The disturbing footage filmed by ABC shows animals “kicked, thrashed and beaten, their throats hacked at, eyes gouged and tails broken.”
The documentary is scheduled to be aired on ABC1’s “Four Corners” tonight.
Activist group Animals Australia went to 11 randomly selected slaughterhouse in Indonesia and filmed the cruelty before providing the footage to ABC’s “Four Corners,” which then sent a team of its own to film the abuse.
Animals Australia spokeswoman Lyn White told ABC, “We had assumed that because there were greater levels of industry involvement in Indonesia, the treatment of the livestock would have been better.
“But we couldn’t have been more wrong.”
The Australian live export industry had suspended shipments to at least three slaughterhouses in Indonesia.
Cameron Hall, the chief executive of LiveCorp, the live export industry’s research and marketing organization, says the footage shows “unacceptable and unnecessary” practices.
“Cruelty is not an everyday occurrence in the Indonesian marketplace,” he claimed.
But Australia’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) wrote in a statement that the industry’s response was “predictable and completely unacceptable,” claiming that it only reacted once animal cruelty had been revealed.
