Protesters at Tas Quality Meats and TasFarmers response | The Examiner | January 16, 2023
Protesters from Animal Liberation Tas and Farm Transparency project are encamped at Tas Quality Meats hoping to keep the spotlight on their practices of animal slaughter and Ian Sauer from TasFarmers responds. Video Rod Thompson
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NewsTranscript
00:00 We got here at 8.30 this morning.
00:09 You want to be prepared just in case trucks come through early.
00:13 They normally slaughter throughout the morning here, so all morning there's been sheep being
00:18 killed in the pens behind us here.
00:22 The trucks may come through after 1pm so they can replenish the pens and start again tomorrow
00:27 morning but at this stage we're not entirely sure.
00:30 If they hold off the trucks because we're here then that will cause disruption to their
00:36 schedule which costs money so then that's a win on our part.
00:43 And if the trucks do come through and we are able to stop them for just two minutes or
00:47 so then we can tell the stories of the individual animals on there and really connect the TQM
00:53 story as it is with the community on an individual level.
00:58 So the public response has been really heartening, seeing the public really get behind expressing
01:04 their disgust and dismay over what happened here which was beyond standard slaughter procedure,
01:09 it was egregious cruelty.
01:13 The government response has been what the government response always is, they always
01:16 promise that they'll establish this and that and something else and it never actually goes
01:20 anywhere.
01:21 So we'll wait and see what happens on a more legislative level but by coming out here today
01:27 we're reminding the community of what happened here at TQM and what we are continuing to
01:33 fight against.
01:34 Back then, 2016, and we saw workers beating sheep and calves and it's not being done properly,
01:42 just pretty awful treatment and we put in a formal complaint at the time and we heard
01:47 very similar things to what we're hearing now, that there was going to be action taken,
01:50 that they were being investigated and nothing came of it, no charges were laid.
01:54 There is clearly systemic cruelty here, it's cruelty that the management of this slaughterhouse
02:00 would have been fully aware of, should have been fully aware of at the very least.
02:04 They've got cameras all over the place, everywhere we put in our hidden cameras there were already
02:09 the slaughterhouse's cameras pointing in those same areas so everything we captured the slaughterhouse
02:13 should have known about.
02:14 Oh look, TAS Farmers think it's a bit disappointing that there's a protest out there at the moment.
02:22 All that's going to do is affect the workers and the workers' families and the suppliers.
02:26 We don't think that's particularly helpful.
02:28 I mean at the moment the animal rights people identified a problem in our abattoirs, TAS
02:35 Farmers and the community agree that shouldn't be happening, it's abhorrent, we just won't
02:40 support that type of treatment.
02:42 The government very quickly set up a task force, that was done within the week, the
02:47 chair's been appointed to that, they've met twice, they're reporting back in March, I
02:51 mean this is lightning fast.
02:53 So TAS Farmers support the government in doing that and we think that the mature thing to
03:00 do is to wait until that report comes out from that group and then the whole community,
03:05 including the animal rights people and the farmers and everybody else can have input
03:09 into it.
03:10 So TAS Farmers has come out very, very early, well before Christmas and we said that we
03:13 want practical, measurable solutions and that's all to do with about changing the culture,
03:18 it's about having new equipment and machinery in there, it's about having training that's
03:22 appropriate and applicable.
03:24 We've called for CCTV footage with 12 months worth of data being kept that can be looked
03:31 and we want snap audits.
03:32 They're the types of things that will change what's happening in these abattoirs.
03:36 [BLANK_AUDIO]