Alarm at animal welfare inaction

Mark Dawson, Editor of Wanganui Chronicle

How's your Sunday roast been the last couple of weekends?

Hopefully not pork with the Sunday current affairs television programme as dessert.

The TV expose of the squalid practices at some of our pig farms over the past two Sundays may well have turned the stomachs of pork eaters ... they have certainly caused indigestion at the Ministry of Primary Industries which bears responsibility for animal welfare.

Secretly-filmed footage of a pig being beaten with a hammer at a North Island farm, and the horrendous conditions at a Christchurch farm where rats run free, newborn piglets are squashed to death because of over-crowding and a dead carcass is left to rot suggest "animal welfare" is down the ministry's list of priorities.

It is alarming to learn that the Christchurch establishment was exposed by activists a year ago and only six months ago given a clean bill of health by the ministry. Now these shocking images ...

What is clear is that the ministry lacks either the resources, or the will, to monitor farms properly.

Chief executive Dean Baigent acknowledged that the level of compliance among farms reflected the level of investment in ministry investigators. That level of investment needs to be seriously increased so the monitoring system is robust and thorough.

And the ministry needs to look at itself. If its main aim is to boost the economic outcomes of agriculture, then is it the right body to champion animal welfare?

Of course, many will shrug their shoulders at all this - animals suffer, so what?

But treatment of animals - like treatment of the disabled - reflects how civilised a society we are.

If these things were done to humans there would be a global outcry.