems due to the restrictive environment and wire floors.  Hens in battery cages can also experience high rates of a condition that leads to liver rupture and death, largely due to stress and lack of exercise.  Despite the European Union banning battery cages from 2012, the move towards cage-free eggs since The Body Shop asked customers to sign postcards twenty years ago has been slow.  More than 11 million hens, or 70 per cent of Australia’s hens, are still confined to a battery cage.  

In 2023, Australian agriculture ministers agreed to phase out the production of battery eggs by 2036, in accordance with the new national animal welfare standards and guidelines for poultry.  In the meantime, McDonald's, which uses more than 91 million eggs a year in Australia, phased out caged eggs at the end of 2017.  Coles and Woolworths own-brand shell eggs are cage-free, but both still sell caged eggs, despite their promised deadline of 2025 for a full phase-out.

The RSPCA reports that, despite seven in ten Australians supporting a phase out of farrowing crates, 90 per cent of Australian pigs are still farmed in confined, barren environments and suffer painful husbandry procedures. Pigs are kept in barren, small steel cages on factory farms with uncomfortable flooring, where there’s no opportunity for these intelligent animals to explore, forage and engage in natural behaviours and which causes them to suffer painful skin lesions and diseases. Mother pigs have it especially bad as they are inseminated in a cage no bigger than an average household refrigerator, with barely enough room to move. While most are then moved into group housing, about one in five of mother pigs in Australia are still confined to sow stalls for most of their pregnancy.  In the first week of a baby pig’s life, his or her teeth are clipped or ground, the tail is cut, and males can be castrated, often without pain relief. 

As well as the cruelty of the feedlots, an estimated 40 per cent of cattle in Australia are treated with hormone growth promotants to boost weight gain in the animals. They are banned in Europe since 1989 due to concerns about the possible link with cancer, although this has not been scientifically proven. 

Valued at over $10 billion annually, the Australian dairy industry, markets itself as natural, locally-sourced, nutrient-rich food for all ages. But, like all mammals, cows must give birth in order to produce milk, and so a mother cow is kept on an almost continuous cycle of pregnancy, birth and lactation throughout her adult life to ensure she continues to produce a high volume of milk. This cycle will eventually take a toll on her body and when her physical health, fertility or milk yield declines, she will generally be sent to slaughter, usually at around the age of 4–8 years.   Annually, Dairy Australia reports that around 310,000 male ‘bobby calves’ are slaughtered, an unwanted by-product of producing the milk.