Rescuers race to save 14k sheep on capsized cargo ship | Hacker News Reader

Rescuers race to save 14k sheep on capsized cargo ship

bbc.com

39 pointsphissk67 comments

An elderly German man told me a story. He was some kind of trade representative in Yemen, based in the Port city of Aden. New Zealand (I think) and Yemen had recently concluded a trade deal for live sheep. The first shipment was to be met with some minor fanfare and a horde of diplomats, trade delegates, minor politicians etc were massed at the docks watching the ship come in.

He says that at a certain point there were a huge flock of sheep on the deck of the vessel and that they suddenly seemed to panic and started leaping into the water. As they did so, sharks in the water started attacking them. Everyone on the docks simply watched as the sheep kept flowing into a blood red sea.

I wish I remembered the details more precisely, because the story certainly requires bolstering with credible detail. He was a well respected person from what I could make out, so I believed him - at the time anyway.

Maybe he was refering to Panurge's sheeps .. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panurge)

Live shipping should be banned.

Why?

Because of the extraordinary suffering it causes to animals. https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/live-animal-transport/

I'm sure it would be possible to transport animals more gently. Banning live animal transport altogether sounds like an overreaction.

You can slaughter them first and ship the carcasses.

What if you're trying to sell breeding animals?

Come on now, that's the exceptional case here.

The same animals walking under the desert sun for months coated in wool without nothing green at sight, does not seem like a totally cruelty-free better alternative necessarily. There is not logical reason to see it as a morally superior alternative.

There is bad ways and good ways to transport animals by road.

Where did I suggest we should transport live animals thousands of miles by making them walk the whole way?

Ok. Honest question. What do you suggest then? Teleportation?

The "but its cruelty against animals so lets kill them instead!" card is a random and really worn out argument nowadays. We have enough of real problems yet.

> Honest question. ... Teleportation?

Your suggestion gives your question the appearance of a not-so-honest question.

> What do you suggest then?

The answer would depend on your convictions. It could be one or a combination of, for example,

- Tight national and international regulations (with teeth) to ensure animal safety and well-being, comparable to the transport of humans,

- Local-only growth,

- Alternative protein start-ups,

- Etc.

> but its cruelty against animals so lets kill them instead!

I could not find any instances where the OP suggested this.

edit: Found someone else who mentioned that, which doesn't make sense to me either - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21637661

On the other hand,

> but its cruelty against animals

Then you would want to stop it in one way or another, no? What would be your suggestions?

I swear the video on that site is edited to make things seem worse than they are. Literally the only thing we ever see is a close up of cow faces, sped up to make the movements seem more erratic.

All the language is also full of hyperbole ‘the terrible exhausting journey’, ‘their sad faces’, ‘the aggressive behavior of the truck driver’.

I just cannot watch this thing. These people instantly have an agenda to me.

They may be right, but there are enough terrible stories out there without any attempt to make it worse (as seen from some of the stories posted here).

> Unexpected issues – in addition to routine suffering, long distance live transport can also result in fires, delays or sinking of livestock ships causing the suffering and death of large numbers of animals.

Apparently sinking ships with live stock is not uncommon?

How is shipping different than truck or train.

Shipping can refer to all three in this context.

Generally the journeys are much longer and in poorer conditions, with a lot less oversight.

Live shipping of sheep and beef out of Australia and New Zealand, especially to the Middle East, has been very controversial and banned on and off depending on the economy and political flavour of the month. It's a long, hot, hard journey, across the equator into the Middle East. There's no oversight on the ships, they get transported in horrible conditions, and the countries they're shipping the animals to don't have a great track record on animal cruelty.

Here's a case where 2,400 sheep died from heat stress on a voyage from Australia the Middle East: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/31/live-...

That's not an isolated incident either. It's endemic to live shipping. The whole reason they're doing it is because they want to maximise profits by shipping them live and slaughtering them in countries where it's cheaper, rather than using Australian abattoirs and shipping frozen carcasses or cuts.

I had assumed OP meant all methods of shipment.

We’re shipping humans live. It’s not as if we subject sheep to something we aren’t willing to undertake ourselves.

What are you talking about exactly? Are thousands of humans dying of heat stress due to spending weeks at sea in literally unbearable conditions? It's horrific.

I'm talking about shipping sheep/animals by sea. The conditions of said shipping can sure use some improvement, but banning it altogether seems like an overreaction.

Citation needed. Last time I tried to ship someone in a container I got 20 years.

Without knowing the in's and out's of supply and demand this really raises the question as to why 14,000 sheep needed to be transported. Our reliance on global markets for our produce is out of hand (probably preaching to the converted here).

> why 14,000 sheep needed to be transported

why not? if i sell my sheep and need to deliver them to the buyer, then i'll need a form of transport.

The pertinent question is "why live?" Live transports are (for example) the biggest animal welfare issue for kiwi sheep.

I'm assuming because of the way an animal is sacrificed in order to be considered "halal". It would require a large slaughterhouse with the proper setup, which in an 98% orthodox country is not a easy arrangement.

About 25% of red meat exports from New Zealand are halal, and almost every slaughterhouse is capable of halal slaughter.

It's actually not particularly difficult to do halal slaughter, the two main requirements are that it is killed with a cut to the throat (common in non-halal slaughter) by a Muslim.

I'm not sure the muslim is a requirement per se, it's just that in practice there's an overseer. Many/most Muslim clerics accept kosher meat as halal, for example, even though the supervision is not necessarily Muslim.

This might give some clue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah

"The slaughter itself must be done by a sane (mentally competent) adult Muslim."

Halal abatoirs are the norm in most Sheep producing parts of Australia/NZ. This is far from unbridgeable.

The immediate reason for live exports now is there there's a premium on live sheep, often in the middle east.

Anyway, either the exporting or importing country can "ban" live shipping, so if origin and destination countries have different opinions that doesn't mean things can't change.

Obviously ban doesn't mean ban, just regulate to the point where transport-to-abatoir doesn't make sense. Obviously breeding stock and such will still travel.

Because of religious BS.

Nothing wrong with needing to transport but the problem is that globalisation has made it economically more viable to sell globally than locally. Produce should first be sourced locally then globally when they really need it.

> Produce should first be sourced locally then globally when they really need it.

global (aka long-distance) trade started around 3000 BC. it got a boom in 1815 due to mechanisation.

if you want to find out more, this is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade

As I've said elsewhere, I have no issue with global trade. What I have an issue with is our over-reliance on global trade.

right, why don't they flock them on their vast deserts

They could import processed goods or simply go without them.

how dare them want to eat right?

What part about importing dead sheep instead of live sheep is the problem?

ah, the good old "I can't see why they doing it so they must be wrong" line of thinking.

dunno, on top of my head:

how much does shipping frozen good costs over short-medium distances?

how much does slaughtering cost in either countries?

how do you track if food was processed according to that market expectancy and codes?

why wendy is so big on touting his beef was never frozen?

and there's not even a general rule, shipping meat can be cost effective compared to animals depending on country of origin and destination, yet alone distances, i.e. https://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/wurpubs/fulltext/420339 and the result vary according to whether you're optimizing for cost or environment protection (and we know what companies tend to go for, right?)

Maybe we shouldn't optimize just for cost effectiveness if sentient beings are involved?

Yeah. The tl;dr here is really that some countries just don't care about animal welfare that much, or at all.

why is everyone so hellbent of depriving people from the taste of fresh meat? setting aside the specific requirement for processed food in these countries, why would you only want them to be served frozen products, if they can afford to foot the shipping costs? animal welfare is tangential and mostly impact on costs. I'm talking about availability, which people seem very keen of just removing because of perceived (and unsubstantiated) issues with livestock shipment.

I see New Zealand lamb, frozen, in my Toronto supermarkets all the time ... they don't need to be alive.

and I see Argentinian meat sold fresh in Italy, plural of anectodes is still not data

That's not how that logical fallacy works and is also the Fallacy Fallacy[1]. An anecdote is absolutely proof that something is possible, just not that it's common or even statistically likely. Also, showing that something is an anecdote does not automatically invalidate the claim.

However, frozen meat exports from New Zealand alone is BILLIONS of dollars a year so I have no idea what point you are even making.

[1] https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy

you brought up frozen food, I was just stating the obvious, if they want fresh meat they have to import livestock.

but according to this community that's highly illogical, so go figure.

You are clearly highly emotional about this issue. I'm going to step out now.

You started crossing into personal attack already upthread, and here went over to the dark side. Can you please not do that, regardless of how emotional another commenter is or you feel they are? It degrades discussion and of course is against the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Message received.

"Our" reliance, in this case, is Saudi Arabia's. They live in a desert that won't produce enough sheep/meat for their pots.

In some senses, this is not new for the region. Meat was produced locally, but rice and wheat have been the main staples for thousands of years. They don't grow in deserts (before irrigation).

There are lots of very ancient cities in the deep deserts of the Middle East.. places that don't produce much food. Petra is a striking one. They've been eating store bought, imported food since before europe existed.

> In the 1970s, increasing incomes in urban areas stimulated the demand for meat and dairy products, but by the early 1980s government programs were only partially successful in increasing domestic production. Bedouin continued to raise a large number of sheep and goats. Payments for increased flocks, however, had not resulted in a proportionate increase of animals for slaughter. Some commercial feedlots for sheep and cattle had been established as well as a few modern ranches, but by the early 1980s, much of the meat consumed was imported. Although the meat supply was still largely imported in the early 1990s, domestic production of meat had grown by 33 percent between 1984 and 1990, from 101,000 tons to 134,000 tons. This increase, however, masked the dominant role of traditional farms in supplying meat. Although new projects accounted for some of the rapid growth during the 1980s, a sharp decline of roughly 74 percent in beef stock production by specialized projects during 1989 resulted in only a 15 percent fall in meat output. This reversal also highlighted the problems in introducing modern commercial livestock-rearing techniques to the Kingdom. [1]

Yes they don't have the capability to rear enough livestock so they have to import. Saudi Arabia existed before large scale imports like this, the problem is our (read: economically powerful countries) expectations are that we can get whatever we want whenever we want. When that happens tragedies like this occur.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Saudi_Arabia

I think that it may be connected to halal restrictions. The ship was destined for Saudi Arabia, and the sheep would be slaughtered locally.

That could be a possibility

If not for global markets, my fresh fruit and vegetable selection would be VERY limited. As a kid, I had mostly root vegetables and apples from October until spring.

I have always wondered if we, as a species, are the problem. Maybe we’re really not supposed to spread and colonize every part of Earth. Maybe we’re supposed to stay within much narrower areas where the local produce is good enough.

Not sure if I’m making sense.

That's a very religious point of view. We are the problem, but only in that we're THE apex predator and we can't seem to figure out a way to control our worst consumption impulses.

One thing that struck me about a childhood visit to "St. Marie amongst the Hurons"[1] was that the Hurons would "use up" a place and simply abandon their longhouses and maize fields and move to a place with better hunting. Sometimes they would return a few years later to that same place after the prey populations had a chance to recover.

The echos of this world view is what freaks me out about people like Musk saying we need to get off Earth.

[1] http://www.saintemarieamongthehurons.on.ca/sm/en/Home/index....

"It is not yet known what caused the ship, which was bound for Saudi Arabia, to capsize"

The romanian newspapers initially reported that the sheep were simply not loaded on both sides of the ship.

Sheeping is hard

The front fell off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Sheeps on the ship. Terrible story. But it’s similar to liquid transportation not having proper organisation can unbalance the forces.

Modern day slave ships. I’m sure the sheep are insured and it’s more profitable to leave them to drown.

Prove it.

what nonsense is this? what slave ship?

Are you trolling or do you genuinely believe the trade and transport of livestock is the same as human slavery? The mind boggles.

loots of people attribute the same value to animals as they attribute to humans.

A life, is a life.

Also he did not say that they where the same, he implied they where comparable on some dimension.

I’m undecided on this topic, but it’s an interesting test of imagination as to whether you could envisage animals before afforded the same rights as humans in the future. Certainly the direction of travel strengthens that proposition, and contemporary attitudes to slavery show just how wrong you can be simply by relying on the ethics in vogue during your lifetime.

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