The other side...

4Corners has stunned us all with their recent show, A Bloody Business.

It was always going to shock us to the core. I would like anyone who has seen it to think back on that episode and try to remember, did the vision of seeing the cow being stunned catch you off guard too? Did that make you think 'Oh crap'?

You know it did.

The whole industry of slaughtering animals for meat is confronting and hard. These animals are bred to die. Some people are not capable of dealing with this, others, such as myself, can live knowing this, and others still, such as children, live blissfully unaware of such truths. Perhaps some of the people from the second group try and squeeze into the third and pretend they don't know.

This is an extremely easy thing to do here in Australia. The primary interaction most Australians have with cows is on supermarket shelves.

We buy our milk and meat, bring it home, stick it in our freezer and eat at our leisure, content that it has been born, raised, farmed, slaughtered and packaged in accordance with strict health and animal welfare regulations, backed up and maintained by billions of dollars of equipment and research.

Indonesia is nothing like Australia in a lot more than just our animal welfare laws.

Watch the video again, and as hard as it is, I ask you to look at the whole picture now, not just the cow. (NO, I am not downplaying the significance of what the cow is going through)

Did you notice the personal safety equipment?

Do you know why the knives are different lengths?

Did you see the lighting?

Did you hear them laughing?

Did they answer the questions truthfully?

Did they answer questions at all?

Did you see if the workers roofs were as secure as the ones on the 5star feedlot?

Did they tell you how much these workers are paid?

Did you find out if any of them lost their lunch the first time they saw a cow slaughtered?

Did you find out how old they were that day?

Did it tell you how long these guys have worked in abattoirs?

Did you see how the meat was hung in the marketplace, uncovered and open to flies?

Did you see the people at all?

and finally - did you see the millions of dollars worth of equipment that Australian Farmers and Taxpayers paid for to improve the conditions of these slaughter houses? Because I didn't.

The welfare of the cows, the welfare of the workers, and the welfare of the people buying the meat are all suffering at these abattoirs.

Usually when something like this happens, there is always the same platitude that people will fall back on, and I could be fairly assured that the majority of people reading this right now are thinking it and waiting to get to the comment section to post it up.

"People aren't more important than cows".

I never once said they were.

But they are equally as important.

I am trying to stop this train at the station in the middle that everyone is steaming straight past.

On the one side, we have continued poor conditions for the animal lives. On the other side, we have millions of impoverished and hungry human lives who won't even be able to buy food with money.

There is a station in the middle.

That is the station where we reach out our hand to our neighbours and say "Hi, my name is Kevin, I am from Australia, and I am here to help".

Now we are not giving them these cows. They are buying them. Heck, we wouldn't be sending them if they weren't, and it is a multi million dollar industry - so don't think we can just shut down the exports and it won't affect Indonesian men, women and children that have never seen the inside of an Indonesian abattoir.

Sure, you may be able to look an Australian Cattle Farmer in the face and tell him to suck it up, but could you look into the eyes of a 6yo child who has just spent a day at work to earn $3 to help feed the family and tell them to suck it up?

Meat and Livestock Australia has been taking money from Australian farmers and using taxpayers grants to help address this situation. However when it is shown that their efforts are clearly inadequate, they point their collective fingers at Indonesian workers making $5 a day, working in dangerous, unsanitary conditions and say it is all their fault.

We gave them a metal box.

We trained them.

But it is their fault.

I would like for those women to have asked them WHY they did some of the stuff they did. They kept saying why in their videos - but no one actually asked these men that question.

Too busy vilifying them.

Knowing anything more about them might make them human. Might show people they are not actually evil. Just men with families who were trained to do a job.

But you can't have a good story without a villain.

PS: The length of the knife would be indicative of its age. As you sharpen a knife, you are wearing some of it away. The shorter, smaller knives have been sharpened and used for a very long time. Apparently no one there can afford to replace them, and no one here in MLA/LiveCorp cares to.