I have an article in Online Opinion at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7007
It discusses Australians relationships with animals. A segment thus:
'Australia, from all the evidence, is at war with its animals. It is an unceasing slaughter unprecedented anywhere else and it continues with public support and participation. It is no exaggeration to say that most interactions between Australians and animals that share the land, including domesticated animals, involves some violence or ends with an animal being killed and/or eaten.'
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Vegetarian Festival Phuket
Came across this website for a Vegetarian Festival in Phuket. From the website:
"The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is an annual event held during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar. It is believed that the vegetarian festival and its accompanying sacred rituals bestow good fortune upon those who religiously observe this rite. During this time, local residents of Chinese ancestry strictly observe a 10-day vegetarian or vegan diet for the purposes of spiritual cleansing and merit-making. Sacred rituals are performed at various Chinese shrines and temples and aesthetic displays such as walking barefooted over hot coals and ascending ladders with bladed rungs are performed by entranced devotees known as "Ma Song"."
It is interesting that so many cultures seem to have periods when eating meat is given up for religious reasons.
"The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is an annual event held during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar. It is believed that the vegetarian festival and its accompanying sacred rituals bestow good fortune upon those who religiously observe this rite. During this time, local residents of Chinese ancestry strictly observe a 10-day vegetarian or vegan diet for the purposes of spiritual cleansing and merit-making. Sacred rituals are performed at various Chinese shrines and temples and aesthetic displays such as walking barefooted over hot coals and ascending ladders with bladed rungs are performed by entranced devotees known as "Ma Song"."
It is interesting that so many cultures seem to have periods when eating meat is given up for religious reasons.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Against Live Exports
A new international coalition has been formed to fight Live Exports. Australia is represented as it should be - seeing as it conducts the largest amount of exports, mainly of sheep to the Middle East. The Australian website is at http://www.handlewithcare.org.au/, the international one at http://www.handlewithcare.tv/.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Vale Harrison Bryan
Sad news today that Harrison Bryan a former director general of the National Library of Australia has died. When I was working for a time in Manuscripts I arranged his papers. He was an amazingly productive man and an incredibly dedicated Librarian, so impressed was I that I wrote an appreciation of him.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Ladybird book of danger
Published in 1970 it is full of wonderful illustrations of brave men doing dangerous things like defusing bombs. Wouldn't be allowed now of course.
Reprint of an article of mine from a couple of years back
I have been meaning to update the below article and so have been trying to get some statistics on abattoir workers propensity to violence. Unfortunately, the gathering of statistics for those convicted of violent crimes does not cover professions very well. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, the police and prisons only record professions at a basic level, such as Manager etc. and not to the level say of abattoir worker. One could look at the crime statistics around country towns that have abattoirs and those that don't, but this would not convincingly prove the case I don't think. Many violent criminals work in abattoirs but then move on elsewhere to commit their crimes. That very frequent animal torturer David Hicks being just one example.
On another note I was reading an article that posited that abattoir workers should be drug tested, but this wasn't thought a good idea as the majority of workers would fail the test. Abattoir workers are generally prone to having drug and alcohol problems, not because of the work that they do, but because abattoirs are the only places these sorts of people can keep a job.
Murderers in the slaughterhouse
It has long been said by Vegetarians that anyone involved in the animal slaughter industry will eventually become demeaned and diminished by it. Vegetarians of course would say that. But even so, so abhorrent to the general population is what goes on in our slaughterhouses that over a hundred and fifty years ago legislation was first introduced in Australia to get them located outside of residential and urban areas so that the public would not have to see, hear or smell what goes on in them. Nonetheless society, which demands meat, gives some people the unenviable task of working in these hidden places.
Historically, meat has always been a contentious food. All major religions have prescribed some form of meat, or set aside some period of time in which it should not be eaten and those which call for an ascetic devotion have members who abstain completely from meat. Meat can be seen therefore as always having been in some way ungodly and unclean.
This however has not stopped meat being one of the most popular food choices, especially with Australian consumers. But to get that meat to the table in its accepted form, which is as divorced from its source as possible, someone somewhere has to kill and cut into a fellow living creature.
In the past it was taken for granted that cruelty to animals would inevitably and automatically lead to the preponderance of cruelty to humans and consequently human suffering. Eminent thinkers and religious leaders such as St Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, William Booth and Jean Jacques Rousseau held and promoted this view. The philosopher John Locke said in 1693
'the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own.'
In many cultures and faiths slaughterers and butchers have been considered as men both socially and morally apart. In Judaism which has its own dietary law (the Kashrut) a traditional slaughterer (shochet) would specifically be required to be a man of training and strong piety so that he would not become tainted by his work, and if such a man could not be found in a given community, then slaughter would be left for the local Rabbi to perform. In this way the community was protected both from non-kosher meat and a possibly morally damaged individual.
So prominent was the view that butchers were tempted into moral degradation by their work that in 17th and 18th c Britain it was customary to exclude butchers from serving on juries as their profession would apparently 'harden their hearts toward men'
In Australia, butchers and slaughtermen have long been known for their propensity for violence. As early as 1886 the Australian Vegetarian Society in its manifesto noted that:
The use of animal food keeps up amongst us a class of men who have, of necessity, to follow a cruel trade; and it is a wrong thing to have such a class, just as it is a wrong thing to have a class of slaves, and could only be justified by there being an absolute necessity for using slaughtered meat as food. Vegetarians sympathise very much with those whom circumstances compel to follow the calling of slaughtermen, and their anxious desire is to educate society so that this class shall be emancipated from their present objectionable occupation.
Today the average person would not even consider visiting an abattoir - so what then are those who work - day in, day out - in them like.
Recent researches on abattoir workers reactions to the job of slaughtering have found that the employees fall into three broad groups. (1) those who quickly leave the industry, because they cannot stomach it; (2) those who are initially emotionally challenged by the work, but who quickly develop a mechanistic and unemotional approach which neither registers animal pain, nor seeks pleasure in it, these are by far the majority; and (3) those who enjoy the work and seek to maximise the opportunities for domination and the infliction of pain.
This last group, though small, who enjoy killing and producing pain reactions and who get a sense of power from it, are also seemingly prone to want to develop those destructive urges in their human relationships. The annals of crime have many clues as to the extent of damage to society that this last group of slaughterers does. Since recorded history it has been noticed that, a higher than average number of butchers and slaughterhouse workers have been involved in murder and other serious violent crimes. Admittedly, however, part of the reason is that abattoir workers are generally both physically strong and are capable with knives and other killing equipment, and so are automatically liable to be more successful in causing harm, than the general population, when engaged in any attempted violent act.
Most recently in Australia, the connection between human and other animal slaughter has been made abundantly clear. Not just by the number of murders committed by current or former abattoir workers, but also by the nature of the crimes. Invariably these crimes involve treating humans in the same way as other animals, as indicated first by the use of tools and skills learnt in abattoirs to kill, and also by the frequent use of body parts after murder in food preparation.
The behaviour of the psychopathic killers in the Snowtown mass murders that horrified the nation came as no surprise to those who know about and oppose what happens daily to non-human animals in abattoirs. John Bunting the leader of the murderous gang and now famously Australia's worst serial killer knew all about killing for he too formerly worked in an abattoir. In 2004, he was convicted of the murder of eleven people and recently it has been revealed that he also cooked and ate his last victim.
Bunting however is not the only Australian abattoir worker to be convicted in recent years of murder. Of the very few people in Australian prisons whose crimes have been so reprehensible that they have been given a life sentence without the possibility of parole, there are a number of other former abattoir workers.
Richard Leonard who killed small animals as a child progressed to killing large ones for a living when he too went to work in a slaughterhouse. No surprise therefore that in 1994 he also went on to kill people and store their body parts in his fridge.
In 2000, Katherine Knight Australia's most notorious female killer did to her partner John Price what she was trained to do in an Aberdeen, NSW abattoir. According to reports, Knight, loved her work in the slaughterhouse and was extremely proud of her cutting skills. So wrapped up in her grisly work was Knight that she has since been diagnosed as someone who receives sexual pleasure from the act of stabbing. Knight had sex with Price then stabbed him 37 times, before skinning and cooking him.
That she was so inured to blood and horror that she treated her partner in the same way she would any other piece of meat shows the level of degradation that this debasing work can have on people.
In November 2000, Raymond Akhtar Ali a goat killer by profession was convicted of murdering his own newborn daughter Chahleen at his Logan Village property, south of Brisbane. Using the his work implements he cut up his daughter in exactly the same way as he would a goat, leading the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper to aptly state in their headline 'Baby slaughtered like female goat.'
During the latter part of 2005 and into 2006 (and still is in 2008) former Dubbo, NSW abattoir worker Malcolm John Naden has been on the run from police suspected of murdering two women.
And then of course there is David Hicks the Australian Taliban supporter who spent his youth killing animals for pleasure and then later for profit in an abattoir, before going off on his military adventures overseas.
Unsurprisingly, given the work involved, in recent years owners have had problems attracting employees to work in their abattoirs. This problem was solved for them in some part by the recent influx of asylum seekers during 2000-2003. Many of these asylum seekers were low skilled, had limited English and little other work prospects and so were only too happy to fill the places vacated by Australian workers. So that in workplaces such as the Fletcher Abattoir in Albany, W.A. and the Burrangong Abattoir in Young, NSW, asylum seekers have become the majority of workers.
Although asylum seekers have only been working in Australian abattoirs for only a relatively short time already Mohammed Mustaf Mohammed, a Somalian refugee has been found guilty of killing Peter Murphy a 50 year old father of three and seriously injuring two other fellow workers in the Ovens River, Vic. abattoir.
Therefore, the list of crimes grows. These then are just the most notable in the last few years in Australia alone. Throughout history and in every society where animals are slaughtered can be found many, many more examples.
In the United States and elsewhere criminologists and law enforcement officers who have studied the strong correlation between cruelty to animals and to humans, now see any conviction for animal mistreatment as a trigger to investigate other acts of violence against humans, especially spousal or child abuse. Conversely however no such linkage is made between those who spend all day causing animal cruelty in slaughterhouses and their behaviour when they go home. Considering the seeming propensity for psychopaths to become abattoir workers or for the nominally sane to become psychologically damaged by working in an abattoir, it begs the question as to whether it is now time for the academic and criminology community, rather than the Vegetarian community, to respond to the question with learned research.
Alternatively of course, we as a society could ask the authorities to restrict periods of employment, increase automation or other such mediatory responses. We could agitate for the government to legislate to close down all abattoirs, or we as individuals could act independently as boycotting consumers to bring about the same purpose.
Closing down abattoirs however, would inevitably make meat unavailable to the urban consumer. Though as the Sydney Theosophist Charles Leadbeater put it in his book Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913) there is just moral cause
"Would the delicate ladies who devour sanguinary beef-steaks like to see their sons working as slaughtermen. If not, then they have no right to put this task upon some other woman's son. … for in eating this horrible food we are making a demand that some one shall brutalise himself, that some one shall degrade himself below the level of humanity."
As it is we have abattoirs which are situated in country areas where industry and jobs are scarce and so locals are often economically compelled to work there. The people who end up doing this work are then inevitably the rural poor, those who lack other opportunities and who invariably have very low levels of education and literacy.
But even though slaughterhouses are deliberately located where there are no other avenues for work or improvement, these places still cannot recruit enough local staff, and so - refugees - the most disadvantaged and marginalised in our society are found to replace them.
In this way the weakest amongst us are forced to do the most degrading and immoral work for us. The people who have the least resources – financial, social and educational end up doing what we have the luxury of choice to avoid.
It is therefore a valid moral question, whether we as a society and as individual consumers are prepared to continue to make others do this work for us, or shall we allow it only as long as the work involved and the damage it does continues to remain hidden.
On another note I was reading an article that posited that abattoir workers should be drug tested, but this wasn't thought a good idea as the majority of workers would fail the test. Abattoir workers are generally prone to having drug and alcohol problems, not because of the work that they do, but because abattoirs are the only places these sorts of people can keep a job.
Murderers in the slaughterhouse
It has long been said by Vegetarians that anyone involved in the animal slaughter industry will eventually become demeaned and diminished by it. Vegetarians of course would say that. But even so, so abhorrent to the general population is what goes on in our slaughterhouses that over a hundred and fifty years ago legislation was first introduced in Australia to get them located outside of residential and urban areas so that the public would not have to see, hear or smell what goes on in them. Nonetheless society, which demands meat, gives some people the unenviable task of working in these hidden places.
Historically, meat has always been a contentious food. All major religions have prescribed some form of meat, or set aside some period of time in which it should not be eaten and those which call for an ascetic devotion have members who abstain completely from meat. Meat can be seen therefore as always having been in some way ungodly and unclean.
This however has not stopped meat being one of the most popular food choices, especially with Australian consumers. But to get that meat to the table in its accepted form, which is as divorced from its source as possible, someone somewhere has to kill and cut into a fellow living creature.
In the past it was taken for granted that cruelty to animals would inevitably and automatically lead to the preponderance of cruelty to humans and consequently human suffering. Eminent thinkers and religious leaders such as St Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, William Booth and Jean Jacques Rousseau held and promoted this view. The philosopher John Locke said in 1693
'the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own.'
In many cultures and faiths slaughterers and butchers have been considered as men both socially and morally apart. In Judaism which has its own dietary law (the Kashrut) a traditional slaughterer (shochet) would specifically be required to be a man of training and strong piety so that he would not become tainted by his work, and if such a man could not be found in a given community, then slaughter would be left for the local Rabbi to perform. In this way the community was protected both from non-kosher meat and a possibly morally damaged individual.
So prominent was the view that butchers were tempted into moral degradation by their work that in 17th and 18th c Britain it was customary to exclude butchers from serving on juries as their profession would apparently 'harden their hearts toward men'
In Australia, butchers and slaughtermen have long been known for their propensity for violence. As early as 1886 the Australian Vegetarian Society in its manifesto noted that:
The use of animal food keeps up amongst us a class of men who have, of necessity, to follow a cruel trade; and it is a wrong thing to have such a class, just as it is a wrong thing to have a class of slaves, and could only be justified by there being an absolute necessity for using slaughtered meat as food. Vegetarians sympathise very much with those whom circumstances compel to follow the calling of slaughtermen, and their anxious desire is to educate society so that this class shall be emancipated from their present objectionable occupation.
Today the average person would not even consider visiting an abattoir - so what then are those who work - day in, day out - in them like.
Recent researches on abattoir workers reactions to the job of slaughtering have found that the employees fall into three broad groups. (1) those who quickly leave the industry, because they cannot stomach it; (2) those who are initially emotionally challenged by the work, but who quickly develop a mechanistic and unemotional approach which neither registers animal pain, nor seeks pleasure in it, these are by far the majority; and (3) those who enjoy the work and seek to maximise the opportunities for domination and the infliction of pain.
This last group, though small, who enjoy killing and producing pain reactions and who get a sense of power from it, are also seemingly prone to want to develop those destructive urges in their human relationships. The annals of crime have many clues as to the extent of damage to society that this last group of slaughterers does. Since recorded history it has been noticed that, a higher than average number of butchers and slaughterhouse workers have been involved in murder and other serious violent crimes. Admittedly, however, part of the reason is that abattoir workers are generally both physically strong and are capable with knives and other killing equipment, and so are automatically liable to be more successful in causing harm, than the general population, when engaged in any attempted violent act.
Most recently in Australia, the connection between human and other animal slaughter has been made abundantly clear. Not just by the number of murders committed by current or former abattoir workers, but also by the nature of the crimes. Invariably these crimes involve treating humans in the same way as other animals, as indicated first by the use of tools and skills learnt in abattoirs to kill, and also by the frequent use of body parts after murder in food preparation.
The behaviour of the psychopathic killers in the Snowtown mass murders that horrified the nation came as no surprise to those who know about and oppose what happens daily to non-human animals in abattoirs. John Bunting the leader of the murderous gang and now famously Australia's worst serial killer knew all about killing for he too formerly worked in an abattoir. In 2004, he was convicted of the murder of eleven people and recently it has been revealed that he also cooked and ate his last victim.
Bunting however is not the only Australian abattoir worker to be convicted in recent years of murder. Of the very few people in Australian prisons whose crimes have been so reprehensible that they have been given a life sentence without the possibility of parole, there are a number of other former abattoir workers.
Richard Leonard who killed small animals as a child progressed to killing large ones for a living when he too went to work in a slaughterhouse. No surprise therefore that in 1994 he also went on to kill people and store their body parts in his fridge.
In 2000, Katherine Knight Australia's most notorious female killer did to her partner John Price what she was trained to do in an Aberdeen, NSW abattoir. According to reports, Knight, loved her work in the slaughterhouse and was extremely proud of her cutting skills. So wrapped up in her grisly work was Knight that she has since been diagnosed as someone who receives sexual pleasure from the act of stabbing. Knight had sex with Price then stabbed him 37 times, before skinning and cooking him.
That she was so inured to blood and horror that she treated her partner in the same way she would any other piece of meat shows the level of degradation that this debasing work can have on people.
In November 2000, Raymond Akhtar Ali a goat killer by profession was convicted of murdering his own newborn daughter Chahleen at his Logan Village property, south of Brisbane. Using the his work implements he cut up his daughter in exactly the same way as he would a goat, leading the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper to aptly state in their headline 'Baby slaughtered like female goat.'
During the latter part of 2005 and into 2006 (and still is in 2008) former Dubbo, NSW abattoir worker Malcolm John Naden has been on the run from police suspected of murdering two women.
And then of course there is David Hicks the Australian Taliban supporter who spent his youth killing animals for pleasure and then later for profit in an abattoir, before going off on his military adventures overseas.
Unsurprisingly, given the work involved, in recent years owners have had problems attracting employees to work in their abattoirs. This problem was solved for them in some part by the recent influx of asylum seekers during 2000-2003. Many of these asylum seekers were low skilled, had limited English and little other work prospects and so were only too happy to fill the places vacated by Australian workers. So that in workplaces such as the Fletcher Abattoir in Albany, W.A. and the Burrangong Abattoir in Young, NSW, asylum seekers have become the majority of workers.
Although asylum seekers have only been working in Australian abattoirs for only a relatively short time already Mohammed Mustaf Mohammed, a Somalian refugee has been found guilty of killing Peter Murphy a 50 year old father of three and seriously injuring two other fellow workers in the Ovens River, Vic. abattoir.
Therefore, the list of crimes grows. These then are just the most notable in the last few years in Australia alone. Throughout history and in every society where animals are slaughtered can be found many, many more examples.
In the United States and elsewhere criminologists and law enforcement officers who have studied the strong correlation between cruelty to animals and to humans, now see any conviction for animal mistreatment as a trigger to investigate other acts of violence against humans, especially spousal or child abuse. Conversely however no such linkage is made between those who spend all day causing animal cruelty in slaughterhouses and their behaviour when they go home. Considering the seeming propensity for psychopaths to become abattoir workers or for the nominally sane to become psychologically damaged by working in an abattoir, it begs the question as to whether it is now time for the academic and criminology community, rather than the Vegetarian community, to respond to the question with learned research.
Alternatively of course, we as a society could ask the authorities to restrict periods of employment, increase automation or other such mediatory responses. We could agitate for the government to legislate to close down all abattoirs, or we as individuals could act independently as boycotting consumers to bring about the same purpose.
Closing down abattoirs however, would inevitably make meat unavailable to the urban consumer. Though as the Sydney Theosophist Charles Leadbeater put it in his book Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913) there is just moral cause
"Would the delicate ladies who devour sanguinary beef-steaks like to see their sons working as slaughtermen. If not, then they have no right to put this task upon some other woman's son. … for in eating this horrible food we are making a demand that some one shall brutalise himself, that some one shall degrade himself below the level of humanity."
As it is we have abattoirs which are situated in country areas where industry and jobs are scarce and so locals are often economically compelled to work there. The people who end up doing this work are then inevitably the rural poor, those who lack other opportunities and who invariably have very low levels of education and literacy.
But even though slaughterhouses are deliberately located where there are no other avenues for work or improvement, these places still cannot recruit enough local staff, and so - refugees - the most disadvantaged and marginalised in our society are found to replace them.
In this way the weakest amongst us are forced to do the most degrading and immoral work for us. The people who have the least resources – financial, social and educational end up doing what we have the luxury of choice to avoid.
It is therefore a valid moral question, whether we as a society and as individual consumers are prepared to continue to make others do this work for us, or shall we allow it only as long as the work involved and the damage it does continues to remain hidden.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Where the Wild Things Are
A movie of the book is apparently being shot in Australia (http://www.wtwta.net). The screenplay is by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggars, so it should be good.
This was one of my favourite books as a child, not being able to afford a copy, I read it whenever I could in the East Finchley Public Library.
Pretty much all of East Finchley has changed from when I first lived there but the Library remains the same. I visit it whenever i am back in the UK and am always delighted to find that it has retained its lovely smell of books and wood polish. One of the reasons I became a librarian is due to my affection for this place.
This was one of my favourite books as a child, not being able to afford a copy, I read it whenever I could in the East Finchley Public Library.
Pretty much all of East Finchley has changed from when I first lived there but the Library remains the same. I visit it whenever i am back in the UK and am always delighted to find that it has retained its lovely smell of books and wood polish. One of the reasons I became a librarian is due to my affection for this place.
A Sacred Duty documentary
A Sacred duty, a new documentary from the Jewish Vegetarians of North America (http://jewishveg.blogspot.com). Lasts 60 minutes.
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