The Solution
Animal Welfare
Strange Bedfellows: The Netherlands and NZ; Welfarists and the Far Right
Kosher and halal slaughter are now illegal in the Netherlands:
Just one week after the acquittal of fiery far-right politician Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliament struck another blow against multiculturalism in the Netherlands yesterday with the passage of a bill banning ritual animal slaughter. The bill requires that all animals be stunned before being slaughtered, a requirement that conflicts with halal and kosher stipulations that animals be fully conscious.
At first glance, this looks like a classic example of the far-right undercurrent that lurks below the surface in much of Europe. It evokes Switzerland’s controversial minaret ban, for example. You can easily picture a pale, thin Dutchman with close-cropped chestnut hair apoplectic about immigrants, their funny cuisine, and their sick, sick, sick farming practices.
But there’s something more, and something stranger going on there.
Foreign Policy continues:
The bill was initially proposed by the Party of the Animals, which holds two seats in the 146-seat Dutch parliament and maintains that ritual methods of slaughter are inhumane.
The Party for Animals? Here in New Zealand, where only one Party has an animal welfare spokesperson, that seems outlandish, and extraordinarily progressive.
Of course, the far right are still in the game:
It gained support from centrists on similar grounds, but Wilders’s Freedom Party has also been a longtime proponent. In fact, it was Wilders who first raised the issue in 2007 when he objected to halal meat being served at a public school in Amsterdam.
Strange bedfellows. The Dutch animal welfare movement and the Dutch far right.
All movements, especially single-issue movements such as traditional animal welfarism or animal rights, must be careful with who they align themselves with and take real care to consider the unintended consequences of their actions. In advancing the cause of animals, we must take care not to alienate natural allies. Animal liberation should not come at the cost of oppressing human minorities.
New Zealand and the Netherlands are bedfellows also. Both are in the handful of countries that have banned kosher slaughter. In New Zealand, however, halal slaughter is legal.
The process was very different. No odd alliance of the SPCA and the National Front, but the slow, methodical, industry-backed process of Codes of Welfare. Without hue or cry, we banned kosher slaughter.
And then backed down:
Under pressure on human rights grounds the Agriculture Minister David Carter has granted an exemption to the Commercial Slaughter Code of Welfare for the local Jewish community, to be able to slaughter chickens without pre-stunning. He is also under heavy pressure to continue to allow a temporary exemption for sheep and cattle, despite it contravening the code of welfare.
What surprises me about this tale is that the state, without an Act of Parliament, banned a fundamental part of Jewish practice. As a lawyer, I strongly suspect that this Code of Welfare could be open to legal challenge on the grounds that it is ultra vires, or outside the power that Parliament has given the executive. But to forestall any such claims, David Carter MP backed down.
SAFE is campaigning for him to stick to his guns – but I’d pick an easier battle. Campaigning against Jewish religious expression makes you an easy target.
Animal Justice Fund
Just a quick note on the Animal Justice Fund, administered by SAFE, funded from Jan Cameron’s (founder of the hugely-successful outdoor equipment company, Kathmandu) fortune which allocates $2 million for whistleblowers. Between $5 000 and $30 000 can be awarded in each instance that leads to a successful prosecution or ‘significant animal welfare outcome.’
To date, at least six workers have ‘dobbed in’ bosses for animal cruelty. But none want to accept the reward.
All were for dairy farms and piggeries. None of the workers were still employed by the farms they were laying complaints against, so the cases and information are considered ‘historical’ and hence a low priority for investigation. Four of these cases were referred to MAF. According to SAFE’s Hans Kriek:
Paddocks were in bad shape, there were stones and lame cows. There were high mortality rates amongst calves. Dying animals were being left to rot in paddocks. With the pig farms we had the usual complaints … that the conditions were terrible and enclosures weren’t cleaned out and the animals were standing a foot deep in their own muck.
Yet, no breaches of the relevant welfare codes were found in any case. Continue reading
Circus Animal Bans
As of 1 July 2010, the use of any animal in a circus has been banned in Bolivia. A handful of other countries have banned the use of wild animals in circuses but only Bolivia has banned exploitation of domestic animals in circuses as well.
The bill took two years to pass through both chambers of the Plurinational Assembly, meeting stiff opposition from the eastern states of Bolivia where there was concern that the law would be expanded to include bullfighting, which is popular in rural villages. Bullfighting remains legal in Bolivia.
The legislature were eventually won over by a screening of videos shot by undercover circus infiltrators in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia co-ordinated and funded by Animal Defence International (ADI), a London-based NGO which found that ill-treatment and violence against animals in circuses is commonplace.
Animal Welfare on Farms: A lower standard for agricultural animals
A healthy flock of sheep
A report in the Dominion Post this week about a particularly nasty case of criminal neglect of sheep in the Manawatu highlights much of what is wrong with the enforcement and prosecution of animal welfare offences on farms in New Zealand:
75 sheep were found dead and another 25 had to be put down [immediately] because of alleged ill-treatment. SPCA officials raided the farm in August after being tipped off about the sheep. The 66-hectare farm is now under strict monitoring by vets and four SPCA inspectors. It is still being run by the farmer and has several hundred sheep.
Although full details have not yet been divulged by prosecutors, pending the laying of charges, it appears that the sheep were emaciated from starvation and severe neglect. The file is about to be sent to Crown Law for prosecution.
For reasons that will become clear, it is important to note that this was a raid carried out by the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). Under the Animal Welfare Act 1999, three bodies are statutorily-empowered to investigate and prosecute animal welfare cases; the Police, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) and the SPCA. Only the Police and MAF are fully state-funded, the SPCA relies for 98% of its income on private donations. Continue reading
Against the Proposed New Elephant Enclosure at Auckland Zoo
Plans were approved in August this year to expand the elephant enclosure at Auckland Zoo to six times its current area. The importation of another 9 elephants to join the current sole occupant, Burma, would make this the only elephant herd in Australasia. The planned extension into Western Springs Park is estimated (by many accounts, unrealistically) to cost $13 million and the zoo plans to expand into 22000 square metres of the park.
Two main arguments have been made for this. First, that Burma is in need of companions as elephants are intelligent, empathic, social animals and she has only recently lost her companion, Kashin. Second, that the herd will be valuable for conservation. Given a choice between sending one animal to a reserve overseas or committing to the hugely-expensive upkeep of ten elephants, the City has chosen the latter.
This goes against international trends to close elephant enclosures. As pointed out in SAFE’s excellent submission to the Auckland City Council Combined Committees, enclosures closed this decade include London (2002), San Francisco (2005), Detroit (2005), Lincoln Park, Chicago (2005), Alaska (2007), and Philadelphia (2009). A significant number of zoos have also committed to gradually phasing out their herds by not replacing elephants.
Schechita, Halal and Ministerial Conflicts of Interest
It’s been a week of big announcements about animal welfare from the Minister of Agriculture, David Carter. We’ve seen not only the phase-out of sow crates but also the reversal of his decision in May 2010 to outlaw the traditional Jewish method of slaughter, schechita, for chickens.
Schechita slaughter requires the animal to be fully conscious as its throat is cut and it is allowed to bleed out. The NAWAC animal slaughter code created under the Animal Welfare Act 1999 (AWA) requires that an animal to be slaughtered must be first rendered insensible – stunned – so that it does not experience ‘unnecessary’ pain or distress. Although Muslims also object to the stunning of animals at slaughter, a compromise has been reached with halal slaughter whereby the animal is stunned at the instant the cut is made.
But there’s one revelation about the reasons behind the decision to ban schechita in the first place that the Minister would rather not see the light of day.
Documents obtained by the Herald on Sunday:
[A]ppear to show Carter broke the rules governing his portfolio by considering trade implications when making the original decision.
An allegation of conflict of interest has been made because of that – he holds shares in a company which exports meat and met with senior managers who wanted a ban on shechita to protect their interests. Continue reading
Sow Crates Are To Be Phased-Out: But ‘harrowing’ crates remain
The Minister for Agriculture, David Carter, has confirmed that the new Pig Welfare 
Code will phase out the use of sow crates in New Zealand within the next five years. The ban will come into full effect in early 2016.
Many readers will remember that SoLVe (the University of Auckland Law Faculty student group that was the genesis of this blog) hosted a seminar given by Peter Sankoff (to a packed lecture theatre) on this issue on May 27th 2009.
A ban on sow stalls included in the draft welfare code was leaked to SAFE (Save Animals From Exploitation) in February this year.
The draft code, developed by the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (NAWAC), was to be released for public notification in December 2009 but was delayed following legal threats from the New Zealand Pork Industry Board. NAWAC preferred a ban by December 2017, a full two years later than the deadline that has been decided.
Sow stalls have already been banned in the United Kingdom and Sweden and will be soon phased out in Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Denmark. Continue reading
Behold the Frankensalmon.
True believers claim that ingenuity is the lifeblood of economy, central to solving the economic, social and environmental dilemmas we have today. Much the same has been touted in connection to the release of genetically engineered Salmon into the US market, as approval is considered in the coming days by the USFDA. On 22 November the FDA finished its comment period on the labelling requirements for GE Salmon, and while the product is yet to hit the market (it could have as early as 23 November) it has become a hot-button topic. Continue reading
Closing the Loopholes?
With much fanfare, the government launched an animal welfare amendment bill earlier this year. You may remember our scepticism. Now, with much less fanfare, Sue Kedgley MP’s clumsily-titled private members bill, the Animal Welfare Amendment (Treatment of Animals) Bill has been balloted to receive its first reading in September.
So, what does she hope to do? Continue reading
Pig Farmers: The NZ Pork Industry Board Is Keeping Your Secrets Safe Tonight
And these are the crates they'll let us see...
The nationwide furore over the conditions in which pigs are intensively farmed has finally prompted voluntary audits of conditions in piggeries around Aotearoa New Zealand.
Today, a leaked email was released in which the New Zealand Pork Industry Board, a statutorily-created entity, is shown attempting to develop a legal strategy to avoid the results of those audits being made public. To quote the Dominion Post:
The leaked email, sent to farmers on behalf of the Pork Industry Board, said: “It is likely there will be a number of farms requiring corrective actions and … those actions could cause embarrassment to the farmer if made public and could cause embarrassment to the industry if used by animal welfarists, [so] some alternatives to current procedures were put forward.”
A suggested alternative would mean only the farmer and auditor would hold “completed documentation”, with the board notified of pass, fail, or “pending corrective actions (unspecified).”
Board chief executive Sam McIvor said its legal advice suggested the audit report would belong to the farmer, meaning it was personal information.
Some very serious questions need to be asked of a statutory body – albeit one that is mostly funded by farmers – that considers protecting piggery owners from “embarrassment” justification for its connivance to avoid a general obligation under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) to make information ‘held’ by them available to the public.
In any event, this tactic will simply not work. The Pork Industry Board is listed in the schedule to the OIA and section 2(5) of the Act is clear that “official information” includes:
Any information held by an independent contractor engaged by any department or Minister of the Crown or organisation in his capacity as such contractor shall, for the purposes of this Act, be deemed to be held by the department or Minister of the Crown or organisation.
Mr McIvor goes further to say that a balance has to be struck between the interests of farmers and the interests of the public:
He said the board wanted to be accountable to pork-buying customers, but most customers did not care about farm conditions, just whether they had passed a minimum standard. “There does have to be some trust and the customers need to be able to trust us that we have the processes in place.”
Indeed. The kind of trust that holds so long as you don’t ask any embarrassing questions.
Leaving aside this deft identification of the Board’s constituency as being only “pork-buying customers”, it is statements such as these that lay bare the true issue: It is not privacy, it is certainly not animal health, it is secrecy. Secrecy that allows an industry with some demonstrably cruel operators to continue to avoid public scrutiny of their profiting from the suffering of animals.
A report on the current review is due next week. We’ll keep you updated.
