Hello down there!
This is me giving you a shout out from atop my greenie, peace-loving, world-saving high horse. At least it feels like that. Because I’m about to post about another cause that is close to my heart and following straight on from my water-saving post, I don’t want to bombard you with guilt. But here goes anyway…
You may or may not have seen this ad that is currently running on free-to-air channels in Australia. It’s an awareness campaign to the prevalence of factory farming of pigs and chickens in Australia. It’s an important campaign, because the majority of pork and eggs sold in Coles and Woolworths in Australia come from factory farms. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
This campaign has been timed for the run-in to Christmas, when pork products are in such high demand, in the hope Australians will start making a stand with their purchasing power and not order their Christmas hams from places that support factory farms and will buy free range eggs. A story about Animals Australia ran on 60 Minutes last Sunday, which received more than one million viewers – the consequent donations they have received have allowed them to book further airtime that will take them up to Christmas.
Many issues of animal cruelty exist in Australia, but this is one that we have a large role in helping to stop. You can donate to causes such as Animal Australia’s but you can also make choices that will go a long way to changing the attitudes of large supermarket chains. If people aren’t buying the products, they have no reason to supply them. Find out if you have suppliers near you that don’t use factory farms and shop there. It’s not possible for everyone to make these changes all at once for different reasons, but you can research what you can do and start to make the adjustments.
Pigs are more intelligent than dogs, yet pigs farmed for meat are kept in cages they can’t even stand up in or turn around in. We wouldn’t do this to a dog, so why a pig? Simply because they’re going to be eaten? They still have a life for a period of time and that life doesn’t need to be spent in pain.
I’ll stop preaching now. If you want to make a donation you can do so on the Animals Australia website www.animalsaustralia.org. There are all different levels of donation to suit everyone and there’s a wealth of information about their causes.




And possibly the most exciting thing of all that has happened in the past week or so, not to me, but I’m still excited… My good friend Mat (Hootie to University of Canberra compatriots) was nominated for a Walkley Award for 