Vikki Campion: Cattle and farmers will suffer if methane meds are legislated

Cattle are suffering from being pumped with new drugs to reduce methane output, but it’s not animal cruelty when the climate club says it’s all right, writes Vikki Campion.

Once, long ago apparently, if you tried to insert a large object up a cow’s bum or force-feed it a foreign chemical, the RSPCA would take a very strong interest in you.

Now you are being fed cattle pumped with new drugs, either force-fed or inserted via suppositories, with a ringside team of lobbyists frothing to have this not just standard practice but government-regulated and enforced.

Coles Chemical Cattle is a poem about the monopolisation of beef, being run on the same marketing strategy as intermittent energy.

First, you get the guilt trip to make you feel bad about consuming it, then the surprise new product to relieve you of your guilt.

Lastly, there are taxpayer subsidies and monopolisation of the market, leading to big profits for the company.

One methane-reduction method put to me by such a lobbyist was an arm-sized rectal suppository, which to insert would involve locking a calf in a crush, lifting up its tail, and pushing it inside his anus to play havoc with his normal digestion.

Coles has been accused of slipping Bovaer – a delicious mix of silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and 3-nitrooxypropanol – inside beef and dairy cattle with minimal discussion. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Coles’ chosen drug is Bovaer, a feed additive, which means these cattle are not out in a paddock on fresh pasture but locked into an environment where there’s no lucerne, clover or rye-grass, forced to consume the drug because there is nothing else to eat.

Bovaer is a delicious mix of silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and 3-nitrooxypropanol (known as 3-NOP).

Experience shows many wonderful ideas – like Covid-19 vaccines – are later found to be dangerous. Picture: Frederic J. Brown/AFP

Experience shows many wonderful ideas are later found to be dangerous.

Millions of Australian taxpayers dollars have been paid out to the Covid-19 vaccine-injured this year alone.

Yet, now, farmers are being harassed to subject their cattle to drugs intended to stop the very thing their four-stomached-digestive systems were designed to do by millions of years of evolution.

Legislate this and your small regular farmer, who raises cattle grazing in preferred pasture and pressures the prices on meat in your butcher window down, will have to go.

Those who supply only small head numbers to market a year will be forced out.

Who stays?

Coles and other big corporates will be the only ones left if giving drugs to cattle to reduce methane increases costs to the point small head farmers are forced out. Picture: William West/AFP

Coles and the big corporates on the subsidy grift.

We have an ever-increasing food production gap to feed the people we have on the planet.

Our goal should be to grow more protein and fat for a cheaper price, not to grow far less at a far higher cost.

Methane has many sources and no political lobbyist has ever explained why the methanogen microbes in wetlands, responsible for a third of the methane in the earth’s atmosphere, or the deep ocean or the out-of-control feral ruminant populations, somehow escape the same solutions as applied to domestically-farmed beef.

Are they going to wander around the Serengeti trying to stick these arm-sized tablets up the backsides of wildebeests? Dangle on ladders under gazing giraffes? Or risking death in a dam to shove it in a hippopotamus rear? Will they be chasing camel bottoms across the desert in the Middle East waving their enormous seaweed suppositories?

And you, provided you are human reading this, produce methane as well. Light a fart and watch your own gut microbes in action. Yet what is under attack? Our food chain.

Former MP Craig Kelly has called out Coles – and been derided for it. Picture: NewsWire/Gary Ramage

When former Liberal MP turned Libertarian Craig Kelly called out Coles for slipping this new drug inside beef and dairy with minimal discussion, they didn’t deny it.

They derided him for it.

It wasn’t farmers with clapped-out hats but by a clique of city reporters who think they know better thanks to pharmaceutical and PR companies primed to make a mint feeding it to you.

If your agricultural knowledge begins and ends at a mobile petting zoo in a suburban mall, and when you are writing stories about how good seaweed suppositories are without considering how they get them inside squillions of wild and feral ruminants, and you’re publishing headlines like “maggots are clean, green” you will be enthusiastically embraced by big pharmaceutical marketers thrilled to finally corner $100 on each calf that makes it off his mother’s milk.

The swamp will carry on as before, puffing out methane, but the cattle will be the ones to suffer; after all, like our eagles being sacrificed to wind turbines, it’s not animal cruelty when the climate club says it’s all right.

ALP TRANSITIONING OUT OF REALITY ON AUSTRALIA DAY

Those who chose to get on a hull to join the 150,000 convicts who arrived here between 1788 and 1868 – half-starved, chain-ganged and used as cheap labour – were people fleeing something worse than a prison colony.

Australia wasn’t a great invasion; it was a great escape.

Yet, again this week, we have a poorly educated Chinese-owned company which bought 200 Australian pubs and bars and banned them from celebrating Australia Day because it was an “invasion”.

Fraser MP Daniel Mulino has talked about “transitioning” out of Australia Day. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Fraser MP Dan Mulino can educate himself when he wants to, evidenced by his Ivy League PhD. He is considered one of Labor’s brightest, strategically inserted into Labor’s nuclear energy inquiry to pressure pro-nuclear witnesses, which is why Hinkler MP Keith Pitt was so concerned when his panel mate started talking about “transitioning” out of Australia Day.

This was no slip of the tongue by some bright-eyed Bambi.

Read a history book and learn about your invaders. Our youngest convict transported here was seven years old; James Grace, aged 11, “broke into a house and stole one part of silk stockings and a length of silk ribbon”; Mary Haydock, aged 15, stole “the favourite horse of the local squire”.

Imagine what their journey to Botany Bay would have been like as children alone on a transport ship.

Doctors wrote of convict lashings so severe that “blood had run in such quantities to fill his shoes til they gushed over”, requiring five week-stays in a hospital.

The next wave of emigrants were punished differently.

Headstones show Mary O’Neill, 23 months old, Annie McGarry, 10 days old, Ann Carmody, 16 months, Bedilia Gilmore, 2, wee bairns of those who fled the great Irish famine following the 1850s, winding up in pioneer graves.

The Irish weren’t invading back then anymore than the persecuted Yazidis do now.

Yesterday’s refugee, according to corporate China and the ALP, could apparently be tomorrow’s invader.

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