Sentient Beings Part I

Firstly how anyone decides to fuel their body is up to them, its their choice and I encourage them in their free will to decide for themselves. All good.

 

Some will get offended by it sure does look like sectors of the Ban Live Export brigade are full on Vegan Cult Members. Its not so much about the trade as its about meat. Respect their view, defend their right to their view, but gotta say its more odd than a $3 note and makes a whole mess of no sense.

Coupla facts here.

India - biggest Vegetarian/Vegan nation in the world. Vegetarian/Vegans there said to be between 20 and 40% of the population. Biggest cause of death in India is heart disease. Average life expectancy is 66 years of age.

America - Big meat and junk food eater. Vegetarian/Vegans thought to be between 5 and 7% of the population. Biggest cause of death in the USA is heart disease. Average life expectancy 79 years of age.
Assess and decide whatever you like for yourself. One thing for sure, large percentage of the Vegan cult are animal rights/liberationists.

The main arguments against meat as food are...its not necessary, its unhealthy, its immoral or its wrong to remove the rights of other sentient beings.

1. Not Necessary - Ahh coffee shops aren't necessary, nor are art galleries, music festivals but we have them. Remove one supposed non essential, remove them all. We don't need buskers, artists, electric windows on cars, so shutting down un-necessary things is a total face plant. "Not Necessary" is not a valid reason at all. I think it needs dismissing completely
2. Its Unhealthy - Ahh wait might want to check the India vs USA facts above. There is no reason to be on a gluten free diet unless you're say a person with Celiac. There is no medical reason to change to veganism. Its just not necessary...and keeping in mind its not necessary the vegan does not have to cut meat out because to do so is "not necessary". Yep that's right veganism on a health level isn't necessary so they need to adhere to their own rules of engagement & stop veganism yeah ? REAL FACTS ARE, a healthy balanced diet with regular exercise is healthy, more so if you're not over eating. Some of the white noise from vegans including the UK Bus advert, infers that if you eat meat you'll be fat and overweight. However its possible to be avoid being fat, over weight and healthy on a good balanced diet with good regular exercise. Veganism is not the only answer. First vegan I met had bleeding gums, put me off. I think the "It's Unhealthy" needs dismissing completely too.
3. It's Immoral - Stop the vegan claimant dead in their tracks over this BS. Moral/Immoral implies straight away that a Moral Law has been broken. You cannot have a Moral Law without a Moral Lawgiver...end of story. Find out which God/diety it is they suggest we should all be operating under. Christian Scripture, that is Old Testament/New Testament, the Jewish Torah all allow the eating of meat no worries, so to does the Quran. So unless they know your religion better than you do and can prove your Immorality, well its a bluff and lie and a big old fat wheelbarrow full of lawn fertiliser. DO NOT BE FOOLED "Immoral" is not on the menu with or without meat. Seriously we can go deeper into this from a lot of other perspectives and the same result. Eating meat is neither Moral or Immoral. It is AMORAL. Here's where & how they'll try to take you to their "Moral Judgement" that condemns you, without actually using any religion or Moral Lawgiver to cite from. They'll tell you that Morals are innate within the human mind and shaped by society. Or they have evolved over time to become what we know is a moral right and a moral wrong, its a society protector thanks to Darwinian evolution. - - - ARGHHH STOP!!!!
   
   That's rubbish too. Firstly on the society decides what's moral angle, to my knowledge Australian society is made up of a lot of different people. Only around 5% are vegetarian/vegan which tells tell me around 95% of society has already decided something entirely different than vegan cultists. Now if they then shape shift over to using Darwinian Evolution, its again fail. There has never EVER been a scientific study ANY TIME, ANYWHERE on morals being empirically proven to have been a result of evolution. If they dump religion and scripture and high tail it to "science" make sure they cite the empirical double blind experiment or study that proves their point.
   
   You know it gets very humourous when you get amongst those vegetarians who find the vegan cult activists very unwelcome & nutty. In any case, good new is I get to reject their BS. So should you. Yep, again, their "moral" angle needs dismissing completely too.
4.  It's Wrong to remove the rights of sentient beings - If you found the above helpful, you'll find this eye opening and possibly pretty humourous. They state that a sentient being is an animal that lives and breathes, has feelings, consciousness, awareness and most likely emotions. Feelings? Consciousness? Awareness ? Yep still no issue and although those three are probably a given (even to a dumb ol' ploughboy like me) I'd possibly not discount the yet to be proven emotions. Repeat yet to be proven, but even if emotions are proven, next question from me would "So?"
   Somehow, maybe by using some inexplicable teleporting of logic that by passes all reasoning, the "inferred rights" just popped into being out of nothing.
   
   WARNING - Impending house of cards collapse.
   
   Inferred by who? We need to know when & how these popped into existence.
   
   Inferred when exactly? I can follow the past philosophers back to ancient Greece, more recent Eastern religions and some Western Philosophers over the last 200 years, but what about before them? Pretty odd.
   
   Humans are sentient beings as are sheep. Somehow, not yet explained the inferred rights to life apply to the sheep we wish to kill and eat and therefore we need to stop so we don't break a moral law inferred on other sentient beings...like sheep.
   
   So what happens to the lion and the antelope? Well apparently that's "just nature doing what nature does, we've evolved to know better". Strangely only 5% of Australia is of higher evolution apparently. If that is correct and we take it on its word, then the Inferred Rights stopping us from killing a fellow sentient being (of a different species) only apply to those who have evolved which is vegetarians and vegans but the other 95% of Australia haven't evolved so they don't apply. Simple, easy.
   
   AND/OR...How come if the premise is correct and we take it on its word does it work when its human eating sheep and not when lion eats sheep? If we're all sentient beings with equal rights then either the lion is committing murder and should be prevented from eating ANY meat.
   
   How come the rights apply to any sentient being we humans wish to eat and not to any non human species wishing to eat any other non human species?  They also don't seem to apply to a non human sentient being eating a human. The inferred rights that came from no one in particular at a completely unknown time for a completely unknowable reason apply only to prevent humans eating a different species. Its based on species this law. It make none the food of man but free to eat man and any other species. That's got to be a form of SPECIES-ISM ironically.

The general Wikipedia type nut shell of the argument is that a non human animal that displays awareness, feelings etc therefore has sentience and therefore can experience fear, distress, pain and other normally accepted experiences. Here I have no doubt and although I can't prove or disprove that premise at all, it seems very logical and reasonable although I'd suspect some animals probably have those experiences in differing amounts and levels. A Western Australian tiger snake is probably more bold in the presence of a human than say a kangaroo. If either animal suddenly without warning saw a human 5 metres away, the snake would exhibit less fear and flight response than the kangaroo. I think we can observe and even cause (in an experiment) fear, distress, pain and other experiences in an animal, however proving how and why that therefore infers rights is not possible. Whats even stranger is even though the inferred rights cannot be proven, shown when they were first delivered and delivered by whom there is not 95% of the population aware of these rights or feel compelled to obey them. Little wonder, they don't exist in reality, they're ironically a bogus affront to both evolution and theism.

 

Scratch deeper, let the light in. You'll see some positions will sizzle, pop and burn into vapour with trusty sunlight.

Take home message - Sentient beings may exist, but no rights exist under theism (belief in God) or Darwinian type belief. No one has delivered them. The so called rights of the sentient being only prevent humans from eating animal meat, not any other animals at all. It can't be evolution because only 5% of the population adheres to it.

Let me repeat, scratch deeper, let the light in. You'll see some positions will sizzle, pop and burn into vapour with trusty sunlight.

 

China - The Mining to Dining Boom

I think its great that prospects out of China are improving, especially for Australian grown meat products. Whether its Live Ex or packaged and extra player in the market is a great thing. For one the more players buying the greater the chance of everyone being kept honest, or rather things will be a little fairer I think/hope/trust.

In the past I have seen saleyard prices fall even when there's 2 players buying. It was on one occasion a bold example of unspoken collusion with 2 buyers taking turns pen for pen getting young sheep at a very low price. "Price has fallen out of the market" was touted, however in reality, it hadn't. Buyers had ascended in their price making position. Supermarkets & butcher shops were using a different line. "Meat market has taken a big hit and product is harder to get hence the price rise" yet in the saleyard, numbers were up, way up, really way up on historical lows partly because the market had fallen and there were farmers getting out of sheep & to a lesser extent cattle to concentrate on cropping. Market glut + few players in the actual market place buying (+ take into consideration the consumers haven't slashed their uptake of product, purchasers at the retail end was still ticking along well) = Great margins for processors and/or supermarkets.

At the end of the day, farming meat is no different a business model than most other businesses.
There's a number of equations to look at, but one is telling and often overlooked.
Its made up of just a few properties.

Profit Margin & Turnover.

If you were to focus solely on one of these aspects to the detriment of the other you will eventually go out of business. I recall many years ago seeing a truck loaded with lambs that were heading to a farmer's property to be feedlotted for several months to fill contracts. Admittedly the contracts may have had a premium over average lamb prices at the time, but looking at the top dollar paid in the saleyards and the staggering estimated price the saleyard chatter said the feedlotters were getting they needed only lose 3 animals on the trip to actually begin to slip to "just break even". Yes they were paying very top dollar in the yards, it was great for producers, but there were transport costs and a number of other costs that would quickly eat into their bottomline. In conversation once with the farming feedlotter he said things were tight but it was like cropping "we make a lot of money annually due to the huge turnover, we can afford to suffer a smaller margin"

And indeed he's quite right, with huge turnovers you can suffer smaller margins but at the end of the day it falls apart. To use the 'like cropping' angle, you should crop to a profit not a yield. 5 tonne/hectare crops are useless if they cost 4.85 tonnes to produce...even if you have 100,000 hectares.

And of course the reverse is every bit diabolical, having huge returns on your investment are useless if you're growing a 5 tonne crop on a 1/2 tonne input cost and you can only grow half a hectare.

Balance is the key and whilst its ok to venture waywardly at times into margin or turnover a blanace is required at some point. With the rising cost of inputs and the relatively less than equal rise in returns each year, most turn to expanding the properties.

Now China is still surging ahead compared to many countries but it is fair to say things may not be on the boil like they were and we've in Australia have been living in a economic bubble due to the Chinese demand. Now we're starting to see ground falling away and mining is approaching a down turn but the Dining Boom.

Yes I know, as a society gets more "middle class" they will eat far more meat. Proven factoid beyond dispute and China has not only a growing middle class its a bulging one, creaking and groaning with is growth. I get that.

However I think it will not result in lamb going to $10/kilo in the next 2 years and soar upwards ever more. I think yes another decent size player in the market will drive prices up a little, but it won't be a 30% spike let alone a doubling. I think the spring will be taken out of the surge by players who see expansion is required. At present there's an awful lot of W.A. wheatbelt country that hasn't seen a sheep's hoof in decades, some since the late 70s. I don't see them all running back to sheep & cattle but if there is a cycle here on the ground in W.A. it maybe the return to sheep being a valuable part of the (cropping) rotation.

China, come on down, we're selling meat and we're open for business, but producers ought to not lead themselves into later despair by thinking prices will soar. Any gain is a great thing, any extra market is a great thing. Any extra chance of great turnovers with same or ever so slightly greater margins is best we can hope for and more than enough to budget for. Anything extra our way should then be viewed as unplanned premium.

Remember though, China is a huge opportunity, but it has limitations and it'll more likely be Live Export. I know the ARA brigade will pant, scream and pop a forehead vein but facts are facts. We're dealing with people who use the same universal business model. Turnover and margin. With a workforce that costs a small fraction of what slaughter & processing would cost here, its a huge cost saving shipping living and using their own people on a much smaller wage to do the work.

That is not the choice of Australian producers. We respond to the market that wants animals.
We're not butchers, slaughtermen, processors or exporters of any kind. You'll be doing well to find any farmer who exports his/her own meat/animals. Lobby China, they are the buyers and the buyer gets what the buyer wants. Farmers produce for the market, the market that supplies what the Market (aka China) has formally asked for.

As a producer you should be looking for opportunities for sure and certain, but maintaining a healthy balanced perspective is pretty much essential. Again there's that funny word...balance