 |
| How much rejection can you take? | |
Most Westerner
meat-eaters are in denial about their true carnivorous nature, and like to
disguise the dead animals they eat. Meat is generally purchased and served in a
way as to disguise where it came from. For most squeamish Westerners, the sight
of a dead animal on the plate looking up at them as they eat it is a sure
appetizer killer. Further, the killing of the animal happens out of site, in
slaughterhouses which most people never visit or even have to acknowledge
outside of mad-cow scares or salmonella outbreaks. Every housewife knows that
lamb chops spontaneously appear on the back shelf of Safeway or Coles. Not so for all cultures though. Chewing an eyeball is a special treat for some,
and others insist on the pleasure of cutting the animal's throat facing Mecca
before serving it up for dinner. So 57,000 of the world's dumbest animals at a time get to enjoy a tropical
sea-voyage off to the Middle
East before meal-time on board the Cormo Express. Except that the latest herd didn't get accepted ostensibly due to scabby
mouth disease. The real reason is hard to call - maybe some corrupt petty Saudi bureaucrat didn't
get his bribe and decided to teach the company a lesson, maybe it's payback for
Australia's involvement in the war (as Warren Truss claims), or maybe the sheep
are actually sick. But the result is clear - the sheep have been sailing around
the Persian Gulf unable to find people who want to eat them. Surely the
cruelest cut of all. And everyone has an opinion. In spite of the fact that the animals are not
in Australia and are not owned by Australians, hasn't stopped
people expecting the Australian government to do something
about it. The notion that what goes on outside Australia is really not the
business of the Australian government hasn't caught on, but interfering in the
affairs of the Middle-East is something the government seems pretty keen on
recently. So the fate of the sheep? The government were planning on landing them in
Iraq, but when plans for that
full scale invasion failed, the return-to-sender option was pretty much all
that was left. History rarely repeats, but it does rhyme. In 1939, after sailing around
the world and being rejected by every country, the Jewish passengers on the
St. Louis landed land back where they started, and faced mass slaughter.
50,000 sheep now face the same fate. Hmm, maybe Israel would like to take them?
| 
