By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
WEST Australian livestock and transport industry people will run a protest convoy of trucks that is expected to severely disrupt traffic in Perth today, March 28th.
The protest is part of the Keep the Sheep grassroots movement that aims to take action against the Albanese Government’s ban on live sheep exports that comes into effect on May 1, 2028.
But the protest organisers say a few hours of disruption to Perth peoples’ workday is nothing compared with the devastation that the ban on the live-sheep export industry will have on WA farming families and their communities.
“More than that, it will have consequences that will hurt truckies, stock agents, shearers and sporting clubs in WA towns like Kojonup, Wagin and Kulin,” protest organisers point out.
“The nations that buy our sheep overseas are concerned about the ban. They trade with Australia for our high quality and superior sheep.
“The ban won’t create demand for chilled or boxed meat, it will simply push the trade to countries with far lower animal welfare standards.”
So, the “moral argument” of the Federal Government and groups like Animals Australia and PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) is that banning live sheep exports stops a major source of animal cruelty.
There’s no argument that industrial-scale shipping and killing of animals is not a pretty business. It produces huge amounts of excrement during transport and blood and guts during the killing process.
Animal liberationists also object to the fact that Moslems slit the throats of live animals. Well, Australian sheep farmers, most of whom are not Moslem, have been doing the same for as long as they have been killing animals for personal consumption.
Incidentally, the killing of animals for food was first given moral sanction in Genesis 9:3: “Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.”
Slaughtering of sheep by throat cutting goes back a very long way and the custom and moral teaching among the Hebrews, long before the Moslems, was that blood should be drained from the meat before it is cooked and consumed.
The Hebrew laws for rightly handling blood originated in Genesis 9:4–6: “But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”
The passage context is where God first allows Noah and his descendants to eat animal flesh, while still forbidding them to eat blood, highlighting the fact that the animal’s blood is its life.
This same teaching was later codified for Israel in Leviticus 17:10–16, where God explicitly prohibits the eating of blood. The reason for this command is in Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.”
So the Old Testament moral teaching is that the blood of both humans and animals is sacred because it represents, and literally gives life. So in obedience to Mosaic and Levitical law, animals were sacrificed daily and their blood sprinkled on the temple altar to atone for the sins of the Israelites.
But even before the giving of the Law of Moses, the Hebrews in Egypt were commanded by God to kill lambs and sprinkle their blood over the doorposts and lintels of their homes. They were also commanded to roast and eat the lamb. “They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts.” (Exodus 12: 8-9)
So that was Old Testament, what about the New Testament? Aside from the orthodox teaching that Christ is the embodiment of “the sacrificial lamb” there were some brief moral/ethical instructions about meat eating in the New Testament.
The daily animal sacrifices ended in AD70 with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple but before that the first Christians and the Hebrew Christian converts in particular, had to grapple with the meat-eating issue, which was prominent in the minds of the Hebrews but not the Gentiles.
The Apostles discussed the issue and James made the following recommendation as recorded in the Book of Acts (15:19-20) “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not cause trouble for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write and tell them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.”
St Paul later followed up on this advice in 1st Corinthians 8 by noting that while believers were free to eat meat and that idols essentially meant nothing, they needed to be sensitive to the other Hebrew believers who struggled with the issue. “Be careful, however, that your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak,” he wrote.
So any alleged “moral case” against the killing and eating of meat, such as those beliefs of animal liberationists against livestock farming and the meat industry are on very shaky grounds. They have to deny some 4000 years of biblical teaching on the subject.
They also place themselves in the position of enforcers of some allegedly new, more enlightened moral code, not realising that the apostles themselves warned against false teachers who “prohibit marriage and require abstinence from certain foods that God has created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.” (ITimothy 4)
In fact is that the anti-meat industry lobby is essentially pushing a new moral code for a so-called new world order based on the new holy commandment of Net Zero Emissions under the “new covenant” of Agenda 2030.
The new god is nature (or Gaia Mother Earth) and livestock and farmers are somehow portrayed as enemies of the environment. The alleged solution? East insect protein and “liberate” the “fragile landscape” from the hooves of cattle and sheep and the atmosphere from their methane emissions.
This same lobby will tell you that they are on a great humanitarian mission to “save the planet” and “the science” is, of course, guiding them. The religious undertones are obvious, despite the appeal to science – or is it “scientism”?
The only sound moral case the anti-sheep export lobby has is that the animals not be treated cruelly. This has undoubtedly happened in the earlier days of live sheep exporting, but is something that has been addressed. It is essentially a matter of improving technology.
The only other valid argument, which is one of economics, is whether it is better for farmers to have all the sheep killed in Australia and the meat shipped to markets like the Middle East.
