The pictures of the mistreatment of live stock in Indonesia have stirred an almost unanimous disgust in Australia, but I do not doubt for one moment that those working in the noted abattoirs would have gone home after work turned on a television or radio and hugged their kids and spoke about the day with their wife.
Selective desensitisation is something we are all guilty of and you can think quickly of something you have remained selectively and purposely ambivalent about avoiding the deeper but obvious philosophical conundrum that just starts too many bush fires if you talk about it.
Why is it that a person can not empathise, or feels that there is no reason to empathise with another? Whether that is another person or an animal that has a lesser but present perception and understanding of its surroundings and circumstance; we believe that logic does not necessarily provide morality but emotion does and we are all endowed with that grace.
Why can a person not understand that a cruel and barbaric process is something that should be relegated to a less enlightened period but we instead confound our perceptions with callousness and a selection of lesser logic over morals to create a suite of self serving rights?
How much can we excuse the ambivalence of those who sit idly by in an environment of modern technology, the mobile phone, computers, flat screens in the same frame as a person torturing and tormenting for no purpose except anger, convenience, laziness or stupidity another which is alive with a brain that we maybe do not comprehend but we have the grace to empathise with.
So what do we do about this barbaric treatment of cattle in a selection of abattoirs in Indonesia and why do we, and we do, care so much. Surely they have cattle of their own that no doubt they kill them the same way so why do we not have such a focus on “our” cattle.
I imagine we see a perceived sense of connection to the event when our direct relationship in actual commercial ownership has past. Our connection is merely our knowledge of the action but that is more than enough in this instance to insist on immediate action. Can we really understand what the cattle are thinking, obviously not, but we go to a higher level and draw on the grace of empathy and that is powerful enough to drive our subsequent actions.
We demand that this cruelty has no excuse and we must do whatever is in our power for these animals because it is right, because it disturbs our humanity and lessens what we are if we do nothing. We do get a sense of communal security that the almost unanimous disgust is good cover and no one has to stick their head too far above the moral parapet. No doubt the drag to higher perception of cruelty is a noble cause and we should do what is in our power to guide others in that course.
Everybody acknowledges that those abattoirs, if they could even be called that, which were responsible for the inhumane treatment of cattle, should not be given the right to process Australian cattle.
It was quite evident however that there are abattoirs in Indonesia that do the right thing and a sweeping ban against the live export of cattle to Indonesia has punished the good and the bad. In fact it has taken a swipe against the Indonesians as a group. It will not achieve better animal husbandry it will merely antagonise our neighbour. If we want a genuine approach to better humane practices then we must remain engaged on terms that are encouraging discussion not intimidation.
Such a ban is a clumsy, broad brush approach which leaves Northern Australia without an industry, Indonesian abattoir workers from compliant abattoirs without a job, Indonesians on the street without beef and Indonesian protagonists against stronger bilateral relationships on human trafficking with real working political ammunition against us.
The question is posed that with more difficult issues closer to home where the friends are fewer and the consequences greater would our resolve that we rightly bestow on cattle in Indonesia, be there.