Activists rally outside Victorian Premier's office (3AW interview)

On Tuesday 21 January 2025, animal rights campaigners gathered outside the ministerial office of Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, in a protest against the government's continued support of the pig slaughter industry. The group of around 50 protestors laid the bodies of dead piglets outside the office, each one symobolising a piggery which had been investigated in a coordinated effort by numerous teams of anonymous activists over the weekend. An initial sample of the footage has been released on FTP's website, showing pigs in narrow cages and other extreme confinement systems living in their own waste; sick, dying and dead pigs; and evidence of scavenging and cannibalisation.

As intensive pig farms are notoriously unsanitary, disease-ridden facilities, investigators are seen in the footage following strict biosecurity protocols to avoid introducing or spreading any disease.

The piglets were laid on a white sheet and surrounded with flowers and photos from the farms where they had been found, having died from malnutrition, illness or scavenging, or killed by workers due to being too small or weak to be worth feeding.

FTP's Executive Director, Chris Delforce, said that the rally was in response to the government's continued inaction on serious, systemic issues in Australian pig farms and slaughterhouses, in spite of countless damning investigations spanning more than a decade.

"Last month, the Victorian government officially responded to the parliamentary inquiry into pig welfare, which recommended an end to some of the most barbaric practices still used in the majority of Victorian piggeries, including sow stalls, farrowing crates, mating stalls, the mutilation of piglets without pain relief or anaesthetic and the killing of 'runt' piglets by blunt force trauma. These changes would have been the absolute bare-minimum the government could have committed to, in order to at least give an appearance of taking animal welfare seriously and standing up to the pig slaughter industry."

"The Allan government opted to ignore the overwhelming evidence presented to it that this is an industry that is rotten to its core, utterly dependent on abuse and secrecy, and beyond redemption; an industry that must be urgently phased out. It's opted to ignore the vast majority of more than 10,000 public submissions calling for a better world for these sentient, intelligent animals. Instead all it has promised is even further tax-payer funding and self-regulation."

He said that the work of investigators, like those who provided Farm Transparency Project with the footage released today, was unfortunately necessary when confronted with government apathy and inaction.

"The reality is, no one wants to have to illegally enter a factory pig farm and document the suffering of thousands of pigs. People do this because time and time again, the worst atrocities of these industries have only been exposed by ordinary people risking their safety and liberty to show the reality of commercial farming to the public."

The audio from this video comes from a 3AW radio interview with Chris Delforce.
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Published: Tue 25 Feb 2025 by Farm Transparency Project
Captured/filmed: 21 January 2025
Created: 21 January 2025
ID: 78l2li21sq
Duration: 3m 46s
Licence: Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please credit: Farm Transparency Project. Link not required.
Country: Australia
Location: VIC

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