When Alan Jones and John Laws were infamously caught out offering “cash for comment”, they were rightly pilloried for their shocking behaviour. Even if you accept – which hardly anyone did for an instant – that they are “entertainers” rather than journalists, and thus free from ethical obligations, their actions were an unforgivable betrayal of their audience.
But if “cash for comment” was bad enough, “cash for cruelty” is unimaginably worse.
It should have rung alarm bells for Animals Australia strategy director, Lyn White, when a live-export worker offered to make animals suffer to help her stop the trade. A tranche of emails, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, show how animal activists, including White, cultivated whistleblowers on board live export vessels, offering them cash for vision of cruelty to animals.
While, to her credit, White sent a series of emails rebuffing a Pakistani deckhand’s offer to deliberately torment animals in order to create useful footage, she still offered to send him money for footage.
Animals Australia is exposed for offering payments in return for vision and photographs of cruelty of animals on the live export vessels. In emails spanning more than a year, White offered [Deckhand Mahmood Raza] Mazher thousands of dollars for footage that showed dead or suffering sheep…In an email sent on May 31, White said she would pay $US1000 a shipment plus a $500 “bonus” if what was filmed was valuable. This is, in my opinion, cash for cruelty.
[…] Mazher says it was a sliding scale. If there was footage that the activist groups could use, he would be paid more. The only problem was, as hard as Mazher tried, he did not see the type of cruelty the groups wanted to see.
And he was looking for it. That’s why he emailed Lyn White offering to inflict cruelty on the animals. He claimed he wanted to see if this was how other footage had been obtained by ship-workers like himself.
So, Mazher offered to create suffering on the vessels and brazenly emailed White with his great idea.
But, even after these emails offering to turn off ventilation for animals, White continued to work with Mazher. This is extraordinary.
A generous assessment of this sorry saga is that White at least told Mazher not to deliberately inflict cruelty. But, at the same time, she was dangling a year’s wages in front of him, if he just happened to film said cruelty. What did she think was going to happen?
Perhaps White was just hopelessly naive. Or is it more likely that such animal activists are so drunk on their own moral superiority that they are prepared to turn a blind eye, use any means necessary, to destroy an industry they so passionately hate? After all, the cognitive dissonance of animal rights loons like PETA, who nevertheless murder thousands of puppies and kittens, is legendary.
White — whose very mission is to protect the most vulnerable and abused animals in our society — continued to work with a whistleblower who had offered to switch off ventilation to make the sheep suffer; who thought it would be a “great idea” to be cruel to animals in order to achieve the greater aim of stopping the trade. Oh, and earning cash.
This is a devastating revelation for Animals Australia and their cause.
Worse, though, than animal activists conniving with cruelty-inflicting workers, is the very government bodies supposed to protect the animal husbandry industry surrendering to the activists who want to destroy it.
“My concern is the department of agriculture has been completely captured by Animals Australia,” [Chair of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources, Liberal MP, Rick] Wilson told me.
There needs to be a fresh inquiry into this practice. As much as live export companies are under scrutiny for their treatment of sheep and cattle, animal activist groups also need to be held accountable for their tactics.
dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/cash-incentives-for-whistleblower-backfires-badly-for-animal-activists