Mayor and Councillors

City of Casey

PO Box 1000

Narre Warren 3805

 

September 18, 2007

 

Dear Mayor and Councillors,

 

Re: Proposed Battery Hen Factory outside Tooradin  (Planning Permit Application P709/06)

 

I am writing to you with further information in regards our objection (and over a hundred others) to the current battery hen factory proposal before you.  Copied in below for your reference is an article from yesterday's Meat and Poultry News website regarding an important new report issued by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation highlighting the potential threats of huge livestock concentrations to public health (entitled Industrial Livestock Production and Global Health Risk).

 

FAO's livestock policy expert J Otte states: "...excessive concentration of animals in large scale industrial production units should be avoided" And the FAO "stressed that production sites should not be built close to human settlements..."

 

The report identified the 'major global concern' of H5N1 avian influenza but also warned of the 'silent' circulation of IAV's (Influenza "A" Viruses) that are "now fairly widespread in commercial poultry". The report stated these silent virurses could also lead to a human influenza pandemic.

 

Our rescue teams have been inspecting intensive farms here in Victoria since 1993 and we have only seen the conditions get worse.  We have hundreds of hours of undercover footage to prove this.  Biosecurity is a joke, dead birds are left to rot in the cages with live birds trapped with them, sick birds are left to suffer, mice and wild birds are inside the sheds, the smell is overwhelming, the air is putrid, the birds are sickly and many have respiratory problems and they all have weakened immune systems from lack of sunshine, fresh air and exercise.  You need only ask yourself why the 'shelf life' of these birds is only one year, when in the wild they would live up to ten years.  The way these sentient animals are treated is unconscionable.

 

Also you may have seen the alarming ABC TV report last night about Australia's continuing drought, where some farmers had given up on this years crop and released their sheep into the field to eat the stunted short growth of the failed wheat crop. Wheat is a major part of the hen's diet.  The program warned that feed costs are set to soar as the drought continues.  I feed a small flock of ten rescued birds and the costs of feeding them has doubled over the past couple years, multiply this by the millions of birds on these environmentally destructive factory farms and you'll understand how economically unsound and unsustainable this type of farming is as well. It's so important that we all really start to consider the wide implications of our increasingly dwindling water supply. It's not just a matter of shorter showers and water restrictions in our gardens, the foods we choose to eat impact dramatically on our water use.

 

I appeal to you all to please consider all the negative ramifications of this proposal and to not allow such a cruel, wasteful and unhealthy development into your shire. Thank you very much for any consideration of these issues.

 

Sincerely yours, 

 

Patty Mark, President
Animal Liberation Victoria
PO Box 15
Elwood 3184 Australia
www.alv.org.au
www.openrescue.org

 

 

ATTACHMENT:

F.A.O. says livestock concentration a public health concern

Meat & Poultry, Keith Nunes, September 17, 2007

http://www.meatpoultry.com/news/daily_enews.asp?ArticleID=88151

Rome – Increased concern about the risk of disease transmission from animals to humans has prompted the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (F.A.O.) to issue a report highlighting the potential threats livestock concentration may pose to public health. "The risk of disease transmission from animals to humans will increase in the future due to human and livestock population growth, dynamic changes in livestock production, the emergence of worldwide agro-food networks and a significant increase in the mobility of people and goods," according to the F.A.O.’s report Industrial Livestock Production and Global Health Risk.

"There is no doubt that the world has to depend upon some of the technologies of intensive animal food production systems," said Joachim Otte, the F.A.O.’s livestock policy expert. "But excessive concentration of animals in large scale industrial production units should be avoided and adequate investments should be made in heightened biosecurity and improved disease monitoring to safeguard public health."

Pig and poultry production are the fastest growing and industrializing livestock sub-sectors, with annual production growth rates of 2.6% and 3.7% over the past decade, according to the report. As a consequence, in industrialized countries, the majority of chickens and turkeys are now produced in houses with 15,000 to 50,000 birds.

Industrial pig and poultry production also rely on significant movement of live animals.

In 2005, for example, nearly 25 million pigs, more than 2 million pigs per month, were traded internationally. The movement of animals and the concentration of thousands of confined animals increase the likelihood of transfer of pathogens. In addition, confined animal houses produce large amounts of waste, which may contain substantial quantities of pathogens. Much of this waste is disposed of on land without any treatment, posing an infection risk for wild mammals and birds.

The report’s authors note that while the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus of avian influenza is of major global concern, the "silent" circulation of influenza "A" viruses (I.A.V.s) in poultry and swine should also be closely monitored internationally. A number of I.A.V.s are now fairly widespread in commercial poultry and to a lesser extent in pigs and could also lead to emergence of a human influenza pandemic, the F.A.O. said.