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Other titles in the series:

Animal death Ed. Jay Johnston & Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

Animals in the Anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures Ed. The Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective

Cane toads: a tale of sugar, politics and flawed science Nigel Turvey

Engaging with animals: interpretations of a shared existence Ed. Georgette Leah Burns & Mandy Paterson

Fighting nature: travelling menageries, animal acts and war shows Peta Tait Animal welfare in Australia

Policy and politics

Peter John Chen First published by Sydney University Press © Peter John Chen 2016 © Sydney University Press 2016

Reproduction and Communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below:

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Creator: Chen, Peter J. (Peter John), 1972– author. Title: Animal welfare in Australia : politics and policy / Peter John Chen. ISBN: 9781743324738 (paperback) 9781743324745 (ebook: epub) 9781743324752 (ebook: Kindle) 9781743325025 (ebook: PDF) Series Animal Publics. Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Animal welfare—Government policy—Australia. Animal welfare—Political aspects—Australia. Animal welfare—Moral and ethical aspects—Australia. Human–animal relationships—Australia. Australia—Politics and government. Dewey Number: 636.0832

Cover image: Hand feeding sheep in feedlot at Connemara Station, Tarcutta, . Photographer: Carl Davies. CSIRO Science Image, http://scienceimage.csiro.au. Used under CC Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). Cover design by Miguel Yamin Contents

Acknowledgements xi List of figures ix List of acronyms xiii Nomenclature xv Introduction xvii

Part 1 1 1 History 3 2 Ethics 21

Part 2 37 3 Attitudes to animals 39 4 In the media 85 5 Mapping the policy domain 123

Part 3 149 6 151

vii Animal welfare in Australia

7 Animal-using industry 223 8 Political and administrative policy elites 275

Conclusion 319 Appendices Appendix A: Research methods 323 Appendix B: Major ethical positions regarding animals 326 Appendix C: Australian animal protection organisations – a 330 sample Appendix D: Animal-using industry in Australia – 334 representative bodies and their relationships with policy-makers Appendix E: Timeline of animal welfare policy in Australia 338 Appendix F: Significant legal instruments 350 Appendix G: Top Google queries relating to the 10 most 360 frequently searched-for animals

Reference list 365 Index 401

viii Introduction

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 slaugh- terhouse 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 and inde- pendent 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 pro- cedure. 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 surgi- cal removal of well-bearing skin from the tail and breech area of a sheep, and is performed to prevent insect infestation; Primary Indus- tries Ministerial Council 2006, 17). Between these two controversies,

xvii Animal welfare in Australia 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 pre- existing 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 commit- ment 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: Aus- tralians’ 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 attacks (AAP 2014), the Western Australian govern- ment implemented a program of shark . In response, the public rallied to the largest pro-shark protests in Australian (and possibly international) history (ABC 2014). That , 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

xviii Introduction 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 protec- tion 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 ‘’: 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 per- sistent subordination of the species with which we share the planet is driven by two forces. The first is inertia. The consumption of ani- mals 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 con- sume. Over the past hundred years, development has been marked by

xix Animal welfare in Australia 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 stan- dards 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 (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 ethi- cal 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 ambi- valent 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, re- engineered to move from birth to plate in a way that is standardised, homogenised and designed to reduce observable diversity and individ- ualism (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 , 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

xx Introduction 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 int- erests 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 activ- ities 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 pro- tection 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 abol- ish or alter. From the industrial perspective, events like the temporary suspension of live exports to Indonesia have alerted many to the im- portance of engaging with policy debates in this area (a $1 billion class-action lawsuit was launched by affected industries in late 2014; Neales 2014, 6). While activists are interested in the policy processes that would allow them to cement policy ‘wins’, industry representatives are concerned with making the policy process both more amenable to their interests and more predictable.

The scope and methods of this book

The field of animal–human relations is a growing area of academic study, both within Australia and internationally. It is intensely inter- disciplinary in nature, incorporating the social sciences (political science, sociology, anthropology, geography), humanities (philosophy and ethics, arts, cultural studies, history), psychology, law, economics

xxi Animal welfare in Australia and political economy, medicine, veterinary science and biology. Given this, this book draws on contemporary academic debates, but does not attempt to critically engage with all of them. This includes questions regarding political philosophy and ethics, technical debates about and the threshold of self-awareness, and the science of animal-welfare standards. This approach is deliberate. A focus on policy-making has permitted greater access to policy domain participants than would have otherwise been possible. As is discussed later in this volume, some industry participants are sceptical about the motivations of academics interested in this area. Additionally, research on animal-protection politics in Australia to date has tended towards normative ethical orientations (the most obvious examples being the work of Australian ethicist and his successors and interlocutors), political sociology research into animal-rights activism (see, for example: Munro 2005a; Munro 2001a), applied political philosophy (see O’Sullivan 2011) and an emerging but very active focus on (see Cao 2010; Bruce 2012a; Sankoff et al. 2013) (also discussed later in this volume). While Australian policy scholars have written widely on rural policy and political interest artic- ulation (see Botterill 2003; Halpin 2004), this has focused on industry policy in the conventional sense of the term, with an emphasis on market promotion and development (Freedman 1997), rather than on animal- protection issues. The research strategy underlying this volume – unpacked in detail in Appendix A – is a mixed methods approach. This approach, drawing on a wide variety of data sources, is ideal for a study that aims to pro- vide a broad overview of a diverse policy-making field. The study of policy processes is not normative in nature, and this represents both a strength and a weakness. The study aims to explain how power struc- tures produce public policy outputs and outcomes. This permits the identification of tendencies, trends and regularities, and therefore sits at the meso-level of analysis, between excessive attention to singular cases and gross national generalisations. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides a historical perspective, which is essential to understanding the status quo. How have current patterns of animal regulation and use developed over time? Political interest in animal protection waxes and wanes, and

xxii Introduction global forces have played a significant role in shaping the domestic animal industry and animal activism. The history of ideas about the relationship between humans and animals, both how we define what it is to be one or the other, and what moral significance we attribute to these classifications, is also important. Major currents in religious, moral and ethical thought are outlined as a means of understanding how our thinking about animals has (or has not) developed. Part 2 provides a broader view of the current situation. I consider the Australian public’s ideas about animals through the lens of public behaviour and opinion, and how popular media both shape and reflect our attitudes. The concept of a policy domain is introduced as an analytical tool with which to map out the major policy actors involved. In the case of animal protection in Australia, policy tends to be produced via a network of highly attenuated and disconnected policy- making structures, with critical input from non-government and industry organisations. After mapping the policy domain, in Part 3 I examine three crucial actors within it: activists, industry representa- tives and policy-making elites. I consider who these actors are, how they influence policy, and where and how they come into conflict with one another. As we shall see, the low salience of animal welfare and protection has tended to produce a policy vacuum in Australia, and this sustains the complex, disconnected and conflictual character of much animal- protection policy in this country. Given the rising salience of the issue for a range of stakeholders, however, the time seems right for a volume exploring how Australia regulates relations between humans and non-human animals. Scholarship has the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of these policy processes, and to help stakeholders to navigate the complex and often contradictory policy landscape.

xxiii