Everyone has seen footage of Ingham and other flooded areas on the east coast. But just as happened in 1974, flooding in remote areas is being relatively overlooked. Very little of this devastation has appeared in the media and they are receiving next-to-no government assistance.
Until John Nelson sent photographs to media organisations in early February, there were no photographs published that illustrated the plight of animals, other than John Andersen’s Townsville Bulletin images of wallabies destined to drown, near Normanton. John’s images of dead and doomed cattle on his Cowan Downs station, on the Cloncurry River, are located on the ABC website.
John Andersen’s photographs of native wildlife and John Nelson’s of domestic wildlife are heartbreaking. Anyone seeing these images, who has a heart, must feel compelled to sit down and think about any way that these animals can be helped (which is admittedly not a task that would be simple nor cheap).
The DPI has said no fodder drops will be forthcoming. Other pastoralists have pointed out that fodder drops were made in the devastating central Queensland flood a couple of years ago. I remember Caribous dropping massive amounts of hay out their back doors during the central New South Wales floods of 1990. So can anyone explain why suddenly it’s not possible to drop fodder to stock doomed to starve on their tiny islands? It seems like a perfect example of ‘the further you are from parliament, the less you see of your taxes’.
And can anyone explain why there is disgustingly deafening silence from animal welfare & animal ‘rights’ organisations, who are so rabidly noisy about everything else from ‘protecting’ pampered professional rodeo stock to banning mulesing so that sheep are instead eaten alive by maggots? Vast numbers of cattle are doomed to starvation and I haven’t heard a single squeak from the RSPCA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Act Now, Animal Liberation, Voiceless, Animals Australia – and the plethora of other do-gooder, fairyland mobs, who are under the illusion that if they don’t eat meat, their existence in no way impacts negatively on the planet’s animals. (A quick poke around the internet reveals more of these groups springing up every day than you can shake a stick at; obviously they’re not big on unity. I guess some eat boiled eggs and others only eat pavlovas.) But of course, they’re all at home with their leather sandals up on the wool tapestry lounge in Paddington and the suburban Richmonds, reading their Australian newspaper that used to be a tree housing a possum family and numerous other native animals, whilst patting their fat cats that have been out all night raiding bird nests (that’s ok, because they were probably only Indian mynah birds, sparrows, starlings or blackbirds – the only birds that can survive in the cement-and-imported-vegetation deserts). Later on they’ll be off down the street in their fossil-fuel burning conveyance for a soy-milk latte with their jelly-bean eating mates, with a quick stop in at their local market for some organic feel-smug produce, before heading to the theatre for a bit of superior culture.
This disaster, and the lack of attention paid by so-called animal welfare and animal rights organisations, is the very best example of their hypocrisy that I’ve seen.