Senator Andrew Bartlett
Monday, July 18, 2005
 
Animal Stories
This blog hasn’t focused much lately on the ‘diary’ part of web diary. I’ve found myself writing what I think about issues without mentioning so much about what I’ve been doing. I’ll try to redress this imbalance a bit.

What I’ll be doing tonight is engaging in the highly political activity of watching television – something I do very little of these days apart from looking at a bit of football and bits and pieces of news.

Tonight’s Australian Story on ABC TV profiles Brian Sherman and his family. He is a migrant to Australia who has set up Voiceless, a fund for animals that assists with increasing public awareness of the conditions many animals live in and getting better laws and policies to protect them. This fund is relatively new but has enormous potential to significantly improve things for animals in the future and to make the public more aware of ways they can easily help reduce animal suffering. A lot of people make a lot of money out of animals and it is very important to have some funds available to help put the animals’ side of the story.

Just to stay on the animals theme, tonight's 4 Corners details the battle around Japan’s intention to increase the number of whales they kill each year. As I wrote last month, while I totally oppose whaling, I do wonder why people are (rightly) horrified by the slaughter of whales but don’t seem to have a problem with the slaughter of many other mammals on a much wider scale.

It might seem like a stretch to keep up the animal theme with tonight’s Enough Rope, which has interviews with East Timor President Xanana Gusmao and his wife Kirsty and with racing driver Peter Brock. However, it’s a chance for me to point out that Peter Brock has an interview from a few years ago on the Animal Liberation website talking about the reasons behind his being vegetarian/vegan for over ten years – not that I expect Andrew Denton to focus on this aspect of Peter Brock very much.

There are a few high profile Australian sportspeople who are vegetarian. Greg Chappell, former Australian cricket captain and recently appointed coach of India, is another who has been vegan for many years. While their diet is also driven by health factors, as Greg Chappell says even if you start for health reasons, “it is impossible to ignore the ethical and environmental aspects of our meat-eating culture.” All of this plays a role in slowly changing public attitudes and moving towards the goal which Brian Sherman and his Voiceless organisation are working towards. It happens to be a goal I share, so I thought I’d take the chance to give it a mention.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Monday, July 18, 2005 Permalink
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