Australians love food. From bacon and eggs at Bondi to Chiko Rolls and meat pies at the cricket, from traditional Sunday roasts to lazy TV dinners, food has been an important part of our cultural identity for generations. We sing about it, we write about it – it’s the fabric around which we celebrate our trials and tribulations – in family, in business, in life.

Australia also claims to be a nation of animal lovers. Many people say that they care deeply about the treatment of animals. This appears somewhat paradoxical, given that many of the animals they claim to love actually produce or comprise the core ingredients of the nation’s most popular meals.

Are we all party to a form of wilful blindness, or is the law simply making it too hard to see?

In the last 30 years, our society has experienced a food revolution,^[1] which has transformed the lives of more than half a billion Australian farm animals who comprise the meat, milk and egg producing machines annually called on to satisfy our national appetite.^[2] The nature of food production, especially the manufacturing of animal-derived food products, has changed dramatically as producers compete in domestic and international markets, on cost, scale and efficiency, to meet growing demand.

The interests of farm animals, who are classified in law as ‘livestock’ or property, have been largely disregarded in this relentless pursuit for profit. Many Australians still subscribe to the iconic image of a rustic farmhouse dotted with pigs wallowing in mud, happy chickens scratching in a sheltered yard and a few cows watching on lazily in knee high yellow grass. However, in reality, Old MacDonald’s farm has long been consigned to the dustbin of history. The bulk of animals raised in Australia today are suffering behind closed doors in large industrial facilities known as factory farms.

Most animals in factory farms live a life of confinement. They spend their time crammed into cages, sheds or feedlots and they never see the sun. Take, for example, the breeding pigs (sows), numbering about 300,000.^[3] These intelligent, emotionally complex beings spend the bulk of their reproductive lives in stalls so small they cannot turn around.^[4] The sole purpose of their existence, as determined by us, is to produce the five million pigs slaughtered every year to fill the mouths of our pork, ham and bacon lovers.^[5]

In case you thought it was merely the pigs that Lady Justice forgot, spare a thought for our nation’s 10 million caged layer hens, also known as battery hens, lawfully allocated a space so small they can barely preen or stretch their wings.^[6] Or the 470 million broilers (meat chickens), crammed into sheds with tens of thousands of others – ‘hormone-free’, but selectively bred to be fast-tracked from nest to nugget in a mere 35 days.^[7] Australia ’s consumption of chicken meat has increased 600% over the past 40 years, with the average Australian now eating 36kg each year.^[8]  

Our nation continues pumping farm animals along the ‘invisible’ factory farm assembly line faster than ever. We are mutilating baby animals without pain relief – the tails and teeth of piglets, the beaks of chicks, the horns of calves and the tails of lambs^[9] – because it’s practical, cheap and lawful do so. Our regulatory environment is specifically designed to sanction and subsidise factory farming operations on the proviso that ‘no unnecessary suffering’ is caused.^[10]

This is an edited excerpt from Katrina Sharman’s contribution to the Australian Law Reform Commission’s ‘Reform’ Magazine, vol91, November 2007. In a landmark development for animal law, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) recently raised the possibility of animal rights becoming the next great social justice movement. The announcement was made at the launch of the Summer 2007/08 issue of the ALRC’s ‘Reform’ journal, which was dedicated to Animal Law. Due to the strong public interest in this particular edition of Reform, the ALRC has made all articles available online. You can read Katrina Sharman’s entire article “Lifting the veil of secrecy on animal-derived food products” and others here.

Learn more about the factory farming of pigs and battery hens.

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