@repentatleisure1952 wrote:
General reply to all...
Have any posters been involved in the thoroughbred or standarbred industry?
No involvment with the horse racing industry at all.
Have any posters been employed in an abbatoir?
No never employed in an abbatoir. I have toured one of Australias largest abbaoirs and seen the full process first hand. I have to admit even for a seasoned farmer it was confronting. Have two cousins who have many years experience working in an abbatoir, one currently as a foreman.
I qualify on both counts...50 years with horses & five years in the knocking box weilding a captive bolt pistol.
I have had to destroy many hundreds of farm animals over the years and still do the chore regularly. ( including earlier this week ) As the only larger scale farmer with experience in the job and a property set amongst smaller hobby farms in a near city location, I am sometimes asked to put down stock for neighbours as well as my own.
Happy to answer any questions.
Imo the issue here is a rogue abbatoir & not the assumption that these practices are widespread....they are not.
It seems to be glaringly obvious that many of the people responding to this thread have not actually watched the ABC programme in full and are relying on 30 second grabs from other news sources as they have not grasped what the premise of the programme was actually about.
The programme used footage from several hidden cameras set up in a pet food processing abbatoir over an extended period of time and showing the final moments of the horses life in very graphic detail. Over that entire period the cameras where in place and many thousands of animals processed there was only a couple of instances captured that could be claimed as cruelty ie, the hitting and kicking of animals. Two or three instances is two or three too many, but the programme did not claim mistreatment was an indemic or regular occurance at the abbatoir...
The cruelty claim relates to the fact that ex race horses are sent to the facility to be turned into dog food in breach of racing industry policy. It was the programme that made a point of the dog food thing, not me as they showed footage of dog owners including some from the greyhound racing industry picking up product from a shop front at the facility. What they didnt directly tell viewers though was that the vast bulk of the product, ( based on production figures quoted in the show ) ends up in the supermarket dog food isle. That is what the abbatoirs function was.... to produce pet food.
The show was not a general critique of the horse racing industry and general practices of training and racing, it was a critique of ex race horses ending up at a pet food facility in breach of industry guidelines.. That being the basis of the cruelty claim. ( rather than animals actually being habitually beaten, kicked etc. ) Its unfortunate that some of the anger people feel regards the horse racing industry in general has been directed at me for simply explaining what the programme showed, uncomfortable as the truth may have been for some.
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