Harrowing footage emerges of abuse at Australian cattle farms that supply Israel
Secretly filmed material shows workers beating, kicking, electrocuting, standing on and shooting at animals for fun, denying them painkillers and vet visits to save money
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
Harrowing footage emerged Monday of animal abuse at Australian cattle farms which send live animals to Israel for fattening and slaughter.
Australia is regarded as one of the more enlightened suppliers of cattle for the meat industry.
But the Kan TV news footage (Hebrew), filmed secretly by two Israelis who secured jobs at several cattle farms in western Australia, showed an animal protection manager kicking and punching a cow; workers standing on, electrocuting and even shooting “for fun” at animals; dying cows being left to die slowly when there weren’t enough guns to finish them off and — in one instance — a cow still alive on the ground after someone who had never previously held a weapon fired four bullets into her body.
Mornings began by collecting dead animals and throwing them into open pits in a practice that Dr. Mohammad Abed al-Halek, a former chief veterinarian at an Israeli abattoir, said polluted groundwater and could poison local wild carnivores. He pointed to a lack of hygiene on the farms.
Calves were filmed dying for lack of water or mother’s milk, sick animals were not treated and anesthetics were not given to calves prior to dehorning — a painful practice to prevent them bruising people or one another.
Vets cost more than the animals were worth, one farm employee said, adding, “It’s a numbers game.”
Ronen Bar, founder of the Sentient organization and one of the two Israelis to document the abuse, said, “I was virtually the only person there who thought that what was happening was crazy.” Farm owners were often located great distances away from the farms, workers did whatever they wanted and enforcement of animal protection laws was “a joke,” he added.
Despite Tel Aviv’s reputation as a vegan capital, Israel is the fourth biggest beef and veal consumer in the OECD, after Brazil, the US and Argentina, with annual per capita beef consumption in 2018 standing at 20.5 kilograms (45.2 pounds). The country imports some 90% of its beef, around a quarter of it from Australia, according to Greenpeace.
Last November, just weeks before the Knesset was dissolved, MKs green-lighted a bill in its preliminary reading to stop the live transports of hundreds of thousands of lambs and calves from Australia and Europe to Israel each year for fattening and slaughter. The bill, which could not proceed further because Israel has since been without a fully functioning government, sought to gradually reduce livestock numbers being imported into Israel and to stop them completely within three years, moving entirely to the import of chilled meat.
According to United Nations figures, some 18% of greenhouse gases are caused by the beef industry — way above the 14% caused by all forms of transport on earth. Despite that, a doubling in beef consumption is predicted over the next 30 years.
According to the Kan report, environmentalists in Holland calculated that 75% of the globe’s farmland — equivalent to the whole of the US, China, the EU and Australia combined — could be freed up and used to feed the world properly if humankind moved to a totally plant-based diet.
