No farmers want to see animals suffer

Congratulations, Anneka Carlson, for all your support after Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor announced live cattle export to China will be banned from 2023.

Also for the 12,000 people who signed the petition. You have signed a death warrant for an extra 100,000 cattle per year. These cattle are sent for breeding, not slaughter.

A big percentage of those cattle will now be bobby calves and have very little value. Farmers cannot run an extra 100,000 cattle on farms in NZ. These cattle are surplus, not all our best animals.

China buys beef heifers and unrecorded dairy heifers. Most are not in calf. A lot of these cattle will not be reared from 4-day-old calves. You have also helped devalue heifers by $500-$600 per head.

People will now lose jobs – calf rearers, farm quarantine staff, feed suppliers, including farmers who grow hay and silage for livestock shipments, contractors who make hay and silage, truck and tractor drivers.

There has been too much emphasis on the Gulf Livestock 1 and the 5867 cattle on board. As one commentator put it (the images of bloated, dead cows floating in a turquoise sea are desperately sad) what about the crew, including two New Zealanders? One, Lochie Bellerby, was a good friend of a member of our family and has stayed with us in Whangamomona. This was a tragic accident.

No farmers want to see animals suffer and we feed our animals as much as we can 12 months of the year, rain, hail and sun. Ninety-five per cent of animals end up in the food chain. The rest die on the farm – bloat, grass staggers, nitrate poison, tutu poison, gravity poison and drowning to name a few.

Next time there is a protest at the port, invite a few farmers as well.

John Herlihy,

Whangamomona