Just as great architecture is our pride slaughterhouses are our embarrassment

Below is a letter I sent to the Prime Minister in a call to end live animal export from Australia. I doubt if she read it but I believe its a message that should be read by someone so I’ll post it here.

‘Whilst I applaud the government’s decision to finally take some action on this issue I appeal to you that much more has to be done. Attempts to train Indonesian abattoir workers and supply them with better equipment are commendable, but without continual monitoring of what is actually going on inside of the abattoirs the mistreatment and unnecessary suffering of animals will continue. 

The knee-jerk reaction of Government, industry groups and the Australian public in relation to the recent exposure of the live animal export trade to Indonesia brings to mind the words of Sir Paul McCartney ‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian’. The issues relating to live animal export have been known for years but as they remained overseas and invisible to all those who didn’t want to know about them, they remained unresolved. The only way Australians can truly know whether or not our animals are saved from the horrible deaths seen in the Animals Australia footage is if there is a complete ban on all animal exports. I would like to think that more regulation would be the answer but as the Animals Australia footage clearly showed the work of LiveCorp, which is directly responsible for stopping these types of atrocities, is clearly failing, sadly despite millions of government funds going to the company each year.

Whilst the footage of conditions in Indonesia was shocking the unfortunate truth is that conditions in many Australian abattoirs are not much better. A lack of monitoring, tough working conditions and poor training lead to similarly macabre mistakes being made on a regular basis at all abattoirs around the world. In England a reasonable solution has been found through the use of CCTV monitoring of abattoirs to ensure better practice. This simple, yet effective, solution was not introduced by the government there, but rather by a group of supermarket chains in the interest of reassuring their customers of reasonable conditions.

Why is it that Governments around the world are so bad at ensuring animal welfare? The live animal industry in Australia worth over $1 billion dollars a year. How can it be that this billion dollar industry is so poorly monitored and regulated that only when a few concerned citizens from Animals Australia report on it are the known issues in the industry responded to?

This Government, just like all previous governments, is letting Australia down on animal welfare issues and millions of Australian animals are suffering needlessly because of it. Cameron Hill and the Directors of LiveCorp, which for over 10 years has supposedly been working to improve industry standards, should be ashamed. The suffering continues as these eight men personally enjoy roughly 10% of LiveCorp’s millions in revenue each year. A lot needs to be done and a lot can be done, both in Indonesia and here in Australia.’

The two main points of the letter are that better monitoring and regulation is needed to end the atrocities that go in everyday in abattoirs around the world and that the companies whose job it is to do that monitoring and regulating, in this case LiveCorp, are failing in their duties.

This letter, and an entire campaign to end live animal export in Australia, all stemmed from a great report by Four Corners aired in May. (Click here for details) Subsequent to this report, and the backlash it created, live export to Indonesia has been temporarily banned.

The problems that plague this world are many and when contemplated fully leave one numb with misanthropic apathy. If one’s goal in life is to make the world a better place then surely the best way to do this is to try to reduce the amount of suffering that goes on here. Depending on how one defines suffering it’s fair to say that animal welfare issues are one of the biggest problems with our world at the moment. We are an inherently irrational species and I can accept this, but to accept this fact at the cost of the lives and wellbeing of millions of creatures is to prove just how selfish and ungrateful we are.

The successfulness of this campaign does make me happy, but still there is much to be done to improve animal welfare, in every country around the world. People continue to ignore the facts of where their food comes from, or goes in this case, until it is vividly and conveniently shoved in their face, as it was in this case. Until we're willing to look at and admit how horrible factory farms and abattoirs are we should not be allowed to eat meat.

How this post relates to architecture is that my interest in architecture stems from my desire to make the world, physically, a better place. The creation and continual use of abattoirs would have to be the most polar opposite of this idea I can think of. To make the world a better place the removal of horrible spaces, such as abattoirs, should be just as important, if not more so, than the creation of great ones.