Television viewers reeled on Monday night as graphic images of Australian cattle being slaughtered in Indonesia went to air.
The ABC Four Corners program used footage captured by Animals Australia during its investigation with the RSPCA on how animals are killed after live transport. The methods, as Liberal MP Greg Hunt succinctly described them, were ‘unacceptable, extraordinarily out of touch with the modern world, and above all, cruel and inhumane’.
The response was immediate and intense. People tweeted, posted on Facebook, and contacted their MPs to vent their outrage. Online petitions against live export were soon inundated.
Members on both sides of Parliament were also disturbed, the issue drawing out a level of bipartisanship not seen in the last three years. Within two days of the Four Corners report, the Gillard Government imposed an export ban against 11 Indonesian abattoirs identified as operating below international standards.
The public outrage highlights the assumptions modern meat-eaters make about how food arrives on their table. Most of us purchase our proteins from the supermarket, where they sit on sterile shelves neatly packaged in uniform containers. We are disconnected from the bloody business of rendering a live organism into a form fit for cooking and eating.
This disconnection explains in part the horror that met the footage of slaughter in Indonesia. While people are generally comfortable with the idea of animals being killed for human consumption, they prefer to assume such animals are killed humanely.
In the age of mass-produced meat, this actually brings us close to older traditions that saw animals as precious and saw their death in the service of humans as noble. Native Americans asked for pardon and gave thanks to animals they killed. Jewish and Muslim traditions also take seriously the business of slaughter, prescribing a method that involves a speedy death and hence the least pain.
Modern animal rights activism has restored the philosophy of ethical slaughter. They have to some degree made us more aware of and careful about how food gets on our plate. In Australia, we see this in the increasing demand for organically produced vegetables and meat, as well as Fairtrade commodities.
But how much of such consciousness exists in Indonesia? Any improvements to animal welfare must begin from local support if it is to be concrete and permanent. Given that Indonesians are predominantly Muslim, perhaps an appeal to change must begin with an appeal to the concept of halal; a term that