Southland sheep slaughter 'made the point’

Press, 12 June 1978, Page 1

Southland sheep slaughter ' made the point’

Friday’s public slaughter of sheep by Southland farmers will not be repeated, farmers say. Mr Owen Buckingham, a spokesman for the farmers involved, said yesterday from his farm at Te Anau that the intention had been “to shock the public.’’ . . “We had to do it,” he said. “We couldn’t get the public to the farms, and so we had to take the sheep to the public. “The next move should be more productive,” he said. ■ . _ Farmers might, as a last resort, load meat from the works on to railway wa geons themselves.

Southland farmers got nothing for the sheep they slaughtered on Friday and had taken to the abattoir, said Mr Buckingham. “The achievement was that we have now found that farmers will combine under drastic situations,” he said.

The protest slaughter in Invercargill was organised by farmers who knew one another beforehand, but Mr Buckingham denied that the plot had been hatched at meetings of Federated Farmers. Most of the farmers involved were members of Federated Farmers, but

they did not meet that way because most were from different branches. Federated Farmers maintains that the farmers went “too far,” but the protestors retort that Federated Farmers’ tactics in the past have had no effect on freezing workers. The protest might make Federated Farmers realise that it had let down its members, said Mr Buckingham. However, he said there were no plans to set up a new farmers’ organisation. He also criticised Federated Farmers’ proposal to retaliate against members of the Meat Workers’ Union by refusing to

employ them in the offseason on the farms. “The sort of meat workers who come on to the farms in the off-season are the ones we want to retain in the industry — not kick them off our farms,” said Mr Buckingham. Answering allegations of “barbaric” slaughtering, he said the stock involved was all old ewes, in poor condition with no teeth. “The alternative was for them to be kept on Southland farms with only hay and swedes. Their suffering would have been greater. “Or they could have been taken right to Christchurch, to the works

there, if the Drivers’ Union had allowed it. But then they would have had to suffer a long journey in a crowded stock crate.”

The actual slaughter was humanely done by competent farmers, many o f whom were former freezing workers. Mr Buckingham also hit back at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, accusing it of standing by in the past while stock were left in works yards or taken back to farms unslaughtered. “We would love their support, but we have never had it,” he said.

The protest slaughtering of sheep by Southland

farmers had been described by the national head of the S.P.C.A. (Mr N. E. Wells) as a “barbaric and irresponsible act.”

Mr Wells told the federation’s annual conference at Nelson on Sturday that many of the old ewes were in poor condition, yet had been walked to the outskirts of Invercargill, where the farmers cut their throats. “Is a barbaric and irresponsible act like this showing any compassion for animals, or are they merely being used as unfortunate pawns to score a political point?” asked Mr Wells.

Freezing workers are expected to let export meat out of works today as a compulsory conference on the back-pay dispute reconvenes in Wellington. Several works have closed in the face of union export bans and other restrictive practices to get back pay for contract workers dated back to a 1973 cost-of-living order. Their employers threatened to take them to the Arbitration Court to force them back to work, but the Court clash was defused in Christchurch on Thursday when the companies withdrew their injunction.