Throughout, the animals in question have been referred to as 'Australian cows'. And yet the were exported to Indonesia, which I suppose means they were s-o-l-d. What is clearly a red-hot issue of discussion today across the ether has prompted me to ask a few questions:
i) Do cows have passports?
ii) Has the Australian embassy in Jakarta offered consular assistance to cows at risk in Indonesia?
iii) How many Australians have enjoyed a beef rendang in Bali?
iv) Would we care if the cows were Afghan, or would we assign their treatment to a third party nation state?
I suppose I am trying to make a point, and the point is twofold:
i) At present we seem a hell of a lot less interested in the treatment of the people we are planning to export to Malaysia who will have no meaningful legal or economic protection and no assurance of a future or outcome (although I suppose they are less 'Australian' than the cows in question), and:
ii) Perhaps we should stop lying to ourselves that the meat we eat is happy meat that has been killed in a humane way, and ponder that it is in fact a dead animal that has been specifically bred for us to panfry. Maybe we should stop obsessing about the means and accept that the end is the end, everyone who eats meat is complicit in this.
One answer for those up in arms - vegetarianism.
NB. I resisted giving this post a title that involved any 'beef' puns and it was hard.
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