All talk, little action

The Tasmanian government has just released their response to our shocking exposé of Tasmanian slaughterhouses, and its far from the decisive action they pledged to take just four days ago.

Rather than responding to evidence of systemic animal abuse immediately, the government has announced that the most they can manage is to re-investigate the facilities and form a task force to consider developing new animal welfare guidelines. Given that all five slaughterhouses we investigated were already in breach of existing state and national welfare legislation, we fail to see what developing new ones will manage, except for giving the appearance of doing something, while in reality preserving business as usual.

It took four days for Tasmanian Minister for Primary Industries, Jo Palmer, to go from condemning the horrific treatment of animals we exposed and stating that "nothing was off the table" when it came to taking action, to quietly attempting to brush this footage under the rug and protect the interests of animal slaughter industries.

Today, we released footage of a calf drowning in blood at Tasmanian Quality Meats slaugtherhouse, still conscious after having been stunned, stuck with a knife and dropped off the killing table into a pit filled with the blood of other calves. The response from the government is completely inadequate given that this is the type of horror animals are facing in Tasmania. For a week-old calf, waiting to die in a holding pen, or a sheep slammed to the floor by a worker, the knowledge that a task force will be sitting in a boardroom, calmly discussing if there is a kinder way to kill them, without damaging the slaughterhouses' bottom lines, would provide little comfort.

But this isn't where this fight ends. We still have four more Tasmanian slaughterhouses to expose and we will do everything we can to keep this issue in the public eye.