Livestock in Drought Prone Areas – Animal Liberation South Australia

Too cruel to keep them alive

Generations of Australians know their country as a land ‘of droughts and flooding rains’. Dorothea MacKellar recognized this when she wrote those words in 1904.

More recently, climate change has made droughts and floods, bushfires and cyclones more frequent and more destructive.

Yet Australia’s graziers remain determined to stock—and over-stock—the ‘sweeping plains’ with cattle and sheep, knowing that droughts must cause multitudes of their animals to starve to death.

How many is too many?

To run a successful business graziers must estimate how many of their sheep and cattle they can afford to allow to starve to death and yet still survive as graziers.

As a result, most of us have probably heard graziers lamenting how upset they are at the death of their stock while simultaneously asking for drought relief so they can keep on re-stocking!

Many graziers say how much they ‘care for their stock’. They care for their lifestyle and their profits, but care for the welfare of their stock? No.

Graziers always try, no matter how long or severe the drought, to keep enough stock alive to breed up when rain arrives. And so the cycle of cruelty has gone on repeatedly for two centuries—except now it’s becoming worse.

To quote another Australian poet, Judith Wright, who grew up and lived on stations in northern N.S.W and Queensland: it’s ‘cruel to keep them alive.’ Wright was referring, in South of My Days, to a drought in 1901 when the rivers turned to dust.

The solution

Instead of endlessly granting drought relief to graziers, governments should encourage them to leave drought prone lands. There should be no grants for drought relief to restock; rather, graziers should be paid to move elsewhere, out of the livestock industry.

Tony Abbott criticized Aboriginal desires to live in the outback as a lifestyle choice—it wasn’t. But to remain on drought prone lands is a grazier’s lifestyle choice, a choice we pay for with our taxes, and a choice the stock pays for in pain and death.

Too cruel to keep them alive

How many is too many?

The solution

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